binary Memes

The eternal computer science debate that makes absolutely no sense to normal humans: endianness. On the left, the logical person crying because "end" should refer to what comes last (little-endian should be MSB first). On the right, Danny Cohen smugly enjoying the chaos he created by naming it backwards - where "big end" refers to the most significant byte coming first. For the uninitiated: endianness determines how multi-byte values are stored in memory. It's like arguing whether to read a number from left-to-right or right-to-left, except we've been fighting about it since the 1980s and nobody will ever surrender.

The eternal battle between marketing and reality. Hard drive manufacturers use 1MB = 1000KB to make their products seem bigger (931GB of actual storage when you buy a "1TB" drive), while the rest of the computing world knows 1MB = 1024KB. It's like ordering a dozen donuts and getting 10 because "our definition of dozen is more convenient for our profit margins." The bell curve shows most people understand the correct definition, but marketing departments and those who believe them occupy the tails of blissful ignorance.