science

Softpedia

Softpedia is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Softpedia rather than just read about it. In short: Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics.

Key takeaways

Softpedia belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Softpedia to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Softpedia from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics. It is ranked as among of the top download portals on the internet.

History Softpedia was started by two Romanian students, Bogdan Gheorghe and Cătălin Garmacea as softnews.ro. They realized that the Romanian audience was too small so they shifted the website to English and changed the domain to softpedia.com. The Romanian version was eventually discontinued because advertisers wanted a solely English website. The site got around 950,000 visits in 2005. Softpedia's revenue in 2006 was 1.6 million euros, with 95% of the revenue coming from outside Romania. In 2007, the Romanian website monitoring service Traffic.ro reported Softpedia as getting 3.5 million visits a week, mostly from outside of Romania. Softpedia chose to stop being monitored by Traffic.ro in June of that year.

Features

The site is owned by SoftNews NET SRL, a Romanian company. Softpedia features reviews written by its staff. Each review includes a 1-to-5-star rating, and often a public rating to which any of the site's visitors may contribute. Products are organised in categories which visitors can sort according to most recent updates, number of downloads, or rating. Softpedia serves the most recent binaries and promotes software that is recently downloaded on its front page. Free software and commercial software (and their free trials) can also be listed separately. Softpedia displays virtual awards for products free of adware, spyware and commercial tie-ins. Products that include these unrelated and/or unanticipated components and offers (which are known as potentially unwanted programs) are marked as such. Softpedia does not repack software for distribution. It provides direct downloads of software in its original provided form, links to developers's downloads, or both. It hosts some products on its own servers in case they become unavailable from their developers' sites. In December 2008, SoftNews NET SRL launched Autoevolution, an automotive news and reference web site.

Safety Softpedia has occasionally been used to distribute malware, such as a spyware program named OSX/OpinionSpy that was hidden in screensavers uploaded there along with MacUpdate and VersionTracker in 2010. A 2018 report found that Softpedia was relatively safe compared to other download sites, with only 4 of 148 programs tested containing unwanted Internet Explorer add-ons and stating that Softpedia was less vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks due to serving more stand-alone installers that do not download executable files. Softpedia displays virtual awards for products free of adware, spyware, and commercial tie-ins.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Softpedia

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Softpedia claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Softpedia before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Softpedia ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Softpedia

In research: Softpedia appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Softpedia in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Softpedia is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Download websites, Information technology companies of Romania, Internet properties established in 2001, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Softpedia outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Softpedia in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Softpedia means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Softpedia out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Softpedia in simple terms?

Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics.

Why does Softpedia matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Softpedia?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Softpedia.