Getting Close

It's only week before Software Freedom Day !! so we the organizing team made a meeting yesterday discussing what we had done so far and what we should be doing in the coming period. The meeting actually started with bad news about our funding and suddenly we found ourselves having very little time to finish many things, any way after 2 hours of discussion, we found our way out and we made a work plan, each team had a task to finish by night.
Thank God we were able to finish on time because we really want this event to be the best and the biggest in Alexandria.

The speakers in our event differ in their knowledge and backgrounds, we have Eng.Mohamed Sayed from Yahoo!, Abderlahman El KAfil from Morocco, Ahmed Mekkawy from EGLUG and others more.
we have computer security presentations, linux (day to day usage), Open Source and GIS and more, we have also a presentation about Wikipedia along with a stand for the Arabic Wikipedia Team.

So why not register and come with us??
Register here and have the chance of winning one or more of our prizes.

The program is really nice and rich ... check it here

Hungry Nukes

All over history, man developed weapons to protect himself and his country from others, that's reasonable and even nukes made sense when they were first produced may be because conventional weapons at that early time were not sometimes capable of causing enough destruction and death to enemy targets, also attacking cities and civilians by savage force was a daily act done by aircrafts, destroyers, artillery and infantry.

Now at the 21st century, every one knows that there is no “right way to use nukes” because when fired must cause massive death tolls and great environmental damages to targeted areas, despite all of that countries are still spending trillions of dollars making nuclear and biological weapon, without counting money spent on transporting, securing and maintenance of already existing nukes. Reports say that the US spent 5.5 trillion $ on making nukes while it has been estimated that fixing every thing – I mean: poverty and illiteracy elimination , improving health care, providing clean water and shelters, debt relief of developing countries and creating sustainable energy resources – on this planet would cost only 260 billion $ annually for 10 years !!

Leaving these stunning economic facts about nuclear weapons and thinking about the security issues we find that some countries have nuclear weapons though they lie in “very hot spots” like Pakistan, Israel and countries which were part of the Soviet Union, these countries along with others were able to build hundreds of nuclear war heads, they surely have good security measures to protect their war heads, but who can guarantee that none of the hundreds would fall in the hands of any extremist or terrorist group? Imagine that Taliban was able to reach a nuclear facility in Pakistan or steal a nuke war head, they won't hesitate to blow it up any where in the world. Imagine an extremist government reached power in Israel that already kills civilians with internationally forbidden weapons. For previous Soviet Union nations, I will not say imagine because it's already known that there are hundreds of missing missiles and nukes.

This doesn't mean that other great powers like the US and Russia have the right to have nuclear weapons, they should stop making nukes and also follow a scheduled disarming process to demolish the existence of nuclear weapons, the problem that you cant' just get rid of a nuke by blowing it up and the disarming operations cost much of money, but we should do it fast or one day our life will be like one of these movies where people live in crumbled cities and starving to death but they have nukes at their backyard.

Piracy

How many times have you payed for a downloaded application or operating system? Never, then welcome aboard you are a Pirate, if you have uploaded files that others downloaded then you are a Captain !

Copyright laws protect software from piracy, but in some countries piracy rate is up to 95% of all running software, this due to legislation that is not aware enough and leaves pirates unleashed or in best conditions leaves back doors opened for them.

Losses are estimated by billions for software companies and stores which lose markets due to their software being accessed through the Internet, United States comes on the top followed by China, Russia, India, France and United Kingdom, they lost more than $27 billion in 2008.

Although many countries cooperate fighting piracy, still global piracy rate rose in 2008 from %38 to %41, but looking at the bright side, piracy rates dropped in little bit more than half of 110 studied countries and rose only in 16 countries. Egypt has done well as it dropped from %65 to %59 in the period between 2004 – 2008.

After that cops talk, let's be honest, is piracy so bad? No. Well, we know it violates copyrights and steal others' work but it doesn't destroy markets as we claimed earlier simply because these markets never existed from the beginning; no one in a third- world country would pay 300$ for Windows Vista Ultimate when that person lives on less than 2 dollars a day.

From that we find that piracy destroyed no markets, contrary they made companies and software more famous in parts of the world where these companies couldn't reach the public. This is not defending piracy but in a no piracy world - which is almost impossible, companies will be making little extra money, but millions of people will have no access to technology, then is it a Robin Hood act? No , it's still a theft and must be stopped and contained as much as it could be, but in a way that guarantees copyrights for producers and cheap access to technology for public. Companies should contribute more in Open Source communities to provide basic software for free or at least adjust prices in countries according to local standards of living.

Tell us what you think about piracy and what is the best way to fight it without depriving the poor from accessing technology and still not destroying IT industries?

IT Making Money

IT companies like all companies have one target which is making money but in IT field there are many ways to make money, some of these ways are traditional like selling licensed software and hardware and some are not like advertising and producing open source software, the common thing between them is that they all make huge money.

Microsoft, Apple, hp and Dell all follow the traditional way and it has kept them the highest profit making companies – though hp has highest revenues, Microsoft has highest profits. These companies are rather old, they produce laptops, operating systems, video games, smart phones and everything you can imagine. Yes they make big money but still not so popular especially with people that care about Open Source and freedom of choice, you may not feel it but these companies collaborate with each other to keep the market and IT media masses under their control, they issue implicit and explicit agreements to support each other's software and hardware. Example of this is hp and Dell selling laptops with a pre-installed version of Vista. These marketing behaviors made them face many lawsuits, Apple was sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for trying to stop and remove online forums discussing iPhone. Microsoft also was fined $794 million for including Windows Media Player with Windows XP installation, imposing it on the user instead of letting him choose the media player he wants to use.

Leaving the giants and heading to the new stormers like Yahoo!, Google, MySpace and Facebook. All are less than 15 years old and all represent the ideal advertising model of making money. Google alone made about $10,491 billion in 2006 only by ads on their pages, this money represents 99% of total revenues of the company, this proves that ads can make big money.

The main idea in the advertising scheme is providing users with free or cheap - charge services and keeping them attached to them all day, then fill the site with tons of ads, this approach always needs more pages to support more ads and make more money, these pages can be applications, news or search results with ads relevant to your keywords. It also needs the company to spread its name in any way by producing anything: toolbars, gadgets and mail services. Attaching users to pages is taking a new approach that depends on making the page more personal as your own: like iGoogle, My Yahoo! and of course profiles on social networks. Any way, this is highly criticized for damaging the users' social interaction in real life, making them addicted to the Internet and wasting their time.

When we discuss making money using Open Source this does not mean that all Open Source applications are produced to make money, some of them are produced by normal people who have the passion to help others by coding.

Anyway, companies still can make money from Open Source. It may seem impossible but when you think deeply, you find that it might be the easiest way of making money, you can simply sell that software, the GNU license under which most open source projects are released doesn't forbidden selling the project, but to make people pay for what they can get for free, you have to provide support and packaging where you sell collection of configured software that can be installed easily with their manuals on CDs. The software can also be used as an advertising tool, you can place ads on the project's page on the Internet or use it to promote another version that has extra features but is not free.

What is this label?

In this label, I will put articles that I wrote in Aimun 09 newsletter, hope you all like them.
AIMUN is Alexandria International Model Of United Nations, it is a conference held in bib Alex every summer where young people discuss some issues and play as decision makers and head of states.
I wrote few articles in the NewsLetter that belongs to the event.

Virtualization

To understand the main concept of virtualization, we will use a real – life example:
Presume you have four different sized people who want to go to work, you can get each one of them a vehicle that suits his route and size, this is going to cost you much and also each car will be used for a little time and then left parking. What if you put them all in one vehicle each of them with his seat that suits him and in a way or another let each "virtualizes" that the vehicle is all his. He can use the radio, the air condition and everything else in the vehicle.

Well, the second way is surely better as it is cheaper, faster and gets all what the vehicle can provide. This second way is "Virtualization" except that we will replace the four different sized men with four different operating systems that we want to use and the vehicle with a computer that has virtualization environment so each operating system sees the resources which we demonstrated as the radio and the air condition as if they were only for it.

At this point, a question has jumped into your head: How one radio will be used at the same time by four men? Well this what virtualization software does, it manages and organizes this operation. Consider it as a layer that creates four virtual tuners one for each man so when a man changes the station, the "one" radio will use the "one" Antenna to get "different" station that the man will hear on his own "headphone" leaving the other men undisturbed.

Another question: How one antenna will deliver different stations? That's the hardware part of virtualization. Instead of buying four antennas we will use only one but each man will have his own amplifier that will enable him to get the station he tuned to. If not convinced, think of it as one router that serves many users each using the internet in a completely different way.

It may come across your mind that creating the virtual tuners and the headphones is going to cost more; surely you will change your mind when you know that with no virtualization each computer will be using only 10 to 15 percent of its processing capacity and still consuming the same energy as a full used computer.

For normal user, this doesn't mean much but for IT companies and web hosting servers, this means saving millions of dollars. It is enough to know that using virtualization, each 10 up to 20 servers can be replaced with only one server. This not only saves money and time to buy and install servers but also reduces size of data centers where servers are located.

With the ever increase in data stored on web and in data bases, virtualization will be a must in order to contain all data in a reasonable cost. IT giants like Sun, VMware, Microsoft and many got that point and they are competing who can provide the cheapest and fastest virtualization technology.

Just Started !!

First Meeting of Software Freedom Day organizers

The time was 10:00 am and the place was one of the classes of Computer Science Department (CSD), Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, the event was the kick off meeting of Software Freedom Day @ Alexandria University.

Let's talk about the event it self before we talk about the meeting, it is a two week event that is intended to start at 1st September 2009. The event targets every one, its main goal is not only to introduce Free Software to people but also to give them the real life experience gained by others who started using Free Software and joined Open Source communities along ago.

The Event will mainly consist of presentations and demos covering wide range of topics,
stands providing on site information and installtion, study groups and contests along with other things, so it seems that we have lots of things to do in the coming month, and you have the chance to enjoy two weeks of Free Software Mania.

Back to the meeting, it lasted for about two hours and was started by each one introducing him / her self, then Ahmed Saeed who is the head of coordination team told us everything about the event and explained to us the tasks we should be doing for the coming month. Teams were created and will be led by four coordinators: Ahmed Abd Al Aziz, Asmaa El Sayed, Yasmin Mohammed and Abd Rahman Gamal who all have previous experience in organizing many similar events.

Come and join us, you will enjoy your time and get great knowledge which may change your life forever or at least the technology you use in your daily life.

You can find more information here and you can join our group on facebook.

Check the blog and the facebook group for updated news about the event, See you all there !!