Civil war broke out between the Little-
Endians and the Big-Endians, resulting in the Big-Endians taking refuge on
a nearby island, the kingdom of Blefuscu??¦???
He went on to describe a holy war that broke out between the two sides. The point of his
paper was to describe the two schools of thought when writing data into memory. Some
feel that the high-order bytes should be written first (???little-endian???), while others think
the low-order bytes should be written first (???big-endian???). It really depends on the
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Chapter 6: Programming Survival Skills
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PART III
hardware you are using as to the difference. For example, Intel-based processors use the
little-endian method, whereas Motorola-based processors use big-endian. This will
come into play later as we talk about shellcode.
Segmentation of Memory
The subject of segmentation could easily consume a chapter itself. However, the basic
concept is simple. Each process (oversimplified as an executing program) needs to have
access to its own areas in memory. After all, you would not want one process overwriting
another process??™s data. So memory is broken down into small segments and handed out
to processes as needed.
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