The flip side of this is that any information that can be reduced to a choice among two or more possibilities can be expressed using bits. Needless
Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carryi...
Xamarin.Forms allows you to be as platform-independent or as platform-specific as you need to be. Xamarin.Forms doesn’t replace Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android; rather it integrates with them.
Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick.
You’re twelve years old. One horrible day your best friend’s family moves to another town. You speak to your friend on the telephone now and then, but telephone conversations just aren’t the same as t...
Some people believe that Moore’s Law will continue to be accurate until about 2015.
Just as Morse code provides a good introduction to the nature of codes, the telegraph provides a good introduction to the hardware of the computer.
To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.
When the iPhone app is built, the Xamarin C# compiler generates C# Intermediate Language (IL) as usual, but it then makes use of the Apple compiler on the Mac to generate native iPhone machine code ju...
In the same way that Morse code reduces written language to dots and dashes, the spoken version of the code reduces speech to just two vowel sounds. The key word here is two. Two types of blinks, two...
Bits also play a part in logic, that strange blend of philosophy and mathematics for which a primary goal is to determine whether certain statements are true or false. True
In 1948, while working for Bell Telephone Laboratories, he published a paper in the Bell System Technical Journal entitled A Mathematical Theory of Communication that not only introduced the word bit...
I said early on in this chapter that we would need 144 relays for our adding machine. Here’s how I figured that out: Each
Communication simply requires
Today’s computers use transistors. When used in computers, transistors basically function the same way relays do, but (as we’ll see) they’re much faster and much smaller and much quieter and use much...
We don’t carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism—a messy back-and-forth kind of thing.
A digital design engineer, you would spend long hours going through the TTL Data Book familiarizing yourself with the types of TTL chips that were available. Once you knew all your tools, you could ac...
We could just as reasonably base our number system on eight (if we were cartoon characters) or four (if we were lobsters) or even two (if we were dolphins).
