big win n.
1. [common] Major success. 2. [MIT] Serendipity. "Yes, those
two physicists discovered high-temperature superconductivity in a
batch of ceramic that had been prepared incorrectly according to
their experimental schedule. Small mistake; big win!" See win big.
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B =
big-endian adj.
[common; From Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" via the famous
paper "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace" by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI
IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980] 1. Describes a computer
architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric
representation, the most significant byte has the lowest address
(the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most processors, including
the IBM 370 family, the PDP-10, the
Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC
designs are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also sometimes
called `network order'. See little-endian, middle-endian, NUXI problem, swab. 2. An Internet address the wrong way
round. Most of the world follows the Internet standard and writes
email addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending
up with the name of the country. In the U.K. the Joint Networking
Team had decided to do it the other way round before the Internet
domain standard was established. Most gateway sites have ad-hockery in their mailers to handle
this, but can still be confused. In particular, the address
_me@uk.ac.bris.pys.as_ could be interpreted in JANET's
big-endian way as one in the U.K. (domain _uk_) or in the
standard little-endian way as one in the domain _as_
(American Samoa) on the opposite side of the world.