Two’s complement is a clever way of storing integers so that common math problems are very simple to implement. To understand, you have to think of the numbers in binary. It basically says, for zero, use all 0’s. for positive integers, start counting up, with a maximum of 2(number of bits – 1)-1. for negative … Read more
29 = 512 values, because that’s how many combinations of zeroes and ones you can have. What those values represent however will depend on the system you are using. If it’s an unsigned integer, you will have: 000000000 = 0 (min) 000000001 = 1 … 111111110 = 510 111111111 = 511 (max) In two’s complement, … Read more
Take a look at the PNG spec. This format has some very good rationale behind it. Also, decide what’s important for your future format: compactness, compatibility, allowing to embed other formats (different compression algorithms) inside it. Another interesting example would be the Google’s protocol buffers, where size of the transferred data is the king. As … Read more
Of course. It’s more commonly called machine code. It’s basically assembly language without the mnemonic devices. Someone who knows assembly very well could program in machine code with additional effort, referring to opcode listings (e.g. x86) as needed. Would I do it? No. Even assembly is only useful in rare circumstances, and there’s no reason … Read more
In university I learned it this way: Multiply by two take decimal as the digit take the fraction as the starting point for the next step repeat until you either get to 0 or a periodic number read the number starting from the top – the first result is the first digit after the comma … Read more
What you are seeing is a marketing stunt. Since non-technical people don’t know the difference between Metric Meg, Gig, etc. against the binary Meg, Gig, etc. marketers for storage will use the Metric calculation, thus 1000 Bytes == 1 KiloByte. This can cause issues with development or highly technical people so you get the idea … Read more
The primary advantage of two’s complement over one’s complement is that two’s complement only has one value for zero. One’s complement has a “positive” zero and a “negative” zero. Next, to add numbers using one’s complement you have to first do binary addition, then add in an end-around carry value. Two’s complement has only one … Read more
Check out bsdiff and bspatch (website, manpage, paper, GitHub fork). To install this tool: Windows: Download and extract this package. You will also need a copy of bzip2.exe in PATH; download that from the “Binaries” link here. macOS: Install Homebrew and use it to install bsdiff. Linux: Use your package manager to install bsdiff.
You can determine that it is likely to be one of those formats by looking at the first few bytes. You should then test to see if it really is one of those, using an integrity check from the associated utility for that format, or by actually proceeding to decompress. You can find the header … Read more
Here are some tips that come to mind: From my experience, interactive scripting languages (I use Python) can be a great help. You can write a simple framework to deal with binary streams and some simple algorithms. Then you can write scripts that will take your binary and check various things. For example: Do some … Read more