Yesterday Sam Bradford, the Oklahoma freshman quarterback, threw four touchdown passes against the in-state rival Oklahoma State Cowboys enroute to a decisive 49-17 victory. The victory gave the Sooners the outright division championship of the Big 12 South and bragging rights in the state for another year.
The four touchdown passes brought Bradford’s total to 32 […]
A file on a computer is a distinct collection of data which is encoded in a particular way for its particular use. This special encoding is the file format. To the casual user, file formats are essentially invisible because they are automatically handled by the software they use. File formats can be divided into some […]
Open source software is a description of the way that some software is distributed. It refers to the fact that the writers or developers of the software publicly share the source code (see below). This policy is the opposite of most commercial software, where the source code is considered a trade secret and is never […]
For an introductory discussion, see The Operating System.
Most home computers use a version of one of two commercial operating systems. The most widely used is the family of Microsoft Windows®. The other is a product of Apple Inc, called Mac OS®.
The first version of Windows to reach widespread use was released in 1992. It was […]
The operating system, abbreviated OS, is the foundation layer of software that makes it possible for the computer to run other programs, also called applications. When you turn on a computer, the first thing that runs is the BIOS, the Basic Input/Output System. The BIOS is what checks connections to the hardware, such as the […]
Software is the term used to describe the sets of instructions that make computers worthwhile. The word software is an invention of computer science, to differentiate it from hardware. It can refer to the whole collection of instructions on a computer, or it can refer to a specific task. Software which does a specific task […]