Tuan Yang di-Pertua,
Ahli-ahli Yang Berhormat,
(Sumber - http://tunfaisal.blogspot.com)
"....semua makhluk ciptaan Tuhan samada manusia,binatang,tumbuhan, alam semulajadi dan sebagainya,saling perlu memerlukan,saling bantu-membantu kerana mereka berkait,terikat antara satu sama lain dalam satu kitaran yang berhubungan. Justeru, jangan diputuskan ikatan itu, kelak, seluruh kitaran akan musnah..." Ahmad Rais Johari
Naib juara di belakang UPM dari segi kutipan pingat MASUM 2012
KOTA SAMARAHAN: Kontinjen Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) hampir menyapu bersih juara keseluruhan dalam 14 acara yang dipertandingkan apabila muncul juara keseluruhan dalam sembilan acara pada Karnival Sukan MASUM 2012 (Fasa 1) yang melabuhkan tirainya pada 15 April 2012.
Walau bagaimanapun, dalam statistik punggutan pingat keseluruhan, UiTM menduduki tangga kedua dengan memunggut 23 emas, 42 perak, 18 gangsa dan meraih 83 pingat keseluruhan.
Mengungguli carta punggutan pingat ialah Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) yang merangkul 35 pingat emas, 13 perak dan 15 gangsa sekali gus membawa balik 63 pingat secara keseluruhannya.
Sebanyak 14 acara membabitkan lapan jenis sukan dipertandingkan pada fasa pertama temasya ini iaitu badminton, catur (lelaki dan wanita), futsal (lelaki dan wanita), memanah (lelaki dan wanita), renang, skuasy (lelaki dan wanita), tenis (lelaki dan wanita) dan tenpin boling (lelaki dan wanita).
“Kita amat gembira kerana berjaya membawa balik sembilan trofi juara dalam pelbagai acara yang dipertandingkan. Kejayaan itu adalah bukti komitmen serta semangat juang yang ditunjukkan oleh semua atlet sepanjang temasya kali ini,” ujar Ketua Kontinjen UiTM, Mohd Fisol Saud ditemui selepas majlis penutupan temasya di Dewan Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra (DeTAR), Unimas semalam.
Mohd Fisol berkata kejayaan cemerlang itu pasti akan menjadi dorongan utama buat atlet-atlet UiTM bagi menghadapi cabaran fasa kedua kejohanan yang bakal diadakan di Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM), Johor pada Julai depan.
UiTM mengekalkan reputasi sebagai gergasi sukan Institut Pengajian Tinggi Awam (IPTA) dengan muncul juara acara catur lelaki dan wanita, futsal lelaki dan wanita, memanah (wanita), skuasy (lelaki), tenis (lelaki dan wanita) dan boling wanita.
“Kita yakin para atlet akan terus meningkatkan usaha mereka dalam menghadapi cabaran lebih getir pada MASUM Fasa II di Johor, Julai nanti,” katanya.
Sementara itu, UPM berjaya mengungguli acara badminton, skuasy wanita dan memanah lelaki manakala Universiti Malaya (UM) menguasai acara boling lelaki dan renang.
Tuan rumah, UNIMAS berjaya meraih satu pingat emas, satu perak dan satu gangsa dalam acara boling beregu lelaki dan All Events serta acara renang 100 meter kuak lentang wanita.
Berucap merasmikan penutupan temasya itu, Naib Canselor Unimas, Datuk Dr Khairuddin Abdul Hamid melahirkan rasa bangga atas kejayaan Unimas yang diberi peluang sebagai tuan rumah temasya sukan terbabit.
By Thor Olavsrud
In the 25 years since Richard Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License, free and open source software (FOSS) have become pervasive in computing: Linux, Apache HTTP Server, MySQL and more can be found in large numbers of enterprises across the globe. And open source is now increasingly undergirding cloud computing as well.
"Open source is certainly at the foundation in terms of building out cloud technologies," says Byran Che, senior director of product management at Red Hat and responsible for its cloud operations offerings, management software and Red Hat Enterprise MRG, (Red Hat's Messaging, Real-time and Grid platform). "If you take a look at market share in the server space, as you look at traditional data centers, about 70 percent are running on the Windows platform and about 30 percent are running Linux. As you take a look at what operating systems people are choosing to build applications on in the cloud, the ratio flips completely."
The reasoning is simple, Che says: With a fresh start, you get to build a whole new architecture from the ground up, and open source gives you the best value.
"You can't get to the Amazon scale or the Google scale and pay the license fees," he says.
Cost isn't the only thing giving the open source model an edge in the cloud space. Che also points to the capability to create a community around a project and thus drive rapid innovation.
"That's what open source is really good at," he says. "Amazon, Google, Facebook, all the people building out all these cloud applications, infrastructure and services, they're all doing it on open source. The fact that they're using open source software is the only way they can innovate at the pace they need to. They can't wait for their vendors to go through the development cycle."
But what exactly is open source doing in the cloud? Stallman, for whom free software is intensely political (he disdains the term open source), claims that cloud computing—specifically Software as a Service (SaaS)—cannot be free by definition.
"SaaS and proprietary software lead to similar harmful results, but the causal mechanisms are different," Stallman wrote in an article published by the Boston Review in 2010. "With proprietary software, the cause is that you have and use a copy which is difficult or illegal to change. With SaaS, the cause is that you use a copy you don't have."
"Many free software supporters assume that the problem of SaaS will be solved by developing free software for servers," he adds. "For the server operator's sake, the programs on the server had better be free; if they are proprietary, their owners have power over the server. That's unfair to the operator, and doesn't help you at all. But if the programs on the server are free, that doesn't protect you as the server's user from the effects of SaaS. They give freedom to the operator, but not to you."
Stallman's contention has its roots in the philosophical divide between free software and open source software. The open source movement, Stallman says, is a development methodology with a practical focus on making the source code available. The free software movement, on the other hand, promotes an ethical stance on how users should be able to interact with their software.
For Stallman, free software must provide users with four essential freedoms:
While the open source definition and the free software definition are nearly identical, they seem to come apart at the seams when it comes to cloud.
"Releasing the server software source code does benefit the community: Suitably skilled users can set up similar servers, perhaps changing the software," Stallman wrote. "But none of these servers would give you control over computing you do on it, unless it's your server. The rest would all be SaaS. SaaS always subjects you to the power of the server operator, and the only remedy is, Don't use SaaS!. Don't use someone else's server to do your own computing on data provided by you."
Meanwhile, the open source world is working feverishly across the cloud stack—Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), SaaS, Data Storage as a Service (DaaS)—and in cloud management.
Che says Red Hat believes in the open cloud, which he says has seven defining properties:
"One of the areas where we need an open cloud is to give you the ability to have interoperability and portability across different clouds," Che says. "I should be able to manage a hybrid cloud that spans across all these different technologies."
One big step in that interoperability and portability direction is Apache Deltacloud, a project initiated by Red Hat in 2009 and then contributed to the Apache Software Foundation, where it gained Top-Level Project (TLP) status in 2010. With Deltacloud, the Apache Software Foundation is attempting to provide an answer to a problem that hasn't much reared its head yet, but is likely to become pressing in coming years: cloud lock-in.
"The biggest challenge is that there's so much happening in the cloud that users are so busy figuring out how best to use cloud that lock-in is still not a big concern for them," says David Lutterkort, principal software engineer at Red Hat and chair of the Apache Deltacloud project. "It's not that high on peoples' lists yet."
Deltacloud is an API that abstracts differences between clouds, enabling management of resources in different IaaS clouds using a single API. It can essentially be implemented as a wrapper around a large number of clouds, freeing users of cloud computing from dealing with the particulars of each cloud's API.
Standards bodies have also coalesced to create open and interoperable standards. In 2009, leading standards development organizations (SDOs) to form Cloud Standards Coordination, intended to coordinate the work of the various SDOs developing cloud standards. Members include the Cloud Security Alliance, Cloud Standards Customer Council, Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF), the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Open Grid Forum (OGF), Object Management Group (OMG), Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information and Standards (OASIS), Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), The Open Group, Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) and TM Forum.
Lutterkort is also a board member of the DMTF, which, among other things, is working on a standard called the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI), which would create a standard API that any cloud could use.
Project Aeolus is another forward-looking open source project, driven by Red Hat, that essentially seeks to build an open source cloud broker. A stand-alone project, Aeolus offers a single, consistent set of tools to build and manage organized groups of virtual machines across clouds. It consists of the following:
Red Hat is far from alone in contributing to the open cloud. Rackspace Cloud and NASA have made waves with the OpenStack IaaS cloud computing project, also made available through the Apache Software Foundation. The OpenStack project's mission is to give any organization the capability to create and offer cloud computing services running on standard hardware.
(Sources - http://www.cio.com)

The social network announced Monday that it is buying photo-sharing service Instagram, a two year-old San Francisco-based company that has attracted more than 30 million users, for $1 billion in a cash and stock deal.
The deal marks an attempt by Facebook to maintain dominance in an area that has proved one of its stickiest and most popular features: photo sharing. At the end of last year, Facebook users were uploading more than 250 million photos a day, on average, according to Facebook's filing with the SEC. The social network's members also spend nearly a fifth of their time on the site browsing photos, a 2011 comScore study found.
Instagram has, in just two short years, developed an offering that has proved attractive and compelling to a diverse group of users, and Facebook no doubt hopes to capitalize on the photo sharing app's expertise, particularly in mobile.
In an update posted on his Facebook profile, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained that the "talented team" at Instagram will be joining Facebookto help the social network add new features to its photo-sharing offerings.
"For years, we've focused on building the best experience for sharing photos with your friends and family," the Facebook CEO explained. "Now, we'll be able to work even more closely with the Instagram team to also offer the best experiences for sharing beautiful mobile photos with people based on your interests."
Zuckerberg also wrote, "We will try to learn from Instagram's experience to build similar features into our other products. At the same time, we will try to help Instagram continue to grow by using Facebook's strong engineering team and infrastructure."
(Source - http://www.huffingtonpost.com)
When it comes to wiring RJ45 data jacks and plugs, ANSI, TIA and EIA agree on two wiring standards: T568A and T568B. While these standards are very similar and can oftentimes be chosen according to nothing more than the installer’s preference, there are a few significant differences between the two, and it’s very important to know about these before you begin to build – or expand – your network.
What do the T568A and T568B wiring schemes look like?
Even though backward compatible with both one-pair and two-pair USOC wiring schemes, T568A has been largely superseded by the more up-to-date T568B. T568B and has become – overall – the most widely chosen wiring schematic because it matches AT&T’s old 258A color code, but at the same time accommodates for current and future needs. In addition, T568B offers backward compatibility with USOC, though for only one pair.
Why is it so important that cabling updates and additions be made in accordance with the network’s original wiring standard? Continuity. It’s simple, really… if the wires don’t match up color-to-color and stripe-to-stripe when plugs and jacks are connected, data signals just won’t transfer.
There are rare instances when T568A-wired components need to be connected to T568B-wired components, and in these cases, a crossover cable (a patch cord that has an A-configured plug at one end, and a B-configured plug at the other) is used to smoothly transition between standards without compromising data.
(Sources - http://cableorganizer.com)