http://mnorid.tigblog.org/ What's on the minds of young leaders from around the globe? en-us http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/399567
Zimbabwe, Durfur, Somalia, South Africa....our brothas blood is in our hands... when does it all end? When does the violence stop? When do we start practising Ubuntu that we so religiously preach? When do we go back to the days of our forefathers...when we stood for humanity,when culture made us proud Africans because we embraced every child of the motherland? My heart hurts because we have become inhumane...loving money over people, enriching ourselves and forgetting the citizens of Africa....and then we lobby for a united Africa.....it seems too farfetched a dream. I don't see a united African in my time....and in 2010...well the world cup may be filled with the spirit of Africa, but it will be a spirit of mourning...because until our brothas in Zimbabwe are free...until our sistas in Somalia, Durfar are hungry no more and are victims of rape by rebels no more...until we stop killing each other and untill our leaders refrain from threatening to kill for fraudsters, our hearts will cry our beloved continent. Our ancestors will turn in thier graves in sorrow.....and all that the Mandelas, Kwame Nkrumas, Bikos, hack even Mugabe then, fought for will be but an ideology that was never achieved, a dream that never will.]]> Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:36:00 EDT http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/399567 -26.9666667 31.3166667-26.966666731.3166667 http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/321431 I was born into the land of Jezebel,
in a land rich with resources,
in a land without supply, without quality,
in a land that can feed us all,
in a land that feeds the minority, where the poor get poorer,
in a land where there is enough for all.
in a land where the greedy take all.
I was born into a land of mystery and dreams,
I was born into a land without hope,
in a place with the window to heaven,
in a place with the window to hell,
a place where rivers run deep,
a place where the rivers run dry,
and the grass is green all year.
and the grass is no longer green.
I was born into blackness,
I was born into oppression,
black diamond, black olive,
black man, evil man,
black is my beauty.
black is my curse.
I was born into a land rich with culture,
I was born into a land where culture has divided us,
a place where Ubuntu is the essence of our identity.
a place where Ubuntu is lost, buried with the ancestor.
I was born into the motherland,
I was born into homelessness,
where a mother is mother to all child,
where a mother has no child,
where a father is father to all child,
and a father has no child,
where you are my brother,
where I kill my brother,
and you are my sister,
and I kill my sister,
where colour exists only in the rainbow.
where colour defines who you are.
I was born into a land of peace,
I was born into war, civil war, tribal war, political war,
where my brother is my brother,
where my brother is the opposition,
a land where I plough in unity,
a land where I kill to plough,
in togetherness, in harmony.
where togetherness, harmony does not exist.
I was born into a land that bares food for all,
I was born into a land of hunger and poverty,
a land where the harvest belongs to the people.
a land where the land is too dry to harvest.
I was born into royalty, I am a king
I was born an outcast, I am a shame,
I am a queen, I am a princess,
I am an abomination,
we are all heirs to this land.
I have on right to inheritance.
I was born into a land of possibilities,
I was born into a land of HIV/AIDS
I was born into Africa, the motherland.
I was born into Africa, the motherland.
I am African.
I am African indeed.

Cry The Beloved Country!!!!



]]> Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:34:00 EST http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/321431 -26.9666667 31.3166667-26.966666731.3166667 http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/318633
The eight qualities of a wealthy woman are:

1. Happiness - with what you have, with who you are, with the way you live your life. Happiness is a state of being. Its not something you get, its something you are.
2. Courage - even where there is fear, draw courage from God, from the universe.
3. Generosity - giving to the right person the right thing at the right time, with kindness and without selfish motives.
4. Harmony - with God, with the universe, with nature, with life. Be in agreement with what you fell, interaction between what you think, feel, say, and do.
5. Wisdom - need I say more.
6. Cleanliness - Your body, your room, your mouth (what you say), your mind (what you think).
7. Balance - emotional stability
8. Beauty - inside and out.

And money does not make the list because although it can buy books, it can't buy brains. It can by a bed but not sleep, food but not appetite, amusement but not happiness, a house but not a home, luxuries but not culture, a bible but not heaven.

Isn't it wonderful, the best things in life don't cost a thing!]]> Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:12:00 EST http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/318633 -26.9666667 31.3166667-26.966666731.3166667 http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/251869
For me, there's two side..........Firstly an African is a black man. That is why African-American is synonymous with balck-American, and that is why in most of the career sites in which I have put my CV in will ask me....."Are you: African, White, Colored, Indian, or other (I suppose the other would be asians?). Obviously I wll say African, I'm a blck woman. So there, an African is a black man.

Secondly, an African is a child born into the motherland., who's roots as far as is generations and generations of ancestors is planted in the African soil. That is what an Africa is. Some of the White famers in Zim for example, who's generations were rooted here many years ago. Yes they are products of colonialists but let not man pay for the sin of his forefathers. Only The higher Being can judge right? Can't they call themselves African? A black man was asked once on radio, "What is being African?" He said Africans were balck. Then the radio personality asked him, "but what if you were to move to China and 10 generations down, your childern continue the legacy you started in China. Will they not then be regarded as Chinese?" He said" Not Chinese, citizens of China yes, but not Chinese" He has a point because chinese are not black right?

Anyone with a clear definition of what an African is?

I have concluded that whatever you choose to call yourselves, we are all citizens of the global village and if we can learn to live in harmony and look beyond race, beyond clolour, we will find that there really is enough room for all of us, whether in Africa, America, Europe or Asia, black, white, colored, indiann, chinese or other.]]> Fri, 21 Sep 2007 08:05:00 EDT http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/251869 -26.9666667 31.3166667-26.966666731.3166667 http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/251861
Sometimes I imagine myself having lived in those times..................free from school. School to me is like what a man is to woman...."Can't live with them, can't live without them". I love school, don't get me wrong but yesterday, I almost cursed those settlers who brought it to our motherland. Have you ever stayed up the whole night becuase of this mind-opener? I have, a zillion times! But everytime I have to its like the a new tormenting experience I can never get used to. I stayed up the whole night yesterday busy with one of my never ending school assignments. YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I almost cried....exhaustion, red teary eyes from starring at the computer for to long, it was hellish. The funny thing is I always tell myself after crossnighting, that I'll never do it agian. That I'll try to manage my time better and hopefully never have to experience being drunk without having taken any alcohol...................but what do you know? When I'm swamped with a load of work as I often am, I'm back cursing (well almost...I'm a Christian woman and I try to refrain from negetivisism..[if there is such a word])............anyways as I was saying.......back almost cursing and wishing I was born before the times of the civilisation and colonisation of the motherland.

On the bright side though, I would never have had the opprotunity to Take it Global...so thank God I'm living in this time hey!]]> Fri, 21 Sep 2007 07:46:00 EDT http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/251861 -26.9666667 31.3166667-26.966666731.3166667 http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/244705
When my lecturer gave us this topic to research on I was amazed. Are there really plans to scrap the internet we have come to love and enjoy so much? I couldn't believe it! I didn't even know there was research going on about scraping the net. After researching though i found out the internet really does need fixing and by "scraping it", what they actually mean is "starting on a clean slate" with a safer, more reliable internet. Here's bits of what I found out if anyone is interested.

The internet is one of the most successful inventions in communications history and is used for almost everything, but there is research already going on to scrap it and start on a clean slate. Bloggers across the net are going on and on with worry about “the federal boffins” who want to scrap the internet.

Why start over with a new internet?

It has taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet since UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969. Today users enjoy unlimited access to multimedia services and many corporate enterprises (Google, yahoo, eBay etc) profit from the status quo. The idea of scraping the internet seems unimaginable, absurd even. But the internet has fallen victim of its own success. Its end-to-end principle (smart at the edges and dumb in the middle) has led to its lack of flexibility or intelligence to allow new ideas to be tested and deployed. Typical examples would be how long it took to deploy IPv6, multicast and the very limited deployment of differential qualities of service.

The internet is also a best-effort network which means it is often “broken” and frequently disconnected due to failures in equipment or fragile routing protocols. It’s unreliable and its behavior is unpredictable making it unsuitable for time-critical applications. When the internet was first created it was thought that it could be routinely used for essential services like air-traffic control and remote surgery. This has not happened because the internet turned out to be unreliable and security compromised. "If air-traffic control was carried on the Internet, I, for one, wouldn't fly” says Nick McKeown, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and leader of the Clean Slate project currently being run at Stanford University in the USA. I share his sentiments.

Some of the short comings of the internet are self-evident, such as the plaque of security breaches, spread of worms, and denial of service attacks. It is rampant with malicious users. The intent of data on the internet can be disguised to look as though it was sent for legitimate reasons when actually it is intended to damage the network, spreading viruses or for other malicious activities. There’s no way of knowing exactly whom data comes from because the network’s design makes it very easy to fake any information’s origin. It does not provide some verification mechanism for any data being sent. It is also very easy for hackers to obtain confidential information through the internet as it does not facilitate anonymity where prudent.

The internet was primarily designed for computers in fixed location and is thus ill-suited to support mobile end-users. Identity and location is represented in one entity, the actual computer (IP Address) and there is no representation for the real end system: the human users. This makes supporting mobility difficult. As result wireless broadband users accessing the internet on their laptops are limited to a certain radius, beyond which, they are cut off. There is no smooth handover as with cell phones.

The real end system on the internet is the user, not the physical computer. A user has a name, an identity number and a physical address. The address changes when a user moves to another town, but the name and identity number remain the same. The IP address, used for connectivity is the equivalent of the physical address. Connecting to an IP address, which changes, means that mobility of the end system (the user) is not supported. The connection should be to the identity number which does not change and thus supports mobility.

The greatest concern of the internet is that it does not ensure quality of service, QoS. The reliability of packet delivery is hard to improve with the internet’s current architecture. It is prone to access link failures, routing failures (security, configuration, convergence, and multipath), congestion control failures and many other technical problems. From the user’s perspective dominant failures include out of date email addresses, broken links, misleading urls and/or unauthenticated data, unusable or unreliable email due to spam, etc.

With all these problems currently overwhelming the internet, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.

One challenge in rebuilding the internet, however, dealing with resistance to change due to the current internet’s commercial success. The new internet will have to be as beneficial to all users as it is today. Industry must play a bigger role in defining the new internet, and, with law enforcement bound to make its needs for wiretapping known, the users’ right to privacy must not be compromised.

Research Projects currently underway

The National Science Foundation (NSF) wants to build an experimental research network known as the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, and is funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND.

Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the universities pursuing individual projects. Other government agencies, including the Defence Department, have also been exploring the concept.

The European Union has also backed research on such initiatives, through a program known as Future Internet Research and Experimentation, or FIRE.

A new network could run parallel with the current Internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture. These clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and aren't expected to be deployed for another 10 or 15 years. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2007, Guru Parulkar, who will become executive director of Stanford's initiative after heading NSF's clean-slate programs, estimated that GENI alone could cost $350 million, while government, university and industry spending on the individual projects could collectively reach $300 million. Spending so far has been in the tens of millions of dollars. Replacing all the software and hardware deep in the legacy systems could take billions of dollars too.


References

Whitepaper, Clean Slate Design for the Internet. [online] http://cleanslate.stanford.edu/CleanSlateWhitepaperV2.pdf. [Lasted accessed 01 July 2007]

Raj Jain, Internet 3.0, [online] http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/talks/internet3.htm. [Lasted accessed 01 July 2007]

Scott Shenker, ‘Rethinking the Internet Architecture’, [online] http://cleanslate.stanford.edu/past_seminars.php, [Lasted accessed 01 July 2007]
http://www.geni.net/research.html. [Lasted accessed 01 July 2007]

NSF budget report, http://www.nanoscience.gatech.edu/zlwang/news/news/NSF.pdf, 5 Feb 2007

]]> Thu, 30 Aug 2007 09:02:00 EDT http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/244705 -26.9666667 31.3166667-26.966666731.3166667 http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/243347
Be happy, enjoy life's every moment as if it were the last. No fuming and freting, just tranquility. serenity, peace of mind, joy and happiness, sunshine always.]]> Thu, 23 Aug 2007 19:45:00 EDT http://mnorid.tigblog.org/post/243347 -26.9666667 31.3166667-26.966666731.3166667