intodimensions.com

Gulf News:

Mosques in Abu Dhabi emirate will go high-tech with the introduction of an electronic network system, the National Consultative Council (NCC) was informed yesterday.

The implementation of the network system, which include electronic screens displaying prayer and prayer call (Azan) timings, titles of Friday sermons and Islamic lectures held at various places in the emirate, is currently under way, a NCC committee said in a report.

The report was prepared in consultation with the General Authority of Islamic and Awqaf Affairs.

The authority will also introduce MP3 devices for recording Friday sermons and lectures, as well as store them in electronic archives which will be available on the internet. A hotline will be available to report poor maintenance and any other malfunction in mosques across the emirate. It will also allow public to register their suggestions and lodge complaints.

To help fully implement the new electronic network system, special training sessions will be held for the employees of the authority and mosques, including prayer leaders (imams) and prayer callers (muezzins), the council was informed.

The report was reviewed during a debate on the poor conditions and maintenance of mosques.

Members participating in the debate voiced concern about the condition of many mosques saying that situation came about due to lack of attention from authorities concerned.

Member Hadhir Al Muhairi said: “Maintenance and cleaning in mosques, particularly those temporary wooden mosques, is a big problem that has to be addressed on a priority basis.”

Gaith Hamel Al Gaith, another member, regretted that almost no UAE nationals are employed to manage mosque affairs.

He said: “The UAE national is missing in the administration of mosques and other religious institutes. There are no national imams, muezzins and religious scholars. We need to set up an institute to train UAE nationals lead prayers in our mosques. We need to train them as muezzins and lecturers.”

The house yesterday concluded its debate by calling for the establishment of a local Islamic affairs council for fatwa guidelines, mosques’ management, assisting local awqaf department and training programmes.

The council further recommended the local government to provide land and licences to UAE nationals for their encouragement of building endowment buildings for charity.

The house called for the replacement of all wooden and temporary mosques with new and permanent buildings.

Budget is Dh12m
* There are 2,757 mosques in Abu Dhabi.
* The authority manages 1,870 of them, 887 are privately managed and 753 are wooden and temporary structures.
* The budget for these mosques, including salaries, maintenance and affiliated education programmes is Dh12 million.

I wanted to write something myself, but James Turner does it so much better (excuse me James for quoting your entire post, but you did such a good job of writing it):

You know all those nice things I said about the Microsoft Development environment a couple of weeks ago? Well, I still stand by them as a realistic opinion of the quality of the platform for developers. However, today’s news brings the major reason you should run away from depending on Microsoft technology like it had a case of Ebola.

The murmurs and worries about Microsoft’s ongoing patent gossip campaign, which came to a roiling boil with the Novell deal, have ended. Yep, no more rumors, just the plain reality that Microsoft is going to take their portfolio of laughable patents and start sticking it to the open source community legally, as spelled out in the most recent Fortune.

I’m trying really hard to avoid descending into obscenities here. So where-ever you see the * character, feel free to insert your own vulgarities as you see fit. * Microsoft has proved what a * bunch of * they are, and shown their true colors yet again. All the * about their open source lab and the code they were releasing as open source was in the end, just * propaganda, as many of us had suspected. Faced with omens such as Dell selling Linux on the desktop, they drew their last major card from the FUD deck, and hope to steal the pot.

And this is why you should use Microsoft technologies only as a very last resort. Because they don’t play nice with others. Sure, all companies are competitive and will do pretty much anything they can do to make a buck, but Microsoft is taking things to a new level. What you as a customer are being told, in essence, is that if you use any technology but Microsoft’s (or those of a company paying blood-money to Microsoft), you are likely to be sued. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to do business with people who threaten and extort me.

I suspect that this is going to be a tipping point on a number of fronts. Firstly, if Microsoft does more than bluster, they will set in motion events which will either end with the abolishment of software patents, or the descent of the computer industry into a morass of intellectual property shenanigans that will cripple it.

Secondly, this is either going to be IBM’s finest hour, or the end of a golden era. It was easy taking on punk SCO, and making them look like fools. Now, rather than fighting the North Vietnamese, they’re facing a direct confrontation with China, to strain an analogy. No one but IBM has anything like the resources to stand toe to toe and lawyer to lawyer with Redmond. But IBM is in a quandary, because if they challenge the Microsoft claims, they’ll also be de facto trashing their own carefully horded cache of software patents. What IBM decides to do will be a very telling sign for how this story will break as a whole.

Finally, this is the do or die moment for the FOSS community. Forget whether GPL 3 is better than GPL 2, or whether it’s free as in beer or free as in freedom, or all the other silly * that has been fracturing the community for years. There’s a wolf knocking at the door, and everyone who ever committed a line of code to a project has a stake in keeping it out. Now will be THE defining moment for Free/Open Source, because if Microsoft prevails, FOSS (at least in America or any country with strong IP ties to the US) will be dead, plain and simple. There’s no way that non-commercial projects will have the resources to check thousands and thousands of bogus patents for possible infringement.

I have no idea how the end game plays out on this. The recent Supreme Court ruling on the ‘obviousness’ of patents gives me hope for that branch, at least. However, I don’t trust the collection of fools we call our legislative branch not to screw it up royally with new laws. Just think how well the DMCA has been going so far. Will other companies band together with the FOSS community to fight Microsoft? After all, if those patents stand, those companies are in as much danger as any open source project. Will we end up mired in another five or ten years of legal wranglings? Pam Jones could have a job for life at Groklaw.

At the end, there’s only one thing left to say. For shame Microsoft, for shame. You’ve twisted competition into a thuggish debacle that ranks right up there with the worst of the great robber barons. How ironic that Bill Gates is trying to reinvent himself as the great philanthropist. Andrew Carnegie took much the same route late in his life, as if it could wash away his sins. We can only hope that in a few years, Steve Ballmer will look as much a fool as Daryl McBride does today.