E-SPEAIT / Aleksandr Voronkov

Two opposite examples of ergonomics/usability/HCI Sometimes the best way to illustrate the value of design is through examples of bad design. Good design most probably will go unnoticed and will stay invisible. However, if design is confusing, frustraiting or just too bad it will definitely annoy you. Picture 1: Enter your phone number [1] It is definitely funny to see these example of bad UI, but what if poorly designed user interface and wrong usage of technology could lead into huge disasters? The Space Shuttle Columbia Burned Up Because of PowerPoint After a piece of debris hit the space shuttle Columbia during launch on January 16, 2003, NASA had two weeks to prepare it for re-entry. Engineers were called to assess the danger, and after reading their reports, NASA decided that everything was just fine. Picture 2: Death by PowerPoint. The Slide that killed [3] So how did the experts so badly underestimate the damage to the shuttle? What did the most advanced space agency in the wor...

To start with, it does not really matter where you are from and who you are, the very first thing you need to do to become an IT professional is to start loving the technology. When you do something you love, you do it better. First of all, I do believe that the most crucial skill for the IT professional is to be able to retrieve the right information. And I am not joking when saying "Googling skills are important". However, it is not about knowing how to open Google Search, it is about knowing how to split up your task on small pieces and find the answer in the Internet. Because of the technological progress and evolution of the media, most of the stuff can be already found in the Internet. You just need to know what to Google. Picture 1: Google Search [1] Since I have already started talking about technological progress, one of the skills IT specialist should have is Adaptability. The IT landscape is evolving at a pace never seen before. Most probably, some of the stuff tha...

Have you ever asked yourself why people enjoy conflicts so much? Unfortunately, I can't answer to this question properly, because I am not a psychologist. But what I can say for sure is that people  are often intrigued by conflict and find the subject very entertaining.  Conflict between two people often causes an interesting outcome, and the people are often quite interesting.  Without conflict stories would be boring, drama would be boring and life would be boring.  One of the reasons why people enjoy conflicts is that people enjoy arguing with each other.   Just imagine if you add an a nonymity to all this. Actually... you don't need to imagine anything. It is already existent and called Internet. Of course, it is virtually impossible to remain 100% anonymous on the Internet, however, in most cases "criminals" don't have any consequences.  In other words, online communication provides tons of possibilities to express yourself in an online message. U...

Copyleft licenses stand in contrast to permissive licenses, which tend to have few restrictions on use of the licensed code. They also don’t have any such code-sharing requirement, so the “open source-ness” does not necessarily persist to the derivative work. That is a feature or a bug, depending on how you look at it. Picture 1: Copyleft All Wrongs Reversed :D [1] Strong Copyleft: Under a strong copyleft license like GPL, if you redistribute a program that includes GPL code written by others, you must make your entire program available under GPL.  That includes any linked libraries or other components of the program. This is a crucial point for any software development projects in view of the strategies that should be considered and employed.  Examples of licenses that fall into this category include GPL v2 and GPL v3, as well as the Affero GPL License (AGPL). Weak Copyleft: Weak copyleft licenses also obligate users to release their changes. However, this requirement ap...

In this opinion review I am going to talk about Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström's work: The Case for Copyright Reform.  Today’s copyright legislation is out of balance. Frankly speaking, it even turned an entire generation of young people into criminals in the eyes of the law. In the most cases I don't see anything illegal in the file sharing, especially if it is used in non-commercial purposes. From the introduction, it was obvious that authors share the same opinion. Therefore, they introduced some of the ideas in order to reform the current copyright system. In today's world, copyright imposes serious restrictions on what ordinary people can do in their lives. I absolutely agree that sharing copies, making use of somebody else’s copyrighted work, should never be prohibited if it is done by private individuals without a profit motive. However, we should not forget about the fact that you can not claim yourself an author if you do not appear to be the one....

In this review I am gonna talk about Himanen's work: Challenges of the Global Information Society, which was written in 2004, and compare it with present situation in the world. In his work he introduced different challenges to the global development of the information society and suggested one alternative for meeting these challenges: the model of the information society combined with the welfare state.  Photo 1: Information Society [2] In short, his idea of the information society can be defined as a creative society that is based on interaction. From the perspective of the author, the most important to the information society is not new technologies but a new way of doing things. This review comes to the conclusion that the most critical aspect in the development of the information society is the development of the deep-set structures of society, to which we must pay close attention.  To start our comparison, let's see first what author was focused on in his work.(numbers a...

By nature, people are very playful. No other species pursues such a wide variety of entertainment. The right entertainment is a very important element of our life. It boosts our energy and desire to do everything that we need to do. Research has shown that playing games is essential for healthy development especially in early childhood. Photo 1: Playing games is important! [6] Gaming is obviously social, so it is not a surprise that one of the major forms of using social media and social network is online gaming industry. We are witnessing the biggest revolution in games since the introduction of home computers: online games, played via modem over the Internet. Many companies now insist that every game they develop must have an online component. The most ambitious online games are persistent worlds, which immerse hundreds of players in a single, shared environment. The predecessor of modern online games was MUD that stands for Multi-User Dungeon. MUDs were a revolution in gaming. These...