Binary

[Yoda]

i heard that binary is something important in computer, so i guess i have 2 questions
1.) What exactly are binary numbers?
2.) Is it hard/important to learn?

[Aethean]

00101 011010 01010101 000101 010101 01010 11 = binary

Its important to a computer because to a computer, all it see's is binary. Its not important to learn unless you really want to, but even then its kind of useless.

[Axed]

Binary isn't worth learning unless you want to memorize the order of 0s and 1s, and then do what? Talk to your friends in binary code? Cool kid.

[Yoda]

Originally Posted by Axed

Binary isn't worth learning unless you want to memorize the order of 0s and 1s, and then do what? Talk to your friends in binary code? Cool kid.

lol no thnx "kid"

so is this how hackers (non game hackers, like real like virus ppl) hack other websites and such?

[unlimitedorb]

Originally Posted by Axed

Binary isn't worth learning unless you want to memorize the order of 0s and 1s, and then do what? Talk to your friends in binary code? Cool kid.

That statement was so erroneous I almost laughed.

Sometimes you are forced to work on the binary level, and other times it's far more efficient. Left shifting is, for the most part, faster than multiplying by 2, etc. Not only that, but when doing tasks such as working with streams, you sometimes have to work at the binary level to read in data. For instance, in Java, every class file begins with the magic hex number 0xCAFEBABE. This allows the compiler to determine whether or not the class file is actually a Java file to begin with. It's unsigned and it's 4 bytes, so in order to read it through a stream filter such as DataInputStream, you would have to use the DataInput interface which provides you with a readInt() method (an integer is 4 bytes, or 32 bits). Sometimes you won't have methods that black box the binary operations for you (maybe it's another language), and you have to write them yourself.

Ok, that was probably overkill but whatever...