Online Computer Terms Dictionary - C

card

1. A circuit board.

2. A punched card.

3. <hypertext> An alternative term for a node in a system (e.g. HyperCard, Notecards) in which the node size is limited.

Cardbox for Windows

<database> A database handling program, especially useful for scholars and librarians.

[Details? Features? Developer? URL?]

(1997-05-14)

Cardbus

<hardware> The 32-bit version of the PCMCIA (PC Card) bus.

[Spec?]

(1996-08-20)

cardinality

<mathematics> The number of elements in a set. If two sets have the same number of elements (i.e. there is a bijection between them) then they have the same cardinality. A cardinality is thus an isomorphism class in the category of sets.

aleph 0 is defined as the cardinality of the first infinite ordinal, omega (the number of natural numbers).

(1995-03-29)

cardinal number

The cardinality of some set.

CARDS

Central Archive for Reusable Defense Software of the DoD.

card walloper

<jargon> An EDP programmer who grinds out batch programs that do things like print people's paychecks. Compare code grinder.

See also punched card, eighty-column mind.

[Jargon File]

(2003-09-20)

Career Limiting Move

<jargon> (CLM, Sun) Any action endangering one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one's job. E.g. "His Halloween costume was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for "best CLM"." A severe bug discovered by a customer might be a "CLM bug".

(2000-08-09)

caret

^

Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; ITU-T: circumflex. Rare: chevron; INTERCAL: shark (or shark-fin); to the ("to the power of"); fang; pointer (in Pascal).

careware

/keir'weir/ (Or "charityware") Shareware for which either the author suggests that some payment be made to a nominated charity or a levy directed to charity is included on top of the distribution charge.

Compare crippleware.

[Jargon File]

(1994-12-16)

cargo cult programming

<programming, humour> A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around some bug encountered in the past, but usually neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare shotgun debugging, voodoo programming).

The term "cargo cult" is a reference to aboriginal religions that grew up in the South Pacific after World War II. The practices of these cults centre on building elaborate mockups of aeroplanes and military style landing strips in the hope of bringing the return of the god-like aeroplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during the war. Hackish usage probably derives from Richard Feynman's characterisation of certain practices as "cargo cult science" in his book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" (W. W. Norton & Co, New York 1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7).

[Jargon File]

(2002-05-28)

Caribou CodeWorks

<company> The company which sells QTRADER.

Director of Marketing: Norm Larsen <wwcoinc@winternet.com>.

(1995-11-05)

Carl Friedrich Gauss

<person> A German mathematician (1777 - 1855), one of all time greatest. Gauss discovered the method of least squares and Gaussian elimination.

Gauss was something of a child prodigy; the most commonly told story relates that when he was 10 his teacher, wanting a rest, told his class to add up all the numbers from 1 to 100. Gauss did it in seconds, having noticed that 1+...+100 = 100+...+1 = (101+...+101)/2.

He did important work in almost every area of mathematics. Such eclecticism is probably impossible today, since further progress in most areas of mathematics requires much hard background study.

Some idea of the range of his work can be obtained by noting the many mathematical terms with "Gauss" in their names. E.g. Gaussian elimination (linear algebra); Gaussian primes (number theory); Gaussian distribution (statistics); Gauss [unit] (electromagnetism); Gaussian curvature (differential geometry); Gaussian quadrature (numerical analysis); Gauss-Bonnet formula (differential geometry); Gauss's identity (hypergeometric functions); Gauss sums (number theory).

His favourite area of mathematics was number theory. He conjectured the Prime Number Theorem, pioneered the theory of quadratic forms, proved the quadratic reciprocity theorem, and much more.

He was "the first mathematician to use complex numbers in a really confident and scientific way" (Hardy & Wright, chapter 12).

He nearly went into architecture rather than mathematics; what decided him on mathematics was his proof, at age 18, of the startling theorem that a regular N-sided polygon can be constructed with ruler and compasses if and only if N is a power of 2 times a product of distinct Fermat primes.

(1995-04-10)

Carnegie Mellon University

<body, education> (CMU) A university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. School of Computer Science.

(1997-06-23)

carpal tunnel syndrome

overuse strain injury

Carriage Return

<character> (CR, Control-M, ASCII 13) The character which causes the cursor to move to the left margin, often used with line feed to start a new line of output.

Encoded in C and Unix as "\r".

(1996-06-24)

Carrierless Amplitude/Phase Modulation

<communications> (CAP) A design of Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line transceiver developed by Bell Labs. CAP was the first ADSL design to be commercially deployed and, as of August 1996, was installed on more lines than any other.

CAP is a variation of Quadrature Amplitude Modulation, the modulation used by most existing modems in 1997. With CAP, the three channels (POTS, downstream data and upstream data) are supported by splitting the frequency spectrum. Voice occupies the standard 0-4 Khz frequency band, followed by the upstream channel and the high-speed downstream channel.

(1997-10-08)

carrier scanner

<security> (Or "wardialer") A program which uses a modem to dial a series of phone numbers (say, from 770-0000 to 770-9999), and keeps a log of what phone numbers answer with a modem carrier. The results of such a search were generally used by people looking to engage in random mischief in random machines.

Since the 1980s, wardialers have generally fallen into disuse, partly because of easily available "caller ID" technology, partly because fax machines are now in wide use and would often be logged as a carrier by a wardialer, and partly because there are so many new and more interesting venues for computerised mischief these days.

(1997-03-16)

carrier signal

<communications> A continuous signal of a single frequency capable of being modulated by a second, data-carrying signal. In radio communication, the two common kinds of modulation are amplitude modulation and frequency modulation.

(1995-03-01)

Cartesian coordinates

<mathematics, graphics> (After Renee Descartes, French philosopher and mathematician) A pair of numbers, (x, y), defining the position of a point in a two-dimensional space by its perpendicular projection onto two axes which are at right angles to each other. x and y are also known as the abscissa and ordinate.

The idea can be generalised to any number of independent axes.

Compare polar coordinates.

(1997-07-08)

Cartesian product

<mathematics> (After Renee Descartes, French philosper and mathematician) The Cartesian product of two sets A and B is the set

	A x B = {(a, b) | a in A, b in B}.

If we consider the elements in sets A and B as points along perpendicular axes in a two-dimensional space then the elements of the product are the "Cartesian coordinates" of points in that space.

See also tuple.

(1995-03-01)