Week 15 IT and Ethics Ethical egoism is a term often used in the last years and it stands for philosophical and ethical position that establishes the fundamental priority of the someone's personal interests over any other interests, like public interests or the interests of other subjects. An "egoist" is often considered as a person who thinks only of himself and / or neglects the interests of other people, while supporters of "ethical egoism" usually argue that such neglect is simply unprofitable for the them for a number of reasons and, therefore, it is not selfishness (in the form of the priority of personal interests over any others), but only a inability to foresee consequences or even stupidity. Ethical egoism in the everyday sense is the ability to live by following your own interests, without contradicting the interests of others. This concept emphasizes that corporate social responsibility is simply “good business” because it helps to reduce long-term...
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Week 14 - The Blind Programmer Tommy McWilliam, Mobile Engineer at Quora told a story about one his of his best friends in high school, who was diagnosed with Leber's hereditary optic neuropathy when he was in his senior year. NONL constantly reduced his eyesight and in his first year of college, he was almost completely blind. He majored in computer science, and the way he programmed was one of the most unusual. In college, he used a combination of magnifier and narrator. The screen magnifier was called MAGic and allowed him to enlarge the text so that only a few characters could fit on the monitor. The monitor itself was a huge screen over 30 inches, optimized for the visually impaired.He always set Narrator to its maximum reading speed (probably over 300 wpm). By comparison, audiobooks tend to sound twice as slow. His friend also preferred to use the absurdly old version of Firefox (3.5 or something) because it supported his screen reader the best. He performed almost all...
Week 13 Linux is a family of Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel. In my opinion Linux has many advantages over another OSs and one of them is a s it is open-source everyone can access the code customizing and modifying it in a way he likes. That's why there are over 600 linux distributions now and about 500 are in development. As we should pick 2 of them and discuss I would like to discuss the most unusual ones. Hannah Montana Linux This distribution is dedicated to fans of the series "Hannah Montana" - where Hannah Montana is an ordinary schoolgirl during the day and becomes a singer at night. Only a single version based on Kubuntu 9.04 has been released. Kubuntu itself is a linux distrubution, that was first presented on December 10, 2004 at the Ubuntu Mataro Conference in Mataro, Spain. It uses the KDE graphical environment instead of the default Ubuntu GNOME. Most of all distributors are not lazy to change the name of t...
Week 12 For me hacker is a specialist, who uses a computer as a tool to solve problems and to achieve the goals. Good hackers are creative, thinking outside the box, as well as they like what they do and love exploring new things. Being a hacker is a culture with its own ideas, ethic and values that were born a long time ago, however they are still modern. In this blog I will go through seven values of hacker ethic and analyse their applicability. Passion - if you do what you love to do, you will never get tired of that and you will always do it better. As Linus Torvalds said: "Linux has very much been a hobby (but a serious one: the best type)", if your work is your hobby then it's not a work. Freedom - today many people work according to given rules and instructions that seem trusted, which doesn't allow them to express their creativity, however the best ideas born when people have opportunity to do things differently Hacker work...
Week 9 In this topic I will discuss how actually important is the design of the product and examples where bad design had led to sad consequences, while good design helped to avoid them. For many people design is first of all how the product looks like, but actually design is also the functionality of the product (how it works) and its value to consumers. Design defines how a brand interacts with a consumer. Air Inter Flight 148 Crashed Because a Display Screen Was Too Small Air Intel Flight 148 crashed while it was approaching an airport in Strasbourg in 1992. The pilots started to descend the plane toward the airport at an angle of -3.3 degrees (this is how they thought) which stands for the descent rate of 800 feet per minute. They inserted the right number " -3.3", but the thing was that the measurement was wrong and -3.3 was interpreted as feet per minute, instead of degrees. The actual descent rate was 3,300 feet pe...
Week 8 Good professional image of IT specialist In this topic I will express my opinion about what qualities and skills in IT professionals were valued in the past and nowadays and also, I will discuss about IT specialists in Estonia. First of all, I think, in the past people who wanted to study IT could do it only in a university or colleges, because higher education was really important to get a well paid job, while today our Internet is full of various online corses, where you can learn any programming language you want, as well as cybersecurity and networking. Even though, higher degree is still a bit more valuable than just an online course certificate, it mostly depends on a particular person, his skills and knowledge. In my opinion, valued qualities of IT professional in Estonia are the same as in the rest of the world. The most important skill is the ability to learn, because programmi...
Week 6 Copyleft Copyleft grants the right to freely distribute and modify intellectual property with the requirement to keep the same rights in derivative works created on the basis of that property. Copyleft also helps programmers who want to make improvements to free software to get permission to do so. Copyleft is a way of applying copyright to a program. It does not mean a complete waiver of copyright; otherwise, it would make copyleft impossible. The term “weak copyleft” refers to licenses in which not all derivative works inherit a copyleft license. Whether a derivative work is inherited or not often depends on how it was obtained. Weak copyleft licenses are often used to create software libraries. Only changes to the software itself licensed with a weak copyleft are subject to the terms of such Copyleft license.This allows progr...