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ADRIAN LARNER
DATA PROCESSING PAGE
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DATA PROCESSING
Various topics in Data Processing (including Computing and Information Systems Teaching, and odd bits of Mathematics and Philosophy)
Data Processing Papers at this site
Reviews of Books for The Computer Journal
DATA PROCESSING ...
This fragment of the Data Processing Page is under development.
See the following:
Copyright © 2001 Adrian Larner. The author, identified as Adrian Larner, asserts all moral rights. Subject to the asserted moral rights, the author grants pro tem unrestricted permission for non-commercial copying of all materials on this site for academic purposes.
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ADRIAN LARNER
DATA PROCESSING PAPERS
Return to The Home Page
Various topics in Data Processing
PAPERS
Data Processing Papers at this site
Reviews of Data Processing Books for The Computer Journal
DATA PROCESSING PAPERS ...
Download
What’s in a Name?
in rtf format (Word for Windows compatible)
Computer Science, no doubt because of its mathematical roots, is steeped in Platonism: it posits the existence of such abstract objects as sets, classes, and types. Commonly, such an abstract object is introduced as the unique bearer of a common name that, intuitively, designates each of its “members” or “occurrences”. It is argued in this paper that the designation of things by common names can – with philosophical propriety and practical simplicity – be better explained and formalised nominalistically: without resort to extra, abstract objects.
Who now remembers “the balanced system”?
It was a mainframe, usually blue, whose CPU, I/O channels, DASD,
and remote lines were appropriately and somehow evenly loaded.
Evenly, but not equally: the CPU might be 80% utilised, the channels only 35%, the lines even less.
What made it balanced? It was not CPU-bound, nor channel-bound, nor DASD activator-bound,
nor line-bound; it had no bottleneck. Or, at least, all its bottlenecks were the same size.
As judged by someone that knew about those things.
Are our systems today balanced, with their multiple client and server processors, LANs, and WANs?...
Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation, has argued that computer software should not be copyrightable. In this essay it is claimed that Stallman’s views are ill-founded: social justice is not to be achieved by appeals to what is “good for society as a whole”. We must give due weight to the claim of natural justice – that each person has a right to what is theirs. However, when the issue is examined on this basis, we still arrive, tentatively, at the conclusion that software should not be copyrightable. But more investigation is needed.
The Golden Ratio is a number, f: it is the ratio of two lengths, say AC and the shorter, co-linear AB, with this property:
AB and BC (i.e. AC - AB) are in the same ratio.
This ratio, f,
has long been considered aesthetically pleasing.
Its numerical value is easily calculated....