Social, Professional and Ethical Aspects of IT

  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...