Kopec Explains Software

The Classic Mac OS refers to the operating system that Apple Macintosh computers ran from 1984 to 2001. While it was one of the first popular operating systems to feature a graphical user interface, it hit some very real growing pains by the 1990s. In this episode, prolific hacker of the classic Mac OS, Elliot Nunn, joins us to dive into some of the quirks of this landmark operating system. We dis...

On July 19th, 2024, the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike released an update for its Falcon Sensor software that brought down millions of Windows computers around the world. Some of these computers were involved in critical infrastructure like airlines, hospitals, and governments. Falcon Sensor, which hooks into the Windows kernel, was certified by Microsoft and cryptographically signed. The update t...

Approximately one in four consumers uses an ad blocker. But do they stop to consider whether that is actually a good thing for them? In this episode, we briefly touch on the technical aspects of ad blockers before having a larger discussion around the ethical and economic considerations of ad blocking technology. Show Notes Episode 6: How Does the Web Work? Episode 82: What Are Cookies? Ad Blockin...

Machine Learning is a discipline within the broader field of Artificial Intelligence concerned with using insights from datasets to make predictions, classify new data points, and generate content. The algorithms used vary greatly in complexity and the real world applications that they are applicable to. Instead of concentrating on any particular algorithm, in this episode we aim to provide a broa...

Abandonware is old software that is no longer commercially available. It's not a legal term, and in fact it's not legal to download most of the software that is termed "abandonware." In this episode we explain what abandonware is, the different legal situations that old software finds itself in, and we discuss whether or not downloading abandonware is ethical. Show Notes Episode 10: What is an Emu...

Grace Hopper is one of the most iconic people in the world of software. Her career as a mathematician, software innovator, computer science advocate, programmer, and technical leader spanned the early era of computing through to the 1990s. One of the first notable computer programmers, Hopper developed the first programming text book, one of the first compilers, and perhaps most importantly she wa...

The creation of BASIC was one of the most important steps in the democratization of computing. BASIC, coupled with the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, was developed by math professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz along with a team of undergraduate students at Dartmouth College in 1964. They revolutionized who could use and access a computer. In the 1970s BASIC became the defacto standard interface...

Many large sophisticated machine learning models, like those employed in generative AI, are trained on immense amounts of copyrighted images or text. How is that legal? In this episode we delve into the exceptions to copyright law that enable such uses to not be seen by courts as infringement. This includes expressive vs functional uses of a copyrighted work, fair use, and the possibility of a dat...

In 2020 the Trump administration and eleven state attorney generals initiated an antitrust lawsuit against Google for its alleged anti-competitive behaviors in the search engine market. Last month, the lawsuit went to trial. In this episode we explain what a monopoly is, the government's antitrust allegations, and weigh-in on whether we agree that Google has abused its monopoly position. We also p...

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, is one of the largest companies in the world by market capitalization. But where does all of the revenue come from to support that? In this episode we analyze Alphabet's third quarter earnings report and earnings call. We delve into the different categories of revenue, how they breakdown as a percentage, what they mean, and some other interesting details tha...

In this episode, originally published in 2020, we discuss the similarities and differences between iOS and Android. We delve into their history, business models, developer ecosystems, and user experiences. Does it really matter if you use iOS or Android? Listen to this episode and find out. Show Notes Episode 89: Multi-Touch Episode 99: Android App Development Follow us on X @KopecExplains . Theme...

In software, a sandbox is an isolated environment that limits the resources that a particular application can access. Sandboxes are used to protect the security and privacy of the user. All Web apps and much consumer software running on modern operating systems like iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows runs in a sandbox. We also use our general definition of sandbox to discuss their use in software de...

We explain what caches are, and where they're typically used. We can think of a cache as a piece of temporary fast memory used for the retrieval of pre-computed expensive calculations or high latency resources. Caches can exist in hardware or in software. Beyond the CPU caches and web browser caches that most are familiar with, in this episode we also dive into specific use cases of caches in comm...

Hash tables are some of the most widely used and powerful data structures. They allow for the efficient storage of key-value pairs. Keys are identifiers that we want to lookup data by, while values are the actual data. Hash tables underly common abstract data types in programming languages used for key-value data known as dictionaries, maps, or associative arrays. Hash tables can accomplish lookup...

Understanding open source licenses is critical if you're a software developer. What are your rights and responsibilities when you incorporate an open source library in your program? In this episode we explain why we have licenses, the different types of open source licenses, and best practices for an open source practitioner. Note that the licenses we refer to as laissez faire licenses in this epi...

Shareware was a major distribution model for consumer software and games from the 1980s through to the 2000s. We’re privileged to be joined on the show by journalist and tech historian Richard Moss, the author of "Shareware Heroes: The renegades who redefined gaming at the dawn of the internet." In the most common scenario, a piece of shareware is distributed free of charge but users pay a fee to...

We’re out this week, so we remastered a classic episode from 2020. It’s our third episode—a layperson’s introduction to bytes! Original description below: What is a Byte? In this episode we go down to the fundamentals and explain how data is represented in a computer. We discuss what a bit is, both at the hardware level and the software level. Then we discuss other terms like kilobyte, megabyte, g...

FreeBSD is probably the most popular operating system that most people have never heard of. Currently celebrating its 30th anniversary, FreeBSD is a performant, secure, Unix-like operating system with many advanced features that fills a lot of the same rolls as Linux, but is developed with quite different philosophical underpinnings. In this episode we explain what FreeBSD is, why some companies c...

There are many misconceptions about open source software, even amongst those who think they understand it. In this episode we dispel five of the most common myths about open source software: Open Source Software is non-commercial Open Source Software is insecure Open Source Software is the same as public domain software Any piece of software that has its source code available is open source Open S...

ChatGPT and other tools based on large language models (LLMs) have taken the software world by storm. While their capabilities are incredible, they have also sparked a lot of fear, doubt, and hyperbole. In this episode we dispel five myths about ChatGPT and similar tools: 1. That they represent human-level intelligence 2. That they will cause widespread permanent unemployment 3. That they're accur...

Early video game consoles (1977-1994) had primitive hardware, no operating systems, and software that was distributed on ROM chips embedded in plastic cartridges. Yet, some of the most iconic gaming software of all time was developed on these systems. What programming language did they use? How did they work without a graphics library and operating system? We use the Nintendo Entertainment System...

We're travelling this week, so we remastered a classic episode from 2020. It's our second episode—operating systems explained for laypeople. Checkout the show notes below for other classic episodes about operating systems. Original description: This week we discuss the most essential layer of a computer’s software, the operating system. We describe what an operating system is. We denote the differ...

How small can a programming language be and still be a programming language? In order for a programming language to be able to compute the same sorts of problems as any other language it must be Turing-complete. Amazingly, there is a programming language that has just eight commands, represented by eight single symbols, that is Turing-complete. In this episode we describe what it means to be Turin...

Strong passwords are so annoying to type-in and they're even more annoying to remember. Yet just about every modern website and app requires them. Why do we need special characters and numbers and different cases in every password we make? In this episode we explain how passwords are stored, and why a weak password stored securely is still a weak password. Show Notes Episode 17: What Is Encryption...

An instruction set architecture (ISA) is a specification of the instructions that a microprocessor understands as well as the infrastructure necessary to support those instructions including registers and a way to communicate with memory. Each microprocessor that implements an ISA may differ in the specifics of its circuitry. But all of the microprocessors that support the same ISA can execute the...