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Usually, the term describes the OS that silently runs behind hundreds of small eletronic devices that we use regularly in our daily life.Take for example - Cell Phones, PDAs, the cool multi-utility digital wrist watches - all of them have some form of OS, helping them function. The concept is rather new in computing terms - as now most of these devices come with extra storage allowing you to download and run external applications written for such OS-es, thus extending the functionality of that particular device. It's like a miniature model of our larger desktop systems, except that such devices are devoid of most of the peripherals and other paraphernalia that are associated with the larger desktop systems. Naturally, there's a massive storage space constraint, and these OS-es have to be specially written to be immensely extensible and yet work stably under such constraints. The term "embedded" most probably rose out of the fact that in most cases these OS-es are hard-coded into some sort of a chip, thus eliminating the need for a separate storage space for them. Whatever extra space you have is reserved for applications to be downloaded in future. Embedded OS-es have given rise to a very competitive market with new variations and offshoots being announced everyday. Just a couple of months back I'd read somewhere about IBM announcing the first successful port of Embedded Linux on a wrist watch. Just google around and you'd find plently of articles on it.As for your other query, Realtime OS-es are supposed to be the ones with immense number crunching power, but so lightweight and compact that they can be fit on most of such small devices, specifically some sort of a microcontroller. The idea behind realtime OS-es is to issue instructions based on a continuous feedback cycle. Take for example, a missile which has been launched. It would need to gather all kinds of data about the atmosphere it's sailing through - air density, speed, direction etc. plus it's own velocity and perform instantaneous computations to figure out whether it would hit the target correctly or not. If not, what could it to (send out a puff from one of the boosters, adjust the tail fin angles.. etc) to correct its speed and direction. RealTime OS-es are primarily finding application in military technology - but that's just one side of it. They've been employed for much more peaceful purposes too..Have you ever wondered, how a train in the subway always comes and stops exactly at the right spot and and align it's doors with the markings on the platform with hair-splitting accuracy ?? That's the work of realtime OS. As the train (whatever speed it might be travelling at) pulls up near the station, a bunch of speed sensors start transmitting data to the trains RTOS informing it about how much time it has during which it has to reduce its speed to ZERO in order to do the perfect lineup.. and the train, whether its travelling faster or slower than the designated speed, to everyone's wonder, invariably always lands up at the right place ;)Regards,m^e

Got one

Nope it doesn't happen according to the english calendar, but the date always falls between Oct-Nov every year. As far as I know it's on one of the New Moon (No Moon) night that comes during October-Nov. That's what the whole thing is about - since it's No Moon, it's complete darkness - and thus you light up all those candles/lamps to ward away darkness and all the evil that accompanies it. :PThanks anyways ;)Cheers,m^eP.S. - Am not in India and missing the festival sorely - or else could have put up a bunch of pictures for you.

OOPsss .. sorry, my bad. The Announcement Forum doesn't support attachments - so when I moved the post there, the attachment got deleted. So I'm putting it back in Graphics Design forum and re-attaching the file. Have fun m^e

Hi guys, ????[/tab]Recently a whole bunch of requests have poured in, to design a new IPB Skin specifically customized for our board. There seems to be no derth of good graphics designers on our board - so why don't you go ahead and boast your skills in this regard? ????Here I am providing you (see attachment) the IPB Graphics Development Kit - which is basically a photoshop file containing all the standard IPB Buttons, Headers, Logos etc. in a proper editable layered format. Enough to get you started on a new design set and to give you ample idea about the required dimensions of each graphics. ????So why don't you go ahead and show what you've got ?? We're anxiously waiting to applaud at some brilliant new designs. Simply let your imagination fly ????As a footnote, I've got a whole bunch of piled up credits (nearing 800) and am willing to part with some, if your design is really brilliant and unanymously voted for by the whole moderating team. I'll talk to OpaQue and see if it's possible to transfer credits from me yet. In any case, you've got: The chance to win 60 credits from me - that'll take care of 2 months of posting needs for you. The chance to showcase your creation as a skin on our beloved board. [tab]Are you up to it ? All the best m^e

He was, in all probablity referring to a completely inter-networked & diskless world. A lot of people have visualized that in near future, the need for transferrable storage media would be completely done with, as communication technology progresses and individually we'll able to upgrade to extremely high-speed high-bandwidth connections. Once we reach such a state, it would eliminate the need of cds/dvds altogether, as then we'd be able to purchase software online and never need to download it to our local disk for installation/running. We'd be able to run them directly over these high-speed networks and wouldn't even notice the slightest lag as the whole data is sent over to our personal systems and executed. The same would be applicable for our own file storage too - we'd probably stash away all our documents on some remote file-server and be able to instantaneously fetch them as per demand. The access speed would be comparable to that of a fast hard drive or even faster.Of course, one can immediately see through the pitfalls of such a scenario (such as no privacy of data, increased hacking etc.), but keep in mind that this is only a "paradigm" and if it ever works out, I'm sure it'll be tested and counter-tested thousands of times against all such measures in order to guarantee us as much security as there can be.

????[/tab]On the auspicious occasion of Diwali (Hindu festival), I take the great pleasure of wishing you all a very very Happy Diwali. May all your wishes come true and happiness and prosperity always be at your doorsteps. May all of you be blessed with eternal luck and good fortune. ????For those who aren't in the know, Diwali or as it is commonly referred to as - Divali, Dewali or Deepavali, is the Hindu Festival of Lights. Here's a breif explanation of the festival/ceremony, whichever you term it as: ????Since I'm a Bengali, this is the day, the Goddess KALI is worshipped in our state West Bengal, India. It is the time of the year, when we see the whole city (Calcutta) as well as all other parts of the state (or in fact the whole of India) is lit up with Diyas (oil-lamps) or candles accompanied by 2-3 days of continuous fireworks. It happens to be one of the most grand occasions on our yearly calendar. For us, this day heralds the expulsion of all evil from this planet and welcoming of the Goddess Kali into each of our individual homes - thus we welcome her with a lit up pathway from our doorstep/gateway through our entire house. [tab]Originally, the word Diwali comes from the Sanksrit word, "Deepavali", which is formed by joining two words, "Deep" - which means oil lamps and "Vali" - which means "a vast array of". Together they stand for one of the most grandoise display of oil-lamps (or candles, as the case may be). More on Diwali: 1. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ 2. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ 3. http://www.diwalifestival.org/ 4. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

Yeah good one Ruben. I've always seen that "EM" dude around, but wasn't clear about what he did. Now I know Thanks

Yup - he's one of the Sig Gurus. He should change his nick to Sig-Michael .. no seriously.. heh..

Cool. Thanks for that vujsa Tells me to come up with some articles on how to use these installed languages programmatically. Will do so soon.

Hehe - he surely did. I can't find it either. Hey YOU, come back and put the url in for us...

Yup. Can be done for sure - and moreover, I believe, if you become a paying customer at Xisto - Web Hosting, OpaQue will see to your needs of shifting the files. Only modifications you might have to do yourself, is absolute links, as viz pointed out.

Me graduated with a 4-yr degree in CS with empasis on IT (not that it helped me learn too much over what I'd picked up myself about computers since the 6th grade).. however it did point me to the right direction and reconfirmed my beliefs in myself as to what I should do for a career. Here I am, software developer (.NET & Java) - running my own firm and actively handling some humongous projects, which include:1. Designing an ultra flexible & complete, school and university management solution, which is nearing completion.2. Designing a system that would help in monitoring the remotest agricultural/farming stations in a country from a central location - and keep a tab on yearly produce & inventory as well - just getting started on it.3. Designing (hopefully) a solution that would give rise to an automated transport control system for public utility vehicles, thus preventing road accidents and collisons - this one would be a bomb although a far cry :)All my work involves the development of distributed appz in a largely networked environment spanning from a building block to nationwide...P.S. I was never the orderly type o' guy - i.e. could never keep up with a fixed schedule. So I kind of knew that I'd never do well under a regular 9-5 schedule. So as soon as I graduated and got a God-given opportunity to jump into my own business, I did so right-away. To me, nothing better than being your own master

Carry on guys. It's great to see such a good response to an old thread like this. The discussions getting better and better and makes a lovely reading. Sometimes I feel, some of the threads on Xisto should be converted into classic articles - and if they were, they'd surely stand out bright. Good job.Any more input ?

Coding for Flash is done using a scripting language called ActionScript. We have a forum on that under Scripting. Ask your questions there. Topic moved to ActionScript.

Contact Opaque - he can help you here.

NOTICE: ????[/tab]Since I wasn't able to come online for a long period spanning over last two months, our IRC channel has got dropped (as it's linked with the founder's nickname, which expires after 30 days of not logging in, consequently dropping the channel too). I was scared that we'd loose the channel, but to my great relief I found that vizskywalker has taken the initiative and re-registered it and then on has been taking care of it quite capably. ????Henceforth, all queries regarding the channel should be directed at him and so will be, any requests for being made AOP/SOP of the channel. I'm there to help out of course - but he's the primary person in charge of the whole matter. [tab]Good luck viz. Regards, m^e

Bala, on behalf of the Xisto Staff, I extend you a warm welcome. Have a great stay here with us. People with computing skills are always treated with great respect here and I hope you'd have no difficulty in carving a niche for yourself amongst us. Good to have one more techhie on our boat :)I myself have done a fair bit of Java - just my university elective courses (around 5, among which the final one I did was on Java with Advanced Design Patterns & Practises). I found the learning curve very gratifying - and not only did it help me strenghthen my Java skills, but gave a big boost to my overall knowledge of the OOP paradigm. Never looked back at top-down coding ever since I've moved away to using .NET as my main development platform is windows, but the Java+OOP skills helped me greatly along the whole way as both employ extremely similar design principles.Hope to see a bunch of good articles from you - and of course help us (me) out wherever I'm getting hiccups with Java.P.S. Are you Indian ? Coz your name distinctly sounds so - probably a Tamilian ? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Just google for "FREE SHOUTBOX" and you'll get plenty of links to onsite (you need to install yourself) and offsite (pre-installed on other sites) shoutboxes. Here are a few links: 1. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ 2. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ 3. http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ 4. http://www.shoutmix.com/v3/login.php 5. http://www.sprit.org/error.html 6. http://www.hotscripts.com/listing/free-shoutbox/ etc ...

Not really - if you look at evolution, these apes, snails, dinosaurs or whatever bigger lifeform didn't just appear overnight. It all began with microscopic living organisms, which clumped together as colonies giving rise to tissue masses - which in turn gave shape to the larger organisms. So whatever animal you see on this planet - all have come from a common descent. This very fact should be enough to claim that our journey actually began with whatever was there before fishes/dinosaurs/apes.

????[/tab]It should be quite easily done with the command crontab - which creates the cron table for the current user. Crontab takes the following parameters: crontab filename????????Install filename as your crontab file. crontab -e????????Edit your crontab file. crontab -l????????Show your crontab file. crontab -r????????Remove your crontab file. ????You simply go about editing/creating a cron file. But first you need to check whether you have a cron file at all. You do that by issuing: CONSOLE shell> crontab -lno crontab for root As you can see, the message says that there's no cron file for me yet. ????So I go about creating a cron file by simply using the -e option (edit) CONSOLE shell> crontab -eno crontab for root - using an empty one ... Your standard editor opens up a blank file. Most likely it's going to be openend up in the VI editor, which is default on most systems. ????Now you need to put in the actual data. Each entry in a crontab file consists of six fields, specified in the following order: minute(s) hour(s) day(s) month(s) weekday(s) command(s) The fields are separated by spaces or tabs. The first five are integer patterns and the sixth is the command to be executed. The following table briefly describes each of the fields: Each of the patterns from the first five fields may either be an asterisk (*) (meaning all legal values) or a list of elements separated by commas. An example for backing up all the mysql databases at 12 midnight everyday would be: 0 0 * * * mysqldump -u YourUserName -pYourPassword --databases mydb1 mydb2 > /home/backups/mysqlbackup.sql That's what should go into the crontab file in the editor. This will create regular backups of the databases mydb1 and mydb2 at sharp 12 midnight everyday of the month/year and dump the backup into a file called mysqlbackup.sql located in the /home/backups directory. Next command would be to mail it to yourself. You can use the standard mail command to mail the file to yourself. Say do it a minute later than the backup command. 1 0 * * * mail ... errr.. I forgot the exact syntax of the mail command. Maybe someone else can help you with it - or when I figure it out, will let you know Hope this helps. Regards, m^e

You guys should try using Picassa too. I've got both IrfanView and Picassa installed, and Picassa of late has evolved into a really powerful viewer + picture cataloging & maintainance software. ACDSee used to be my favourite till maybe version 5. After that it's become really bulky and quite unstable too.

Oh awesome man Thanks a lot. Although I've already put up the TABLE tags long back (and no one seems to notice or use them) - they're not nearly half as good as this one here. Definitely going to take a look.

Dude, be a little careful while trying to buy domains through Yahoo. I stepped into the trap and have had terrific problems with them earlier on. See my earlier posts on them..

Great Glad to be of help. Issue resolved. Topic Closed.