Business

Microsoft blames economic woes for missing profit targets

Microsoft on Tuesday reported fiscal fourth-quarter profit of $16.7 billion, or $2.23 per share, falling short of analyst expectations for $2.29 per share—a rare disappointment from the tech giant that has consistently ...

Business

Examining the development of music streaming

Until the invention of audio recording devices, the music industry as it was involved live performance and the selling of sheet music for people to play their favorite pieces at home. The invention of recording and playback ...

Business

Mismanaged cloud services put user data at risk

Organizations' failure to properly manage the servers they lease from cloud service providers can allow attackers to receive private data, research my colleagues and I conducted has shown.

Engineering

Facebook engineers announce development of Time Cards

A pair of Facebook engineers have announced the development of Time Cards—PCIe cards that can be used in x86 architecture machines to serve as a timekeeping device. In their announcement on the Facebook Engineering blog ...

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Personal computer

A personal computer (PC) is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end user, with no intervening computer operator.

A personal computer may be a desktop computer, a laptop computer or a tablet computer. The most common current operating systems for personal computers are Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, while the most common microprocessors are x86-compatible CPUs, ARM architecture CPUs and PowerPC CPUs. Software applications for personal computers include word processing, spreadsheets, databases, Web browsers and e-mail clients, games, and myriad personal productivity and special-purpose software. Modern personal computers often have high-speed or dial-up connections to the Internet, allowing access to the World Wide Web and a wide range of other resources.

A PC may be used at home, or may be found in an office, often connected to a local area network (LAN). This is in contrast to the batch processing or time-sharing models which allowed large expensive systems to be used by many people, usually at the same time, or large data processing systems which required a full-time staff to operate efficiently.

While early PC owners usually had to write their own programs to do anything useful with the machines, today's users have access to a wide range of commercial and non-commercial software which is provided in ready-to-run form. Since the 1980s, Microsoft and Intel have been dominating much of the personal computer market with the Wintel platform.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA