The Nerdout Zone

Ok, so this show started airing two years ago and is currently on it's third season, so if you never heard of it you're either not that much of a computer nerd, or you don't watch much TV. Nevertheless I thought this was a suitable place to talk about it, although I don't want to write too much in case you actually missed it, but want to see it after reading this (I'll try to avoid major spoilers). The story centers around Elliot Alderson (played by Rami Malek), a genius hacker, and programmer, who suffers from mental illness; social phobia, and dysthymia. He works at a computer security company by day, and is recruited by a hacker organisation called fsociety. It early becomes clear that one of the main targets of fsociety is E-corp. Short for Evil Corporation. This is of course not the actual name of the corporation, however Elliot has conditioned his mind to automatically translate the company name to evil corp, and that is what the audience get to hear

A simple BASIC program written on the Commodore 64 Why should you learn BASIC? Well, you shouldn't really. "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." - Edsger Dijkstra BASIC was a programming language designed in 1964, primarily to teach basic programming principles to beginners. BASIC is an acronym for  Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code . However BASIC became popular with the increase of microcomputers for the home market, and during the 1980s many computers used a BASIC interpreter in place of an operating system. Examples of such computers are Commodore 64, Apple II, TRS-80, ZX-80, and BBC Micro. There where several different dialects of BASIC with somewhat different syntax, such as Simons Basic for C64, and BBC Basic for the BBC Micro. Even if you where unaware of it, you actually used BASI

This is a continuation of my last post about Binary Numerals. When we know what binary is, we of course want to be able to apply maths to it. Binary Addition Line the two numbers up, one over the other and start adding each column, starting from the right. There are four possible results: 0 + 0 = 0 1 + 0 = 1 0 + 1 = 1 1 + 1 = 0 (carry 1) In the fourth case the result is 10, so 0 is written and 1 is carried over to the next column. Technically the carry causes a fifth possible case: 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 (carry 1) Here's a problem for you to solve on your own: 10110 + 01011 Binary Subtraction There are four cases for binary subtraction: 0 - 0 = 0 1 - 0 = 1 1 - 1 = 0 0 - 1 = 0 (Borrow 1) Here's a problem for you to solve on your own: 1101 - 0011 Binary Multiplication Binary multiplication is actually simpler than decimal multiplication. There are four cases for binary multiplication (and all but one results

"There are 10 types of people, those who understand binary numbers, and those who does not." Just as the most commonly used decimal number system is based on the number 10, the binary number system is based on the number 2. As the decimal numbers are represented by the 10 numbers 0-9, the binary numbers are represented by the numbers 0-1. Just as the decimal system, the binary system is also a positional system where the number to the right is the least significant. Compare the decimal number 1035 1*10 3  + 0*10 2  + 3*10 1  <+ 5*10 0 = 1000 + 0 + 30 + 5 To the binary number 101101 1*2 5 + 0*2 4 + 1*2 3 + 1*2 2 + 0*2 1 + 1*2 0 = 1*32 + 0*16 + 1*8 + 1*4 + 0*2 + 1 = 44 (in decimal) In other words the value of each position in binary is doubled; Binary Decimal 1 1 10 2 100 4 1000 8 10000 16 100000 32 1000000 64 100000