Top 25 Charles Petzold Quotes
#1. A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.
Charles Petzold
#2. Some programs - especially games - require that your system be set to a particular color depth and resolution. Often such special settings are different from your usual mode, though.
Charles Petzold
#3. 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).
Charles Petzold
#4. In some far-off distant time, when the twentieth century history of primitive computing is just a murky memory, someone is likely to suppose that devices known as logic gates were named after the famous co-founder of Microsoft Corporation
Charles Petzold
#5. MIDI made a natural transition to the PC. The MIDI messages that make up a musical composition can be saved as MIDI files, which are collections of MIDI messages with timing information.
Charles Petzold
#6. Owning a computer without programming is like having a kitchen and using only the microwave oven
Charles Petzold
#7. I really liked figuring things out on my own. Early on in the development of a new version of Windows, I would explore it, I would try out various things, I would see what worked, I would see what didn't work.
Charles Petzold
#8. NOP stands for (and is pronounced) no op, as in no operation. The NOP causes the processor to do absolutely nothing. What's it good for? Filling space. The 8080 can usually execute a bunch of NOP instructions without anything bad happening
Charles Petzold
#9. We don't carry in subtraction, however; we borrow, and that involves an intrinsically different mechanism - a messy back-and-forth kind of thing.
Charles Petzold
#10. 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
Charles Petzold
#11. 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.
Charles Petzold
#13. All modern MIDI synthesizers are capable of polyphony, which means they can play more than one note at a time and more than one instrument at a time.
Charles Petzold
#14. To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.
Charles Petzold
#15. I felt more like a scientist exploring nature, and Windows was my environment. You don't pass judgment on nature; you just explain how it works.
Charles Petzold
#16. Blend is great for designers because it implements a lot of sophisticated behaviours, but for what I like to do, hand coding XAML is preferable, particularly because I have to publish it.
Charles Petzold
#17. Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick
Charles Petzold
#18. I started out with machine code and assembly language.
Charles Petzold
#19. Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours - but not always.
Charles Petzold
#20. 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
Charles Petzold
#21. Some people believe that Moore's Law will continue to be accurate until about 2015.
Charles Petzold
#22. 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.
Charles Petzold
#23. Many MIDI files contain entire musical compositions. Because MIDI supports only 16 channels, however, no more than 16 different instruments can play at any time, and one of those is the key-based percussion instrument.
Charles Petzold
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