Indeed! :-)
And that reminded me the classics, - Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
(1726) where the Big-Endians are fighting with Little-Endians.
(For those who doesn't remember that story from the childhood, - see the
link at the bottom of this message.)
The irony is that that story has a direct relevance to the arguments of
PC/Linux vs. Mac. There is sort of a historic loop closure (which is
almost 300 years long now).
For those people on this list who don't know, the terms "big-endian" and
"little-endian" describe how numbers are stored (and processed) in the
binary representation in the computers (tail-first or head-first, crudely
speaking).
Ironically, IBM PC's are running on little-endian CPUs (Intel), while Macs
in 1980s were running on Motorola's 68k CPUs, which were big-endian.
So, the Mac-vs-PC war has been the war between Big-Endians and
Little-Endians.
:-))))
And a little be deeper, - which makes it even more relevant to PDML:
This "big" mess has a big implication for all images (today's "digital
photos"): Images should be read on any platform. More over, in different
image formats the endianness can be different.
So, the software needs to recognize the kind, and reverse the order
if needed.
E.g. TIFFs can be of either type and that is marked by the "signature" at
the beginning of the file, which is by itself is a palindrom: "II" or
"MM", so they are endianness-independent.
In contrast, AFAIR, in JPEGs the image portion is big-endian, but exif
notes can be either (or something like that).
For the history of naming that includes the relevant (and ever-actual)
passage from Swift's book, see e.g.
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Spring_2003/ling538/Lecnotes/ADfn1.htm
Cheers,
Igor
Godfrey DiGiorgi Thu, Jan 27, 2022 7:47 AM wrote:
Of course, whinging and whining about which operating system brand is
better just seems so 1990s… LOL!
G
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