Kopec Explains Software

Facebook's been in the news again, and as usual it's not a positive story. In this episode we dive into some of Facebook's financial statistics from their most recent quarterly filing with the SEC. We then talk about their business model and how your use of Facebook plays into it. We discuss some of the inputs into Facebook's algorithm, and how the data points you generate for Facebook are used to target you with advertisements. Finally, we touch on the Facebook whistle-blower, whether Facebook should be regulated, and how Apple has hurt Facebook's revenue.

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Last week marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Steve Jobs. We discuss his legacy and how he inspired people in the tech industry. David also tells the personal story of his Steve Jobs fandom.

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Objective-C was developed nearly contemporaneously with C++, yet it never achieved the same widespread level of industry acceptance. Both languages attempted to add object-oriented features to the C language, but they went about doing it in very different ways. Objective-C is a superset of C, marrying a thin object-oriented layer inspired by Smalltalk on top of the venerable C language. Today, Objective-C use is largely limited to Apple platforms where it is being replaced by Swift. In this episode we will explain the history of Objective-C and how it compares to C++.

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Open source does not mean non-commercial. We start this episode by dispelling the common myths amongst the general public about the relationship between the business world and open source software. We then get into the many different business models that open source software companies use to make money. We cover six different business models, ranging from selling services to using your open source product as a so-called "loss leader." After we tour the major business models, we discuss some of the less well-known business models, like selling documentation.

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Last week, influential British inventor and entrepreneur Clive Sinclair passed away. Sinclair invented some of the first slim calculators, handheld televisions, and digital watches, but he is perhaps best known for being one of the pioneers of the British personal computer industry. In the early 1980s his company, Sinclair Research, developed the hot-selling and widely cloned ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum computers. In this episode we talk about Clive Sinclair's life and the legacy of the ZX line of personal computers.

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Firewalls protect computers and private networks from threats originating across the wider Internet. They come in both hardware and software flavors. They ensure unwanted network traffic is turned away or dropped and that legitimate traffic is only routed to the appropriate application. They work by both simply blocking ports and by analyzing packet data. Windows has had a built-in firewall since Windows XP. In this episode we provide a basic overview of firewalls.

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Every hardware peripheral connected to your computer is powered by a device driver. A device driver sits between the operating system and a hardware device. It speaks the language of the hardware. It understands its commands. It's a point of translation and control. In this episode we explain what device drivers do, why they need to be managed, and how they differ from firmware.

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A content management system (CMS) is a piece of software that lives on a web server for the dynamic generation of web sites based on content that lives in a database. A CMS frees a site developer from the need to edit raw HTML and CSS to update and stylize their site. The most popular CMS in the world by far is WordPress, but there are many open source and proprietary alternatives. In this episode we explain why a CMS is useful, how it compares to a static site, and the ways that a CMS is expandable.

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Intel has received a lot of bad press the last few years. It never successfully made the leap into the smartphone market. Its fab got stuck at a 14 nanometer (nm) node for several years while competing fabs pressed on to 7 and 5 nm. And it lost a huge amount of share in the X86 market to arch-rival AMD. Yet, Intel is still very profitable and it still has its chips in the majority of desktops, laptops, and servers. With new leadership, it's branching out in several new directions. In this episode we break down why Intel has faced challenges and where it's experimenting with going next.

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Algorithms are at the heart of computer science. And they're actually a really simple concept. What are the steps we need to take to solve a problem? The best algorithms are generic enough to be used on different problems of the same type. Software developers favor algorithms that are efficient and easy to implement. In this episode we'll discuss what an algorithm is, how algorithms are measured, how we can be sure they are correct, and some of the issues around bias in algorithms.

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