Berkerja Kerana Allah S.W.T - Sr. Tuan Hj. Tamzil Munir

Pada hari ini termeterailah sebuah perjanjian untuk membangunkan sebuah kampus baru UiTM di Dengkil khas untuk program matrikulasi dalam semua jurusan dan aliran berkapasiti 5,000 orang pelajar. Majlis tersebut disaksikan sendiri oleh Menteri Pengajian Tinggi, Dato Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin.

Saya berkesempatan berbual panjang dengan Sr. Tuan Haji Tamzil Munir, Pengarah PFI, Pejabat Pembangunan UiTM semasa dalam pulang dari KPT ke UiTM kerana kami menaiki kenderaan yang sama. Satu nasihat yang memberikan beliau dan memberikan kesan kepada saya ialah berkerja kerana Allah. Jangan takut kepada selain daripada Allah kerana semua itu makhluk Allah belaka. Tuhan melihat apa yang kita buat dimanapun kita berada, justeru sebagai hambanya kita kena wajib menyerahkan seluruh kekuatan, tenaga dan pemikiran untuk berkerja sekuat mungkin tanpa mengira waktu dan niatkan kerana Allah untuk menjalankan tugas yang diamanahkan kepada kita. Ia akan menjadi ibadah dan pekerjaan kita akan diberkati. Demikianlah nasihat beliau.

Tambah beliau lagi "...kita kena bekerja secara profesional. Dalam dunia pembinaan, kualiti binaan perlu dijaga dan diperhalusi sehalus-halus mungkin. Kita perlu tegur kontraktor jika mereka mengabaikan kualiti..." Saya berazam untuk mengikuti nasihat beliau itu demi meneruskan sebuah perjalanan hidup untuk agama, bangsa dan negara.

Bill Gates Was Speechless When A Microsoft Manager Compared Windows To A Toilet

by Matt Rosoff | Mar. 12, 2012, 8:56 PM

Hillel Cooperman quit Microsoft about five years ago to found his own software design company, Jackson Fish Market.

Today, Cooperman described a meeting in 2003, when he tried to convince Bill Gates that different software features could have different types of designs.

As an engineer, Gates had a firm belief that interface design should be as consistent as possible -- why rewrite menus in a bunch of different ways? It was a waste of time and code.

Cooperman believed that people aren't that robotic and can handle variations. It's more important to make sure the overall user experience feels good.

So he told Gates, "A shower, a toilet, and a water fountain all have mechanisms to control water flow, places where the water comes out, some sort of porcelain basin to hold the water, and a drain, but we don’t combine them into one thing to reduce their learning curve."

Gates paused for what seemed like forever.

Then he finally came out with, "That's just rude."

Cooperman lost the battle, but Microsoft has since come around to the idea that user experience can be tailored for different functions -- just look at the way Windows 8 combines two totally different interfaces in the same product.

Full credit to Cooperman for bringing Bill Gates to a near speechless state. In his earlier days, Gates was known for his blunt opinions, including favorites like "that's the stupidest f-ing idea I've ever heard."

Read the whole blog post here.

Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

(Sources - http://www.businessinsider.com)

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work

By Andy Baio March 13, 2012 | 3:44 pm |

While most of the tech world was partying at South by Southwest in Austin yesterday, Yahoo announced it was filing a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 patents from their 1,000+ patent warehouse.

I’m no fan of Facebook, but this is a deplorable move. It’s nothing less than extortion, expertly timed during the SEC-mandated quiet period before Facebook’s IPO. It’s an attack on invention and the hacker ethic.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a small supporting role in this story. None of the patents I co-invented are cited in the Yahoo complaint, but a handful of applications I worked on with Yahoo were granted patents, weaponized now to use against people like me.

Here’s how the process worked, in my case:

In 2005, Yahoo acquired Upcoming.org, the collaborative events calendar I’d launched two years before.

Back then, the Web 1.0 behemoth seemed on the verge of turning things around. A series of smart moves — high-profile hires, the Oddpost and Flickr acquisitions, the launch of the Yahoo! Developer Network, and their Research Lab — was breathing new life into things. Two months after we were acquired, Del.icio.us and Webjay joined us in the Yahoo fold.

After we moved in, we were asked to file patents for anything and everything we’d invented while working on Upcoming.org. Every Yahoo employee was encouraged to participate in their “Patent Incentive Program,” with sizable bonuses issued to everyone who took the time to apply.

Now, I’ve always hated the idea of software patents. But Yahoo assured us that their patent portfolio was a precautionary measure, to defend against patent trolls and others who might try to attack Yahoo with their own holdings. It was a cold war, stockpiling patents instead of nuclear arms, and every company in the valley had a bunker full of them.

Against my better judgement, I sat in a conference room with my co-founders and a couple of patent attorneys and told them what we’d created. They took notes and created nonsensical documents that I still can’t make sense of. In all, I helped Yahoo file eight patent applications.

Years after I left I discovered to my dismay that four of them were granted by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office.

I thought I was giving them a shield, but turns out I gave them a missile with my name permanently engraved on it.

I was naive. Even if the original intention was truly defensive, a patent portfolio can easily change hands, and a company can even more easily change its mind. Since I left in 2007, Yahoo has had three CEOsand a board overhaul.

The scary part is that even the most innocuous patent can be used to crush another’s creativity. One of the patents I co-invented is so abstract, it could not only cover Facebook’s News Feed, but virtually any activity feed. It puts into very sharp focus the trouble with software patents: Purposefully vague wording invites broad interpretation.

In their complaint, Yahoo alleges that Facebook’s News Feed violates “Dynamic page generator,” apatent filed in 1997 by their former CTO related to the launch of My Yahoo, one of the first personalized websites. Every web application, from Twitter to Pinterest, could be said to violate this patent. This is chaos.

Software patents should be abolished, plain and simple. Software is already covered by copyright, making patent protection unnecessary.

Ask any programmer — developing software is as creative and unique as writing poetry.

Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook is an insult to the talented engineers who filed patents with the understanding they wouldn’t be used for evil. Betraying that trust won’t be forgotten, but I doubt it matters anymore. Nobody I know wants to work for a company like that.

I’m embarrassed by the patents I filed, but I’ve learned from my mistake. I’ll never file a software patent again, and I urge you to do the same.

For years, Yahoo was mostly harmless. Management foibles and executive shuffles only hurt shareholders and employee morale. But in the last few years, the company’s incompetence has begun to hurt the rest of us. First, with the wholesale destruction of internet history, and now by attacking younger, smarter companies.

Yahoo tried and failed, over and over again, to build a social network that people would love and use. Unable to innovate, Yahoo is falling back to the last resort of a desperate, dying company: litigation as a business model.

That it’s Yahoo makes it even sadder. The complaint isn’t really wrong when it asserts that: “For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo! got there first.”

But being first with something generic that would have been invented by someone (like the wheel) — as opposed to something few could have imagined (like the Segway) — is a big difference.

Ask any start-up CEO — execution is everything.

As Facebook founder Jesse Eisenberg cum Mark Zuckerberg says in The Social Network, “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”

Illustration: From one of the patents I helped Yahoo obtain.

Homepage photo: Schill/Flickr

Andy Baio is a writer and tech entrepreneur in Portland, OR. He blogs at Waxy.org, and writes the Wired column "Codeword" every Tuesday. He works with Expert Labs, helped build Kickstarter, founded Upcoming, made the album Kind of Bloop, and other stuff too.
Follow @waxpancake on Twitter.

(Sources - http://www.wired.com)

As Dell Shifts To Software & Services, Announces Plans To Buy SonicWall

Computer manufacturer Dell announced today that it has signed a definitive agreement that will allow it to acquire SonicWall, a security vendor specializing in firewalls, network security and data protection. The move will help Dell round out its security solutions portfolio, the company reports, which currently includes Dell’s SecureWorks security services, cloud security solutions, data encryption solutions and Dell KACE vulnerability and patch management.

The acquisition is more than just a “beefing up” of Dell’s security line up, though – it’s representative of a shift in Dell’s overall strategy as a technology firm.

The move comes shortly after last month’s announcement regarding the formation of a new Software Group within the company, designed to enhance Dell’s solutions capabilities. Dell hired John Swainson to serve as President of the Group. Swainson, whose background includes over 26 years at IBM, and 4 years as the CEO of CA, Inc., took the position on March 5th – only a week ago. And boy, did he move fast.

Although terms of the deal were not disclosed, SonicWall is no small potatoes. In 2010, it was bought for around $717 million led by private-equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC.

Founded in 1991, SonicWall got its start selling Ethernet cards, hubs and other networking equipment. It later shifted into firewalls and VPN appliances for the SMB market and went public on NASDAQ back in 1999. Today, SonicWall has 300,000 customers in 50 countries, 950 employees and a channel program with 15,000 retailers, which Dell plans to integrate into its own PartnerDirect program. When the deal closes in Dell’s Q2 2013 (early August), resellers from both Dell and SonicWall will be about to sell the enhanced security line up.

SonicWall also has over 130 patent apps, with 64 issued to date, which Dell rightly states as another reason why the acquisition has value.

Explains Swainson in a release, “SonicWALL gives Dell access to unique intellectual property resources and technology that position us well in fast growing parts of the software security business.”

Dell also told Wall St. this morning that SonicWall had approximately $260 million in revenue over the last 12 months, and it expects the acquisitive to be accretive to earnings in the second half of its fiscal 2013.

The acquisition, beyond being an attempt to beef up Dell’s security portfolio, is also indicative of a bigger shift for the computer maker – a move to software and services boosted by acquisitions, with a special focus on business customers. The change is reflective of an overall shift in computing, and especially in personal computing, which is a decreasing part of PC manufacturers’ business, and Dell’s in particular. In Dell’s last earnings call, the company noted that in its consumer business, revenue was down 8% year-over-year and client growth was down 6% in the same time frame.

Companies that once made their bread-and-butter putting PC’s in every home – Dell, HP, and IBM, for example – are now moving towards high-margin software and services to make up for the fact that consumers are now using mobile devices and Apple computers in increasing numbers

(Sources - http://techcrunch.com)