E-SPEAIT course blog

 It is of utmost importance to make things easy to read and as foolproof as possible. It can be a decisive factor since many disasters can be avoided or happen because of that. 1) Air Inter Flight 148 crashed because of the small screen This disaster happened in 1992 because pilots practically descended into mountain. A two-year investigation concluded that ridiculously small display screen was most likely at fault. The pilots intended to descend toward the airport at an angle of -3.3 degrees, so they likely entered "-3.3" into the autopilot and proceeded with landing procedures. However the autopilot happened to be sent in the wrong mode of feet per minute instead of degrees. So those entered digits were interpreted as 3300 feet per minute - over four times faster than pilots originally intended. Autopilot display screen was simply a two-digit screen and it gave no hints as to what mode was actually used. Even the simplest alarm clocks have more safeguards! Another problem w...

 In my opinion, some aspects of IT pro in Estonia (and in the world) remain and will remain the same but others are shifting. Experience is still majorly more valued than university diploma. Unless person wants to move into academia field, Estonian companies don't really care about his education. However, even for junior position 1-2 years of experience are sometimes required. I know a few stories where people who finished their BSc in IT were struggling to find a job and had to go the tech support route. At the same time, I know a few people who went to "Java courses" for 3 months and managed to land development position right after that. That leads to another universal skill - the art of self-presentation. I believe this skill is relevant with Estonian IT pros. A lot of companies still do hiring through their HR and IT departments (in contrast to using some testing-and-hiring websites like hackerrank for example) so there is some room for maneuvering if one's skills...

 Similar to real-life's etiquette, netiquette is a (somewhat unspoken) set of rules that exist in order to make people's online lives happier and easier. A book with the same name was published in 1995 by Virginia Shea where she outlines "Ten Commandments". The one that I believe to be the most important is "Remember the human". Speaking mostly from my experience as MMO and MOBA gamer, people seem to forget every possible set of spoken or unspoken rules when there is victory on the line. I've known some 30-40 years olds whose [baby] rage is far worse than one of a ten years old who didn't get the toy that he wanted and the toxicity of vocabulary is on par with world's deadliest snakes. And this is the age when people that are considered the backbone of society in terms of their knowledge and judgement. Obviously, people who are way younger can be toxic online as well but they can be excused as they might even not know any better. However to my mi...

Referring to “The Case for Copyright Reform” by Rick Falkvinge and Christian Engström, I think that some concepts of their proposal for copyright reform simply got outdated and outsmarted by the industry, both existing and emerging. By removing the need to purchase the content, streaming services like Netflix and Spotify now act as a middle-man, and simply make file-sharing overly unnecessary and time-consuming. A general media consumer will gladly pay a monthly fee and never worry about finding a tv show, movie or music album ever again. Even being a veteran p2p user (starting with BitComet), I now find it much easier to pay Spotify and Netflix fees (shoutout to student discount) and get everything I need in one or two places.  While consumers greatly benefit from such streaming services, the authors suffer. Average royalty for 1 song played is around 0.0038$ and 0.0074$ for major platforms so to make a living by simply uploading their works to a streaming platform, author would h...