IPv4 addresses are the most common on the Internet. How can they uniquely identify every connected object? How do they facilitate data routing from one side of this vast network to the other? And why are they progressively being replaced by IPv6 addresses? We will attempt to answer these questions in this article. But before that, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to remind ourselves of the...
We all know the Internet. It’s the network that enables data transfer on a global scale. Its magnitude is staggering: there are about 5 billion users, 200 million active websites, 300 billion emails sent daily and 40 thousand Google searches every second. We access it by different means (WiFi, optical fiber, coaxial cable…), and with various devices (computers, smartphones...
Diving deeper into the computer science world, we often come across the terms “terminal”, “console” and “shell”, which seem to be used more or less interchangeably. Is that really the case? And if not, what is the difference between all of these terms? In order to understand the subtleties of these terms, we need to go back to the very beginnings of computing...
Computers only know one language: binary. Our many programming languages allow us to give instructions in a human-readable format, which are then translated into long sequences of 0s and 1s. Although this level of abstraction is essential to us humans, it can be useful and even much more efficient to manipulate bits directly, thanks to bit shifting and bitwise operations. We previously had the...
As we all know, a computer only knows two things: 1s and 0s. Every letter in this sentence, every color, every second of a video or of a piece of music, every web page, every program is nothing other than a long string of 1s and 0s. This is binary, and if we hope to communicate efficiently with these machines as programmers, we must understand how this base 2 numbering system works. Why do...