Database Software

Stop Online Piracy Act ... While white-box testing can be applied at the unit, integration and system levels of the software testing process, it is usually done at the unit level...

Software Patent Debate ... Arguments for patentability There are several arguments commonly given in defense of software patents or in defense of the patentability of computer-implemented inventions... Constitution mandates that patent law promote "the progress of science and useful arts." Supporters of software patents argue that inventions in the software arts are useful to modern life and therefore deserve the same incentive provided for inventions in other useful arts (i.e., to promote investment in research and development)... Thus patents accelerate software development by making previously unknown and not obvious software inventions public...

3D Computer Graphics ... 3D computer graphics rely on many of the same algorithms as 2D computer vector graphics in the wire-frame model and 2D computer raster graphics in the final rendered display. In computer graphics software, the distinction between 2D and 3D is occasionally blurred; 2D applications may use 3D techniques to achieve effects such as lighting, and 3D may use 2D rendering techniques...

System Software ... Device drivers such as computer BIOS and device firmware provide basic functionality to operate and control the hardware connected to or built into the computer. The operating system (prominent examples being z/OS, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux), allows the parts of a computer to work together by performing tasks like transferring data between memory and disks or rendering output onto a display device...

Software Industry ... The software industry expanded in the early 1960s, almost immediately after computers were first sold in mass-produced quantities... The computer-makers started bundling operating systems software and programming environments with their machines... New software was built for micro-computers, and others, including IBM, followed DECs example quickly, resulting in the IBM AS400 amongst others...

Software Bug ... This was initially dismissed as pilot error, but an investigation by Computer Weekly uncovered sufficient evidence to convince a House of Lords inquiry that it may have been caused by a software bug in the aircraft's engine control computer...

Software Engineering ... Software development, a much used and more generic term, does not necessarily subsume the engineering paradigm... Although it is questionable what impact it has had on actual software development over the last more than 40 years, the field's future looks bright according to Money Magazine and Salary.com, which rated "software engineer" as the best job in the United States in 2006... Dijkstra wrote his seminal paper, "Go To Statement Considered Harmful", in 1968 and David Parnas introduced the key concept of modularity and information hiding in 1972 to help programmers deal with the ever increasing complexity of software systems...

Software Patent ... Important issues concerning software patents include: Where the boundary between patentable and non-patentable software should lie; Whether the inventive step and non-obviousness requirement is applied too loosely to software; and Whether patents covering software discourage, rather than encourage, innovation...

Copyright Infringement Of Software ... Motivation Some of the motives for engaging in the illegal activity of copyright infringement are the following: Pricing – unwillingness or inability to pay the price requested by the legitimate sellers Unavailability – no legitimate sellers providing the product in the country of the end-user: not yet launched there, already withdrawn from sales, never to be sold there, geographical restrictions on online distribution and international shipping Usefulness – the legitimate product comes with various means (DRM, region lock, DVD region code, Blu-ray region code) of restricting legitimate use (backups, usage on devices of different vendors, offline usage) or comes with annoying non-skipable advertisements and anti-piracy disclaimers, which are removed in the pirated product making it more desirable for the end-user Shopping experience – no legitimate sellers providing the product with the required quality through online distribution and through a shopping system with...

Black-box Testing ... One of the main reasons for regression testing is to determine whether a change in one part of the software affects other parts of the software... Background Experience has shown that as software is fixed, emergence of new and/or reemergence of old faults is quite common... Often, a fix for a problem will be "fragile" in that it fixes the problem in the narrow case where it was first observed but not in more general cases which may arise over the lifetime of the software...

Regression Testing ... Destructive testing is most suitable, and economic, for objects which will be mass produced, as the cost of destroying a small number of specimens is negligible. It is usually not economical to do destructive testing where only one or very few items are to be produced (for example, in the case of a building)...

Test Automation ... These applications are either pre-installed on phones during manufacture, downloaded by customers from various mobile software distribution platforms, or web applications delivered over HTTP which use server-side or client-side processing (e.g...

Software Development ... Software can be developed for a variety of purposes, the three most common being to meet specific needs of a specific client/business (the case with custom software), to meet a perceived need of some set of potential users (the case with commercial and open source software), or for personal use (e.g... Embedded software development, that is, the development of embedded software such as used for controlling consumer products, requires the development process to be integrated with the development of the controlled physical product... The need for better quality control of the software development process has given rise to the discipline of software engineering, which aims to apply the systematic approach exemplified in the engineering paradigm to the process of software development...

Software Documentation ... Without proper requirements documentation, software changes become more difficult—and therefore more error prone (decreased software quality) and time-consuming (expensive)...

Software Quality ... Historically, the structure, classification and terminology of attributes and metrics applicable to software quality management have been derived or extracted from the ISO 9126-3 and the subsequent ISO 25000:2005 quality model, also known as SQuaRE... Based on these models, the software structural quality characteristics have been clearly defined by the Consortium for IT Software Quality (CISQ), an independent organization founded by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Object Management Group (OMG)... CISQ has defined 5 major desirable characteristics needed for a piece of software to provide business value: Reliability, Efficiency, Security, Maintainability and (adequate) Size...

System Testing ... Today national copyright laws have been standardized to some extent through international and regional agreements such as the Berne Convention and the European copyright directives. Although there are consistencies among nations' copyright laws, each jurisdiction has separate and distinct laws and regulations about copyright...

History Of Copyright Law ... Due to the need to frequently translate old software to meet the needs of new machines, high-order languages like FORTRAN, COBOL, and ALGOL were developed... A few companies sold the service of building custom software but no software companies were selling packaged software... 1945 to 1965: The Origins The term software engineering first appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s...

Montage Image Mosaic Software ... The Supreme Court of the United States issued an opinion on appeal (as Bilski v. Kappos) that affirmed the judgment of the CAFC, but revised many aspects of the CAFC's decision...

White-box Testing ... Specific knowledge of the application's code/internal structure and programming knowledge in general is not required. The tester is only aware of what the software is supposed to do, but not how i.e...

Programmer ... British countess and mathematician Ada Lovelace is popularly credited as history's first programmer, as she was the first to express an algorithm intended for implementation on a computer, Charles Babbage's analytical engine, in October 1842, intended for the calculation of Bernoulli numbers. Her work never ran because Babbage's machine was never completed to a functioning standard in her time; the first programmer to successfully run a program on a functioning modern electronically based computer was pioneer computer scientist Konrad Zuse, who achieved this feat in 1941...