An Intense Rivalry

By Uday Shankar

A quick google search for the name “Flimnap” brings up a character from Gulliver’s Travels. Specifically, Flimnap is the treasurer of the nation of Lilliput. The nation of Lilliput is always in argument with the nation of Blefuscu over trivial things, one example being which end a soft-boiled egg should be opened from. Lilliput believes that they should be opened from the smaller end, while Blefuscu believes they should be opened from the bigger end. This is actually the etymology of the terms “little-endian” and “big-endian” in computer science. Big-endianness is the practice of placing the bytes in a multi-byte data type in order of decreasing significance, while little-endianness does the opposite. For example, if we write the budget $36,223 in hexadecimal, we get 0x8D7F. On a big endian computer, this would be represented with the bytes 0x00008D7F (the zeroes are because a word on a 32-bit computer is 32 bits wide). However, on a little-endian computer, this becomes 0x7F8D0000 - the bytes are stored from least to most significant. Flimnap, being a Lilliputian, will obviously have a little-endian computer, so the budget will have the representation 0x7F8D0000 on his computer. 4chan is Flimnap’s foremost enemy, so there’s a good chance she’s from Blefuscu and therefore uses a big-endian computer. When she hacks Flimnap, her computer interprets the bytes 0x7F8D0000 as being big-endian, which leads to a decimal representation of $2,139,947,008.

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