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
To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.
Communication simply requires
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...
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...
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.
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...
We don’t carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism—a messy back-and-forth kind of thing.
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).
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...
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
Some people believe that Moore’s Law will continue to be accurate until about 2015.
Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick.
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.
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...
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
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...