Software is the term applied to any set of instructions carried out automatically by a computer. The most familiar type of software is a software application, which is a set of instructions, or a number of instructions sets used together, designed to meet a particular need or related set of needs (e.g. a document editor, a movie player, a website browser, etc.)
Questions tagged [software]
47 questions
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Can Microsoft's success be attributed to their abuse of a monopoly
Can the success of Microsoft be attributed to their abuse of their operating system monopolies of MS-DOS through the various versions of Windows (and other related monopolies such as the Internet Explorer web-browser)?
I remember Microsoft…
Brian M. Hunt
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Can Skype wiretap your calls?
The Skype-Open-Source Blog speculates that Microsoft have changed the architecture of Skype in order to facilitate wiretapping:
Two months ago, Skype replaces user-hosted P2P supernodes with Linux grsec boxes hosted by Microsoft, but for…
Jesvin Jose
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Are some software programs "illegal" in Germany?
A German article in PC Welt (PC World) claims to list a number of "illegal hacker tools".
The list includes:
Network Sniffers
Aircrack-ng, Wireshark
Copy-Protection Circumvention Tools
AnyDVD, DVD Shrink, Vista Loader
Password Recovery…
codepleb
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Does your choice of browser relate to your IQ
SOURCE
PC World reports that a "psychometric consulting" firm called
AptiQuant gave free online IQ tests to 100,000 people, and then
plotted the scores against the browser on which the tests were taken.
It found that Internet Explorer users…
Chad
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Is the MacKeeper software service a scam?
This question is based on this question recently asked on Ask Different. The long and short of it is, the original poster recently purchased a copy of MacKeeper and was then contacted by phone by someone claiming to be a part of the MacKeeper team…
Giacomo1968
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AI can guess whether you're gay or straight – how do they get 91% success rate?
This article claims there is a software, that can say if a person is homosexual, based only on their facial images. The other article calls it "pseudoscience" though:
critics say we’re revisiting pseudoscience
Is it true or fake? How did they…
enkryptor
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Did the NSA pay RSA $10 million to make Dual_EC_DRBG the default in BSafe?
According to this article from Reuters
Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar…
ike
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Do off-the-shelf software products which claim to "Clean Your PC" work?
It's these incessant commercials I always see on my TV. "Install our product, and we will make your PC up to 100% faster!" Then they usually go through a few customer use cases (typically involving elderly folk) about how they installed it and found…
wfoster
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Are piracy rates for PC games often 85-90 percent in 2016?
In an article on Ars Technica about Jonathan Blow's pricing strategy for his new game The Witness, he was cited as saying the following (emphasis mine):
"There's this rhetoric that piracy is free publicity," Blow said during last week's Twitch Q&A…
Thunderforge
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Does the average software developer not own (or has never read) a book on software development?
The book 'Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams' by Timothy Lister and Tom DeMarco makes an unreferenced claim that:
"The average software developer, for example, doesn't own a single
book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever…
combinatorics
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Was "bug" used to refer to software bugs before being popularized by Grace Hopper?
A very famous photo is the following
which is the picture of a moth stuck to a piece of paper with the writing "First actual case of a bug being found".
We already know that bug was being used for glitch in engineering for a long time (Edison used…
Sklivvz
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Are individual watermarks widely used to fight piracy?
I have heard on some occasions that programs for digital media, such as Adobe Photoshop, embed hidden watermarks in the pictures that make it possible to spot a pirated copy and trace it to the person using that copy. This point typically comes up…
Lagerbaer
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Do any ATS companies advertise entirely automated resume rejection?
It's not an unheard of notion that employers, particularly large tech companies, might use automated systems to reject candidates, without any human involvement.
This article claims the following:
... an ATS will scan your resume for keywords and…
Ryan1729
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Do 95 percent of the world's ATMs use Windows XP?
Reuters claims:
Windows XP currently supports around 95 percent of the world's ATMs.
Is that true?
In the same article, it is said:
The U.S. software company first warned that it was planning to end
support for Windows XP in 2007, but only…
Franck Dernoncourt
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Did Adobe Flash's EOL cause trains to stop running in China?
News website Apple Daily posted on Jan 17 a report, picked up widely on socials, that Adobe discontinuing Flash caused trains to stop running in Dalian, China: As Adobe Flash stops running, so do some railroads in China.
The railroad system in…
stib
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