Malaysia year 2016 national and state public holidays announced

The official 2016 national and state public holidays in Malaysia has been announced by Cabinet, Constitution and Inter-Government Relation Division (BKPP), Prime Minister Department.

There are 14 days of national holiday, and 3 of them fall on Sunday and another 3 fall on Saturday. Most of the states will have around 4 state holidays in addition to the national holidays.

 

Chinese New Year falls on Monday and Tuesday (8th and 9th February 2016). Hari Raya Puasa falls on Wednesday and Thursday (6th and 7th July 2016). Deepavali falls on Saturday (29 October 2016).

 

Click here to download the table of Malaysia year 2016 gazetted national and state public holidays.

Solid state drive (SSD) will soon phase out the traditional hard disk drive (HDD)

Flash memory devices that store computer data using NAND memory chips is gradually dominating the data storage medium.

We have just seen how soon the USB thumb drives replaced the optical discs (CDR, DVDR, Blueray, ...) to become the major removable storage medium nowadays. I believe we will soon see the SSD phasing out the traditional HDD to become the major internal storage medium.

In fact, flash memory is already the data storage medium in mobile devices and slim ultrabook computers nowadays.

Traditional HDD stores data in spinning magnetic discs, and the data read/write is performed with a movable r/w head. Since there are moving parts, there will be wear and tear during operations, which limit down its lifespan. Also, it is fragile to drop or even large physical movement during operations, eg. if you shake your laptop with your hands while its HDD is busy operating, you'll probably cause  damage to the HDD, such as introducing some bad sectors.

The traditional HDD also access data much slower than SSD, which is its main disadvantage against SSD. However, HDD is cheaper to produce, and therefore carries a much cheaper price than SSD, and made available at generally higher storage capacity too.

So, the 2 main reasons why SSD hasn't replaced the HDD yet as of today, are:

• Price
• Available storage capacity

New NAND memory technology that evolves in 2014 will change the game plan. Now, manufacturers including Samsung, Toshiba, Intel, etc. have already come out with multi-layer 3D NAND memory chips, which stakes the flash memory cells vertically in 32 layers or even 48 layers, to achieve a 256 gigabits multilevel cell (MLC) and 384 gigabits triple-level cell (TLC) die that fit within a standard package.

It is said that this approach can greatly reduce the manufacturing cost, at the same time can make available higher storage capacity to SSD. With reduced price and comparable storage capacity with HDD, there is no more resistant for SSD to replace HDD as the major computer storage medium.

Advantages of SSD over HDD including:

• Can package in smaller size
• Less electricity consumption
• Less heat produced during operation
• High grade NAND can have a warranty period of 10 years, much longer than HDD
• Much faster data access speed
• More robust to drop or movement during operation

The diagram below is a Samsung 850 EVO SSD using the 3D V-NAND technology. You will soon find it inside the next generation of Apple MacBooks within the next couple of months.

What should you do to save your life when your building is on fire?

Have you ever think of this question and get prepared when your building is on fire?

I have recently read some notes written by professional firemen in Facebook, and summarize here according to my understanding.

Here we go...

If you are in the same room with the fire, and the fire just started and still controllable, try to extinguish it. If the fire has been burning for more than 5 seconds and the flame is spreading fast, leave the room and evacuate immediately.

If the fire is outside your room (which you probably have no idea where is its exact location), get close to the door, and use your hand to touch the upper part of the door. If you feel the door is hot, it is safer to stay in your room than going out, because there is high temperature outside, and probably accompanied by smokes and poisonous fumes.

The reason to touch the upper part of the door and not the middle or lower part of it, is because the smokes, fumes and heat travel upwards. They might be right behind the door, but you still can't feel it at lower level yet.

However, if the door has little resistant to heat or fire (such as plastic door, glass door, etc.), it might be unsafe to stay in the room. In that case, you should crawl out and move to a safer room (eg. room with wooden door, or better still, fire escape staircase).

If you were to stay in the room, open the window to have fresh air to breath, get as far away from the door as possible, and ask for help from the window, as well as using your handphone.

Do not jump out of the window unless you are staying at ground floor or first floor, because you probably can't save your life by jumping out either.

If you don't feel the heat at the back of the door yet (which means the fire and/or fume has not reach outside the door), or your room is unsafe to stay (door has little resistant to heat or fire), and you decided to evacuate, remember, always go DOWN the building. Do not go up.

This is because the smokes and heat are travelling upwards at the speed of about 3-5 meters per second. They are travelling faster than you, and you probably will get yourself roasted or suffocated if you move up.

You can do a little experiment: light up a candle and put your hand at different positions: on top of the fire, beside the fire, and under the fire. Now you should be able to reason why you should always go down and never go up the building during a fire.