<programming> The tendency of software that has not been used in a while to fail; such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed to bit rot. More commonly, "software rot" strikes when a program's assumptions become out of date. If the design was insufficiently robust, this may cause it to fail in mysterious ways. For example, owing to shortsightedness in the design of some COBOL programs, many would have succumbed to software rot when their 2-digit year counters wrapped around at the beginning of the year 2000. A related incident made the news in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 applied for a driver's licence renewal in Raleigh, North Carolina. The system refused to issue the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and 1 cannot be distinguished. Historical note: Software rot in an even funnier sense than the mythical one was a real problem on early research computers (e.g. the R1; see grind crank). If a program that depended on a peculiar instruction hadn't been run in quite a while, the user might discover that the opcodes no longer did the same things they once did. ("Hey, so-and-so needs an instruction to do such-and-such. We can snarf this opcode, right? No one uses it.") Another classic example of this sprang from the time an MIT hacker found a simple way to double the speed of the unconditional jump instruction on a PDP-6, so he patched the hardware. Unfortunately, this broke some fragile timing software in a music-playing program, throwing its output out of tune. This was fixed by adding a defensive initialisation routine to compare the speed of a timing loop with the real-time clock; in other words, it figured out how fast the PDP-6 was that day, and corrected appropriately. [Jargon File] (2002-02-22)

Rot-Weiß Oberhausen is a German association football club in Oberhausen, North Rhine-Westphalia. The club was formed as Oberhausener SV in December 1904 out of the merger of Emschertaler SV (1902) and the football enthusiasts of Oberhausener TV 1873.

<programming> (Or "computer program", "program", "code") The instructions executed by a computer, as opposed to the physical device on which they run (the "hardware"). The term was coined by the eminent statistician, John Tukey. Programs stored on non-volatile storage built from integrated circuits (e.g. ROM or PROM) are usually called firmware. Software can be split into two main types - system software and application software or application programs. System software is any software required to support the production or execution of application programs but which is not specific to any particular application. Examples of system software would include the operating system, compilers, editors and sorting programs. Examples of application programs would include an accounts package or a CAD program. Other broad classes of application software include real-time software, {business software}, scientific and engineering software, {embedded software}, personal computer software and {artificial intelligence} software. Software includes both source code written by humans and executable machine code produced by assemblers or compilers. It does not usually include the data processed by programs unless this is in a format such as multimedia which depends on the use of computers for its presentation. This distinction becomes unclear in cases such as {spread sheets} which can contain both instructions (formulae and macros) and data. There are also various intermediate compiled or semi-compiled, forms of software such as library files and byte-code. Some claim that documentation (both paper and electronic) is also software. Others go further and define software to be programs plus documentation though this does not correspond with common usage. The noun "program" describes a single, complete and more-or-less self-contained list of instructions, often stored in a single file, whereas "code" and "software" are uncountable nouns describing some number of instructions which may constitute one or more programs or part thereof. Most programs, however, rely heavily on various kinds of {operating system} software for their execution. The nounds "code" and "software" both refer to the same thing but "code" tends to suggest an interest in the implementation details whereas "software" is more of a user's term. (2002-07-21)

We should try to genericise this bit of the software.

Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work.

Zinc pest (from German Zinkpest), also known as zinc rot and zamak rot, is a destructive, intercrystalline corrosion process of zinc alloys containing lead impurities.. While impurities of the alloy are the primary cause of the problem, environmental conditions such as high humidity (greater than 65%) may accelerate the process.

Customised software (also known as bespoke software or tailor-made software) is software that is specially developed for some specific organization or other user. As such, it can be contrasted with the use of software packages developed for the mass market, such as commercial off-the-shelf software, or existing free software.