Serial port is a type of device that uses an UART chip, a Universal Asynchronous Receiver Transmitter. One of the two basic ways to interface a computer in the olden days, parallel ports were the other way. Serial is simple to hook up, it doesn’t need a lot of wires. Parallel was useful if you … Read more
There’s an important distinction between backing up your development machine and backing up your work. For a development machine your best bet is an imaging solution that offers as near a “one-click-restore” process as possible. TimeMachine (Mac) and Windows Home Server (Windows) are both excellent for this purpose. Not only can you have your entire … Read more
To understand queue families, you first have to understand queues. A queue is something you submit command buffers to, and command buffers submitted to a queue are executed in order[*1] relative to each other. Command buffers submitted to different queues are unordered relative to each other unless you explicitly synchronize them with VkSemaphore. You can … Read more
You should think of pointers as being addresses of virtual memory: modern consumer operating systems and runtime environments place at least one layer of abstraction between physical memory and what you see as a pointer value. As for your final statement, you cannot make that assumption, even in a virtual memory address space. Pointer arithmetic … Read more
In older architectures, peripherals were accessed via a separate mechanism to memory access with special I/O instructions. On x86, there were (and still are!) “in” and “out” instructions for transferring bytes between the CPU and a peripheral. Peripherals were given addresses, for example 0x80 for the keyboard. Simplifying a lot, doing “in 0x80” would read … Read more
ViewConfiguration.get(context).hasPermanentMenuKey() See ViewConfiguration#hasPermanentMenuKey() for more information. Note that this is only available for API level 14+ (Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or newer).
Some instruction sets are limited to one bit shift per instruction. And some instruction sets allow you to specify any number of bits to shift in one instruction, which usually takes one clock cycle on modern processors (modern being an intentionally vague word). See dan04’s answer about a barrel shifter, a circuit that shifts more … Read more
Lego Mindstorms NXT http://mindstorms.lego.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms_NXT http://nxtnet.codeplex.com/
I’m one of the rendering software architects at a large VFX and animated feature studio with a proprietary renderer (not Pixar, though I was once the rendering software architect there as well, long, long ago). Almost all high-quality rendering for film (at all the big studios, with all the major renderers) is CPU only. There … Read more
An invalidate queue is more like a store buffer, but it’s part of the memory system, not the CPU. Basically it is a queue that keeps track of invalidations and ensures that they complete properly so that a cache can take ownership of a cache line so it can then write that line. A load … Read more