[SGVLUG] Bit order (was Linux based web-server appliance)

[Dustin Laurence]

On Sat, May 20, 2006 at 03:03:23AM -0700, David Lawyer wrote:

> On Fri, May 19, 2006 at 01:51:01PM -0700, Dustin Laurence wrote:
> > Hmm.  The internet does no such thing; it's too high in the stack to
> > know about bit transmission or, indeed, whether the transmission is
> > serial or parallel.  Do you mean ethernet?  It certainly cares about
> > byte-order, though, and specifies big-endian.
> 
> Doesn't the Internet have a physical layer ??

The answer is either "no" or "many, of all different types", depending
on how you want to say it.  The internet is named that for a reason; it
goes across networks.  Anything that carries IP is internet, no matter
what layers below it are.  So it isn't even well defined to talk about
the "internet's physical layer"; that isn't what the word means.

There is a famous gag where some group managed to transport IP via
homing pigeon--it's silly, but it worked precisely because IP is
independent of the lower layers of the stack.  And it certainly didn't
transmit in terms of bitstreams--but that didn't change the fact that it
carried IP.

> I just went on Google and typed "most significant bit first"
> and "least significant bit first".  I got roughly 50k hits for each.
> So it depends on the hardware.  For modems it's least first
> (little endian) and until just now I incorrectly thought that the
> whole internet would be like this, but it's not per the Google
> results.

You assumed that something related to modems was predictive of real
networking?!?

Dustin
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