Article 16 and HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Good evening. The is the last news post in this class and I would like to dedicate it to the Piracy and Ethics issue. Can you name the piracy acts ethical? Is it beneficial for society? Let's take a look on the article below.

Article 16. The ethics of Piracy.

http://www.cs.rpi.edu/courses/fall00/ethics/papers/bironj2.html

The article covers 2 cases:

1. Case when a pirate sells software for money.

2. Case when a pirate distributes software for free.

Let's examine each of them.

1)

a) Consider someone who copies an application developed by a large company and decides that this product is way over-priced and should be available for a much lower price. So pirate begins creating and distributing copies of the application at their new, adjusted price. The pirate in this case may think they are ethically right for providing the product at a price that they feel it should be sold at. But the fact that the pirate seeks to profit from the piracy seals off any form of ethical argument for their acts.

b) If a company discovers the existence of a pirate who is selling their product and choose not to take action, how do the ethics now apply? Sometimes it is better for the company financially to allow the pirate to continue than to take an action, but does this make the piracy ethically right?Ethically, the company is also wrong because they are allowing the unethical act of piracy to occur when they are able to take action to stop it. Therefore, in a situation such as this, the act of pirating a product is still an unethical act.

2) The second type of piracy is that in which software is obtained freely. Pirates may override whatever form of copy protection exists and distribute a product free of charge. Probably the premier argument for this type of piracy is that the companies aren’t losing anything. But using the effect of an unethical act to justify it is not a strong argument, therefore this case is unethical in terms of piracy.

So when might this sort of piracy ever be considered ethical? There is at least one case that can be shown, where the piracy is not wholly unethical. Many times, when products are pirated and freely distributed, the users are given the suggestion that if they like the software then they should purchase their own copy.

From my point of view piracy like a phenomenon is wrong. But I would like to remind that piracy industry gives much more opportunities for people, who would never use some kinds of software otherwise. It also creates additional working places and sometimes even a tax source for the government. So is it so harmful like big corporations make us to think?

Individual Assignment no. 5 and News Posting combined.

Question:

How did your group make the decisions? What problems did you encounter in the process? Did your group make decisions in a different way than the whole class did? Why? What kind of information system do you need to design to support such a process of negotiation? Provide a simple hardware/software configuration.

Answer:

As the goal of our group was to establish equal amount of points for which students and we did not have real competition among us (no real benefits and reasons to hide information from each other) we decided to cooperate in full. We chose a person, who volunteered to calculate the optimal points distribution among team members and send him all our personal scores by e-mail. As result during our class meeting we had a table with different alternatives available and amount of scores each of alternative gives to the members. One of the problems was that one of our members had to get very low score in orders others could get high. Or all of the students had to get less or more equal low score, what we did not like too. In order to solve the problem we talked to the professor and realized that we were free to change our conditions and share points like we want. From my point of view it does not make sense as in negotiations you always have some conditions fixed and you have operate instead of them with the better possible option for you. In you case everything was flexible. So, finally we pick the option with the highest possible score and shared our points among each of the members equally to get the highest possible score for everybody. I believe we are the only team who made such a decision - to change completely all the frames of the assignment given - the rest of the teams were flexible only inside the limits of the individual scores given. The reason was - additional hint from the professor and our "boldness" in changing all the conditions without fear to lose possible points.

To make such a decision with the use of informative systems you have to have software or system combining: database available with all necessary data; Microsoft Excel or other program allowing you to create a table and sort the data given; e-mail software allowing you to communicate with other members or another method of communication (phone, VoiP, etc).

News Blog:

As an real example of such a system you can see The Mediator software (http://www.mcn.org/c/rsurratt/conflict.html).

The Mediator promises to find the best possible agreements between two people . The real value of this program lies in the realization that different people have their own idea about how important the issues are or how much the issues are worth. It is possible then to find envy-free agreements in which all parties feel as if they've gotten the best deal. This program will allow you to easily enter the areas of conflict, assign preferences for both parties, and automatically calculate the fair, equitable, and envy-free maximization of those preferences. There is demo version available on the web-site to try it.

Personally I am very skeptical in using negotiations software: as real negotiation is all about persuasion and communicating efficiently (voice recognition and visual presence allow to solve each negotiation 3 times faster), but in some easier events (e-bay bidding, etc.) it can be really efficient.

Comments on classes and Article 14.

Good evening! This week we had all our presentations over and as a member of the last team (B) to finish I am glad it is finally done. The problem only is that I cannot discuss minuses or pluses of my work. Regarding Team A presentation I would like to say that it was a great job, full of offerings and serious scientific graphs. The only my offering for it is always to double check whether the scale and experience of the company, which will implement the solution, allows to use what is recommended. It seemed to me that CRM offered was to complicated for small B&B with 8 rooms of facilities.

Article 14. QuickStudy: System Development Life Cycle

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=71151&pageNumber=1

Audio version: http://a1448.g.akamai.net/7/1448/25138/v0001/compworld.download.akamai.com/25137/techcast/computerworld-techcast-sdlc.mp3 or http://blogs.computerworld.com/node/4452 (see media player picture)

The article above was very interesting for me as it strengthened the points the professor had mentioned in the class about system development stages. To summarize: system development process changes over times: before it was a writing code for solving a problem or automating a procedure, now it is much more complicated process.

There were several types of system described starting from the oldest to newest. They are:

1The waterfall system;

2) The fountain model;

3) The spiral model;

4) The rapid prototyping;

5) The incremental model.

The author offer to use the synchronize and stabilize method, which combines the advantages of the spiral model with technology for overseeing and managing source code. This method allows many teams to work efficiently in parallel. The approach was defined by David Yoffie of Harvard University and Michael Cusumano of MIT. For me it seems very reasonable to use new types of system developments models in response to the rapid changes in the society requirements. The last model seems to be very interesting. The companies, which used this method (Microsoft and Netscape) also give it more weight in consideration.