For the question posed, Tim's answer suffices. I am responding to the "Bit order usually follows the same endianness ..." assertion. Bollocks. The convention is pretty near universal (on Earth) that the least significant bit is referred to as bit 0 and the most significant bit in a N-bit word is referred to as bit N-1, regardless of the machine architecture. And for those few machines that provide bit addressability, the field within a machine instruction specifying the bit follows the same convention. Furthermore, when such instructions are exposed in assembly language, the universal convention is followed. If Linux Journal said that, it's a sign that they're scraping the bottom of the barrel for articles and/or writers.