'A real achievement' New Statesman 'Beautifully portrays - and exemplifies - the combined wit and profundity, exuberance and rigour, of Oxford analytic philosophy' TLS What are the limits of language? How to bring philosophy closer to everyday life? What makes a good human being? These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language. Being vigilant about their words was their way to keep philosophy true to everyday experience. A Terribly Serious Adventure traces the friendships and the rivalries, the shared preoccupations and the passionate disagreements of Oxford's most brilliant thinkers. Nikhil Krishnan brings his knowledge and understanding of philosophy to bear on the lives and intellectual achievements of a large and lively cast of characters. Together, they stood for a compelling moral vision of philosophy that is still with us today.

What are the limits of language? How to bring philosophy closer to everyday life? What is a good human being? These were among the questions that philosophers wrestled with in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a period shadowed by war and the rise of fascism. In response to these events, thinkers such as Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch aspired to a new level of watchfulness and self-awareness about language. Being vigilant about their words was their way to keep philosophy true to everyday experience. A Terribly Serious Adventure traces the friendships and the rivalries, the shared preoccupations and the passionate disagreements of Oxford's most brilliant thinkers. Far from being stuck in a world of tweed, pipes and public schools, the Oxford philosophers drew on their wartime lives as soldiers and spies, conscientious objectors and prisoners of war in creating their greatest works, works that are original in both thought and style, true masterpieces of British modernism. Nikhil Krishnan brings his knowledge and understanding of philosophy to bear on the lives and intellectual achievements of a large and lively cast of characters. Together, they stood for a compelling moral vision of philosophy that is still with us today.

Ethical questions are often associated with practical dilemmas: questions in morality, in other words. This volume, by contrast, asks questions about morality: what it is, and to what it owes its precarious authority over us. The focus on metaethics is sustained throughout, via a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Distinguished luminaries who include R. M. Hare and Bernard Williams address keenly debated issues such as what constitutes morality in politics; the relationship between education and ethical standards; and whether or not morality can indeed be defined at all. As Nikhil Krishnan writes in his elegant Foreword, 'The plain-speaking, essayistic grace of these essays, speaks nevertheless of the possibility of moral philosophy, written with an eye to a listener, very possibly not a professional philosopher, who has the right to say, ''This is all very well, your neat little theory, but it doesn't ring true. Things are more complicated than that.'''

Data storage has grown such that distributed storage over a number of systems is now commonplace. This has given rise to an increase in the complexity of ensuring data loss does not occur, particularly where failure is due to the failure of individual nodes within the storage system. Redundancy was the main tool to combat this, but with huge increases in data, minimization of the overhead associated with this technique caused major concern. In a large data center, a third concern arose, namely the need for efficient recovery from the failure of a single storage unit.In this monograph, the authors give a comprehensive overview of the role of differing types of codes in addressing the issues in large distributed storage systems. They introduce the reader to regenerative codes, locally recoverable codes and locally regenerative codes; the three main classes of codes used in such systems. They give an exhaustive overview of how these codes were created, their uses and the developments and improvements of the codes in the last decade.This in-depth review gives the reader an accessible and complete overview of the modern codes used in distributed storage systems today. It is a one-stop source for students, researchers and practitioners working on any such system.