[SGVLUG] Linux based web-server appliance

[Jeremy Leader]

Dustin Laurence wrote (in part):
> Yes, C programmers generally know what endianness is because C allows
> you to manipulate values at the sub-word level (many languages don't)
> and thus write endianness-dependent code.  Enormous flame wars have been
> waged over which one is The Right Thing.  Of course I know the answer,
> but I'm not telling. :-)
> 
> Hmm, I fear my mental model may not be entirely firm on this: my big
> picture is big-endian, as is English text with Hindu numerals, but I'm
> not sure but what my pointer instincts are little-endian.  Better keep
> an eye on that, huh.  I can't remember when the last time was I cared
> about endianness, so very likely I'm capable of pulling
> clueless-n00b-who-learned-on-a-PC stunts.
> 
> Small trivia bonus for those who know where the name "endian" comes from
> in the first place.  Much bigger bonus for knowing why it's also called
> the 'NUXI' problem without looking it up.

I vaguely remember that it's a reference to Gulliver's Travels; one of
the odd countries he visited (Lilliputia?) fought a war over whether a
boiled egg should be opened large end up or small end up.

"NUXI" is what you get if you byte-swap "UNIX".

As I recall, there used to be some processors which stored larger words
in really weird orders, I think it was 3412 or some such order for 4-byte
integers (instead of 1234 or 4321).

Then there's also oddities like ones-complement architectures (which have
two representations for 0), and I actually worked with a mainframe
architecture which did all arithmetic, including memory address calculations,
in BCD (where each 4-bit digit held values in the range 0-9 instead of 0-F).
They were designed & built in Pasadena for something like 20 years!

-- 
Jeremy Leader
jleader at alumni.caltech.edu
leaderj at yahoo-inc.com (work)