Infinite Fight to Piracy!

Infinite Fight Start, Ready?

Since Internet play a important character in our daily life, there has a new culture come out. It is share, also means piracy in most of the time. Do you had download any free music, film, game, book form Internet yet. Honestly, people enjoy these free entertainments is human being. It may be illegal, but it make sense. If you can enjoy something without charge, are you willing to pay addition for it? Most of people will answer no.

Pirate products have a long long history form ancient times to modern times. In older times, pirate products are producing for earning money mostly. When I was a kid, I always saw some shop selling pirate AV VCD/DVD and no shop assistant inside the shop. About 13 years ago or more, in Hong Kong, selling pirate products is a illegal action but these kind of shop are very common. Nowadays, it is hard to find these flagrant pirate shop because of Customs’s action.
 

What Piracy?

However, the pirate action are moving into Internet, it is very hard to seize the criminal. The following are some common cases:
 

NDS

 A kind of memory card “R4” provide a access to the user which allow they play NDS game without game cartridge. After download the game document from website and saved it into R4, people can any game without payment. This event brought a great loss to Nintendo and the game developer.

e-Book

Originally, it is developed for a good wish of reading in anywhere without paper. However, people share the e-book file under a Internet share culture. Although, This phenomenon is not common yet, a lot of books still have no e-copy but some organization are starting to build up e-library. It may be good for study area, but I can foresee that it will make a loss to book industries.

Music

Most people can aware the severity of illegal-download. It is the most common case and bring a biggest loss to the music producer. Although legal-download websites are built up, the times of illegal-download are keeping in a high level.

Cycles of Actions
Why I said that it is a infinite Fight? I will use the Cycles of Actions and a real case of PSP to explain to you.

You can see the picture display a loop of action:

1. Individual cognition → Individual acts : (The Personal cognitions and preferences affect their behavior)
It is human being so people want to saving money. This is the reason of why using pirate product. The major factor is money, because of a lot of young Internet users have no economical ability to afford purchasing product.

2. Individual acts → Organizational actions : (Individual behavior affect organizational choices)
The manufacturer develop anti-piracy policy in order to blocked these pirate action. In PSP, Sony are using 2 method to fighting. First is a new format of game cartridge “UMD“ because high product cost can reduce the willing of producing piracy. Criminal make pirate product only for profit not share. Therefore, Sony’s strategy is quite successful, I had not discovered any pirate-UMD till today. Second is continuing upgrade the PSP OS, the latest game only can operate in the latest OS. However, this strategy are not successful.

3. Organizational actions → Environmental actions : (Organizational actions affect environmental responses)
In beginning, new OS came out but it can stop the piracy of latest product only. I can say that it is un-useless, not useless but a little useful. Both hackers and Sony’s technology level are growing in the same time. Hacker often can cracked the new OS after few weeks and then upload the unlocked OS into Internet. They think the cracking of OS as a kind of challenge usually so that they continued . It is not for any profit but a good feeling.

4. Environmental actions → Individual cognition : (Environmental acts  affect individual cognition)
When the latest unlocked version uploaded, people share the file. It will go back to the beginning stage again. If people can find out the resource in Internet, they never think about using the genuine product. It is very hard to change personal value.

Think about Youself
Both Piracy and Plagiarism are serious problem in entertainment industries. Law can protect the enterprise and fight to the piracy. However, plagiarism was not the case. We can saw many good entertainment ideas are copy into china like Facebook’s Flash game. Browsing the Chinese social network site, you can discover a lot of similar place. In order to end this infinite fight, the only way is change our personal cognition, stop using pirate product and protect the intellectual property rights.

We have learned Bloom's Taxonomy before, but now we learn more about Bloom's Taxonomy in revised version. 

Here, I have some application of Bloom's Revised Taxonomy to our previous learning, business programming.

 

I remember that in the previous course of Principles of Business Programming, we had learned basic concepts and techniques of developing computer in business environment. We use Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008 to create our own unique programs.

We can divide 6 level of Bloom's Revised Taxonom into 3 aspects. However, I would like to discuss each of 6 different level only- the hierarchy of learning.

Let's look back to the past of our learning....

Knowledge

In the beginning, we need to know what Microsoft® Visual Basic® can perform, such as what functions each toolbox buttons have, how to design the window of our program

We also need to remember programming languages, like some symbols, statements, structures, etc.

Some examples:

Relational operators
   ‘=’ mean ‘Equal to’

  ‘<>’ mean ‘Not equal to’

  ‘>’ mean ‘Greater than’

Data types

  ‘str’ mean ‘string’

  ‘int’ mean ‘Integer’

  ‘dec’ mean ‘Decimal’

  ‘Boolean’ mean ‘True or False’

Statements

  If <condition> Then

  <Statement executed>

  End If

  Me.close()

…………..and so on

We should keep those in our memory.

Comprehension

We should understand why the programming codes are set in the specific ways, why we need to write some statement first, otherwise there is an error.

For examples:

When I want to make the program have ability to be entered any data and then calculate them, why I firstly need to type the following statement-

Dim (variable) As (Data type)

(E.g. Dim strWelcome As String )

The reason we learn is that computer need to store data in RAM to process, and the variable is a location in RAM that we name (e.g. I named it strWelcome.)

If the code cannot be processed by the program firstly, the data cannot be stored in RAM. So it must set a location in RAM for the data, then the computer can calculate or process those data you enter. Also data must be stored in a particular data types like string (any word) or integer (integer number). One of the reasons is that it will cause errors if the computer calculates the English alphabet.

We realized and understood the principles and reasons which explain knowledge of programming.

Application

After we had learned programming language of Visual Basic and, we have the ability to set the program interface by using different functions, select and use different code to express and construct a set of instructions in a programming language to tell the program to do a specific task. It is like a job to translate the meaning of human orders into programming language.

For example:

If I want my program to save ‘welcome to our blog! ’ that I enter in text-box(named txtEnteringData) in my program, I would set a variable named strWelcome and then store the word ‘welcome to our blog!’ in the variable.

Dim strWelcome As String

StrWelcome = Me. txtEnteringData.Text

Analysis

When we had more experiences in writing code, we knew how to categorize functions of code such as types of data (Alphabetic, numerical, Yes or No), types of statements like conditional statement(e.g. If….then & in the case)

We can also compare different statements. For example, we should analyze which expression ways of programming code are better to minimize the workload of the computer (avoid using too much code that are not necessarily needed), and at the same time those can make the computer to do the same tasks.

Evaluation

Although Microsoft® Visual Basic® will help user to check errors of code, we also need to assess our program. For example, we would judge whether the program is user-friendly, the design of the user interface is attractive or not. Also, we will consider how well your structures of code is, since if your code is structured bad, it is difficult to find problems or improve the functions of your program.

Creativity

From the beginning of learning, we need to follow the instructions to create a program that are similar to the model program that the textbook and the PowerPoint showed. So we did not generate a new thing.

Until we knew many skills and knowledge about programming, we can combine all things we had learned, and then use our creativity and learning to design our own program by make a creative user interface and write carefully organized code to make it have an additional special functions. This is program innovation.

You can download Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008 in Microsoft website.
















Do you have any idea about Bloom's Taxonomy or our past course of Principle of Business Programming ?


Feel free to share your opinions

Frederick