awesomeness

http://www.chicagotribune.com/

[RAMSEY, Minn. (AP)] - When their children returned from Halloween trick-or-treating, a couple found suspected methamphetamine and $85 in cash among their 7-year-old son's Snickers bars and Skittles.

Lars and Shelly Brosdahl called police, who confirmed that the substance was methamphetamine, worth up to $200 on the street.

Someone who looked like a teenager dropped something into their son's bag as he went trick-or-treating with his 9-year-old sister on Halloween night, the Brosdahls say.

"He said some bigger kid ran by him and asked if he wanted some candy," Lars Brosdahl said. "He said 'Sure,' and the kid dropped it into his bag."

The clear crystals looked like rock candy, the parents said.

"The (kids) could have OD'd on it. That's what makes me so shaky and upset," Shelly Brosdahl said.

Police think the young man was a suspect fleeing police after a report of an assault in the area that night.

Police in Ramsey, northwest of Minneapolis, did not immediately return a call seeking comment Tuesday.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/

In the wake of the launch of Ubuntu 8.10, Mark Shuttleworth - the founder of the Ubuntu project and the chief executive officer of Canonical, the commercial entity behind Ubuntu - hosted a conference call with the press and analyst community. And in that call, Shuttleworth, who is not afraid to shell out money for a good cause - such as the $20m he paid to be the second tourist in space, via a Russian Soyuz mission - made it clear that he is perfectly happy to fund Ubuntu until it gets on its own financial two feet.

Canonical is a private company, one that was founded in 2004, after Shuttleworth came back down to earth. While most of you know this, many of you may not know that Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, a South African company that became the biggest seller of digital certificates and was sold to VeriSign for $575m in stock in 1999.

Shuttleworth's net worth is not known, but he clearly can afford to indulge in the Ubuntu effort, and he made no apologies for where the company is at in terms of growth and sales and his continuing personal investments in Ubuntu.

"We continue to require investment. I can continue to be careful with my pennies as I make what I consider to be a good investment," Shuttleworth said in the call. He explained that Canonical - which has more than 200 employees in Europe, North America, and Taiwan - was not cash flow positive. But he said it could be if the company focused on its core desktop and server products and did not make investments that Shuttleworth and his Canonical team as well as the larger Ubuntu community deem necessary for the long-term success of Ubuntu.

It is clear that Shuttleworth wants to make these investments. He said that Canonical had "several million dollars" in annual revenues derived from support and related services for the Ubuntu distribution, but that he had "no objection to funding the business for the next three to five years."

Shuttleworth added that the company could be positive in two years, but that it will probably take longer than that, given the investments that needed to make Ubuntu more pervasive on both the server and the desktop.

So, what metrics does Shuttleworth use to gauge his investments? More human ones than perhaps we are used to hearing about. "We have customers coming back and new customers knocking on the door," Shuttleworth explained. While the exact numbers for Ubuntu adoption are unclear, adoption rates - which Canonical gets anecdotally and from numbers it gets from application software vendors like Alfresco Software or IT box counters like IDC - are on the rise, and this is a key metric.

(This is the same metric that Sun Microsystems' president and chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz cites as Sun's success for Solaris 10 and Java. But as a public company, Sun has a duty to actually get revenues and make money - unlike privately held Canonical, which is on a mission that is cultural more than economic).

The uptake of Ubuntu by third-party makers of IT gear in Asia is another key metric Shuttleworth is using, and Canonical is working with the top ten ODMs in Asia, although not all of them have Ubuntu-based products. Yet.

Precise Ubuntu installed base numbers are impossible to obtain, but Shuttleworth said the most recent estimate is about 8 million users for the Linux variant. Ubuntu does not have any call-home features to help Canonical count installations. That's because Shuttleworth does not want to violate users' privacy or put up any barriers to adoption for the software. "We actually have no idea," Shuttleworth admitted.

On the server front, IDC did a survey in 2007 that showed that 20 per cent of large US companies had Ubuntu installed. Other IDC estimates give Ubuntu about a 3 per cent share of the server operating system racket, by box count (certainly not revenue).

A survey that Canonical did as part of the 8.04 LTS release this year - which had over 100,000 responses - indicated that about 25 per cent of those polled had Ubuntu supporting production applications. This is pretty good for a Linux variant that was really aimed at the desktop when it launched in 2004 and a server platform that is only a little more than two years old.

With the launch of Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Long Term Support) - which gives servers support for five years and desktops for three years instead of the normal 18-month support life for an Ubuntu release and the kicker 8.04 LTS release earlier this year - Canonical has done a pretty good job getting its foot in the data center door. "We see a surprising amount of non-LTS releases on servers," said Shuttleworth, and that is because the quicker release cycle of the normal Ubuntu releases allows it to run on the latest-greatest iron and deliver the most current practical support for virtualization features.

The final metric Shuttleworth is using as he guides the Ubuntu distribution and pushes the Canonical business is the happiness and satisfaction users have with the distro. It is hard to put a dollar value on this, unless you count the software that companies don't buy when they are happy with the Ubuntu distribution.

When asked if anyone can make money selling a desktop Linux, Shuttleworth was blunt and candid. "No. I don't think anybody can. And that is a good thing." The revenue model that Shuttleworth had when he created the Ubuntu project and the Canonical support organization was to give away the software and patches and rely on tech support and other services that are required by some users and businesses to generate the revenues that give people at Canonical their jobs.

"It is at the heart of our philosophy to not make money on the desktop." And in this, Shuttleworth believes that Canonical is on the leading edge of the software industry, and that all software suppliers - including Microsoft - will have to shift away from licensing bits to selling services to make their daily bread.

Google releases Android code

Google has released the source code for its Android mobile operating system as open source software. The move comes almost a month afer the first Android-based phone - the HTC G1 - was launched.

In a post on the Android developers blog yesterday, Jason Chen wrote: “We and our Open Handset Alliance partners have now released the source code for Android. There’s a huge amount of code and content there.”

The Android source code has been released under a number of “grants” which Google says are based on the licences used by the Apache Foundation.

Google says on the Android source code page that “Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications. And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.”

The source code and instructions for setting up a development machine for Android can be found on the http://source.android.com website.

Related stories:

• First Android phone goes live
• Google announces Linux for phones

[tectonic]

http://www.iol.co.za/

By Sheree Bega

Rico Bernert and his girlfriend Lizette are enjoying their sixth bottle of champagne. For the Joburg couple, there is plenty to celebrate.

On Wednesday, the Pretoria High Court ordered Absa to pay millions of rands in damages to Bernert, concluding his nine-year battle with the bank for breach of contract.

It's Thursday and the 45-year-old German entrepreneur is sitting in a coffee shop near the couple's home in Boskruin, north of Joburg.

It's here that they told sceptical neighbours about their struggle with the bank.

"No one believed us," says Lizette.

"They think it's so outrageous. Why would a bank do something like this to people? But they did. It's been an absolute nightmare for us."

It all started in the 1990s when Bernert, a mechanic, spent much of his time travelling the globe to exhibit prototypes of El Macho, his hand-crafted lightweight military patrol vehicle that could be rapidly deployed from a helicopter. Interest grew.

In 1999, Sheik Fawaz bin Abdullah Al-Khalifa, a member of the royal family of Bahrain, agreed to invest US$6-million in a joint venture with Rotrax Cars, a local company owned by Bernert and his uncle Alfred Mahener, to make the vehicles in South Africa.

But when Absa cancelled letters of guarantee that it had given to Fawaz's bank in the Middle East, declaring them fraudulent, Fawaz pulled out, claiming his reputation had been destroyed.

"They [Absa] made me and him [Fawaz] look like such fools," said Bernert.

"They said the sheik and the project didn't exist. The project was blown out of the water before it even started."

A "humiliated" Bernert, a "little guy", started his epic battle against the bank.

"You get to the point where you're running on nothing but adrenaline. You're fuelled by hate. The longer it took, the stronger I became. It became my job - 8am to 5pm every day, strategising and planning. There's no way else to beat them. I think a lot of people thought I was the biggest nutcase."

Lizette interjects: "He didn't have a job, a factory, his wife had left him. How could he take on the big boys?"

Bernert survived by renovating houses he bought and rented out. "It kept me sane," he recalls.

"I was outdoors in my shorts.

"How many people are destroyed by banks? Now it's the other way around for a change. I stood alone against them."

The court verdict was like a "lead weight falling off my shoulders".

Lizette, who worked for his lawyer Louis Nel in the case, resigned in 2003 and has been at Bernert's side ever since.

"I know each and every one of the 50 000 documents," she says, or "five bakkies worth".

She adds: "It's unfair what they did to Rico. It doesn't make any sense."

Bernert reveals: "I've been arrested for driving suspicious-looking cars and evicted for non-payment of my bond. What else? There are 48 judgments against me."

It hit his family hard. The financial strain caused his marriage to collapse. It wasn't the first battle he had had.

His uncle, who had received a bravery medal for saving 14 children in the Westdene Dam bus disaster in March 1985, shot his 17-year-old daughter and wife and tried to commit suicide in 1994 because Absa had threatened him with legal action over a financial dispute. He hanged himself eight months later.

"What must someone do to you to drive you to that? It's banks and money," says Bernert.

"Banks will go all out to discredit you and to make it as difficult as they can."

He has no immediate plans for his millions, but has created a Section 21 company called Citizens Against Financial Abuse, a non-profit organisation.

"People come to me for advice. There are a lot of people in the same situation. People are on the verge of suicide because they're two months behind on their bonds and the banks threaten them. Someone called me Eric Brockovich in court yesterday."

But his fight isn't over. Absa owes him at least R360-million, he says, which includes the $6-million investment and an intellectual property valuation, in today's rand value.

The court ordered that Absa will also have to pay interest for six years at 15,5 percent a year. Then, there are the profits he never made to factor in.

"I won't consider this over until Absa is dead and buried," says Bernert.

Will he return to his car-making dream? "I'd have to remarket the project. My credibility is gone," he says, adding he has contacted former F1 champion Michael Schumacher to endorse his car to help restore credibility.

Later, Bernert pulls his rumbling El Macho out of his driveway.

"This was the project that everyone said didn't exist," he gestures to the car, draped with a huge Absa flag, grinning.

Hayden: Rossi is one bad dude! - Nicky Hayden congratulates Valentino Rossi on sixth MotoGP title victory. [motogp]

Google Calendar Gets Better a Little at a Time

If you're a GCal lover with the niggling complaint here and there, the Official Gmail Blog highlights several small but worthwhile improvements to the popular web-based calendar. Updates include better meeting request follow-ups and more flexible reminder schedules among a few other nice updates.

Under the Sea, Google Expands Even More -

Google’s fierce expansion under the sea is a sign that the company views Asia as its big growth market and is preparing to build an infrastructure that gives it a distinct advantage over others. Asia is one of the hottest Internet markets and the demand for bandwidth is exploding in that region. It isn’t much of a surprise that many cables are being built, leading to speculation that another optical bubble might be building.

[gigaom]

Stellenbosch gets high-performance Linux cluster

South Africa’s Stellenbosch University now has a high-performance Sun Fire cluster running OpenSuse Linux, courtesy of Breakpoint Solutions.

http://www.newsobserver.com/

It's a small plastic thing, resembling a guitar in basic appearance only.

But Blake Peebles brings energy to the room when he slides the strap over his skinny shoulder and steps atop the wooden box that serves as a stage.

As the music begins, Blake quickly presses buttons on the guitar in time to a speed-metal tune blasting from the giant TV. It is an odd sensation, to watch a young man control the sounds of a rock song with a toy instrument, but this is "Guitar Hero," one of the most popular video game franchises in recent memory. Blake is one of the better players in the country.

Other than his fingers, Blake barely moves while playing. His feet are set in place and his eyes are locked on the screen as he peers through a mop of curly brown hair. Gaming for him is serious business. It's his job.

Among the prizes he's won playing "Guitar Hero" tournaments: gift certificates, gaming equipment and chicken sandwiches.

Blake is 16, resides in North Raleigh and lives to play video games. On this night, he's at the Fox and Hound in Raleigh's North Hills shopping district. It's the restaurant's regular Sunday "Guitar Hero" night, and Blake and his family have come to watch and play. His brother and sister are here, as are his mom and dad, an aunt and an uncle, some cousins and some friends.

But in the end, it's not the people related to Blake who confirm his plastic-guitar prowess. It's the group of 20-somethings sitting at a nearby table, who applaud when Blake finishes playing along to "Through the Fire and Flames," viewed as the game's toughest song.

"It's pretty sick," says Andrew Gambling, 27, who describes himself as a casual player. "He's talented."

Blake is appreciative of the applause and grins shyly when it is mentioned to him. But he's not very happy with his score.

"That's probably the worst I've ever done," he says, which seems impossible. The game moves at warp speed, so Blake's fingers do too.

This is not a competitive environment, so the score hardly matters. But his attitude about it underscores some Peebles family truisms: Blake is so dedicated to gaming that his parents let him quit school so he can better concentrate on it.

They pay for home tutors instead. Mom and Dad do this, even though there are very few people in this country who make their living playing competitive video games.

Blake very much would like to be one of them, but a boy cannot live on chicken sandwiches alone.

Leaving school

Blake is the middle child of Mike and Hunter Peebles. Tucker is 18, an honor-roll student who plays football for North Raleigh Christian Academy. Caramy is 13, a dancer with a congenital disorder that causes developmental disabilities.

Mike and Hunter do not believe in one-size-fits-all parenting.

That is not to say that it was an easy decision for them to let Blake leave school last September. They would have preferred that he stay in high school with his brother. But he bugged them until they let him quit.

"We couldn't take the complaining anymore," says Hunter. "He always told me that he thought school was a waste of time."

Blake never gravitated toward sports or drama or any of the other traditional school-based activities. Just gaming.

So they made a deal. Blake could leave school but would have to be tutored at home. In one respect, the arrangement is similar to what parents of gifted child athletes and actors have done for years.

In another, those careers can bring big money. Competitive gaming is still growing. Major League Gaming, one of the field's top sanctioning bodies, holds tournaments in cities across the country.

The company has more than 125 players signed to management deals. Top players can earn more than $80,000 a year, plus outside sponsorship money, says an MLG spokeswoman. The average pay is in the $20,000 to $30,000 range.

Blake has done well in local tournaments, including one held at a Chick-fil-A that earned him 52 combo meals. By his account, he has lost only once since "Guitar Hero III" was released late last year. Some of that time was spent playing online, against players from all over the world.

This is how he knows he's good. It wasn't that long ago that kids who excelled at some activity, say basketball, would only have to go to the next neighborhood to have their dreams crushed by some older, more accomplished player.

Today, on Xbox 360, players use the system's online component to compare scores with players all over the world. Blake, who goes by the online name "Dreminem," figures that he has top-10 scores on 20 or so of songs on "Guitar Hero III."

He guesses that he's probably one of the top 15 or 20 players in the country.

Blake so far has won about $1,000 in prizes in the months since he began competing in "Guitar Hero." His biggest challenge will come in mid-August, when father and son travel to California for the U.S. regionals of the World Cyber Games. Blake qualified to appear there after performing well online.

If Blakes wins the regional, it's on to the national championship. The best "Guitar Hero III" players there will earn the right to represent the U.S. at the world tournament in Germany.

Blake is happy with his success. Mom and Dad are happy with his grades. Since he's gone to the tutoring arrangement, she hasn't once had to tell him to do his homework, because he does it on his own. They got plenty of grief from family and friends about their decision at first, but they've also watched Blake, who is shy and disliked school, become a happier person.

Set up to play

Inside his upstairs bedroom, Blake's environment is set up specifically to make him a better gamer. There is a PlayStation 2, a Nintendo Wii and an Xbox 360. He also has a stack of plastic guitars, but no real ones. Blake doesn't play an actual guitar, a skill that doesn't really transfer to playing the virtual kind, anyway.

The frame for his bed is on the back porch, with the box springs and mattress on the bedroom floor. That puts his bed at a more comfortable level for sitting to play "Guitar Hero III" for extended periods. At the moment, he plays just a few hours a day, but that number will increase as the California competition nears.

Blake seems happy with his home school arrangement, as you would expect from a teenager who is allowed to stay up into the wee hours to play video games. Sometimes, when Mike heads to the gym before 5 a.m., his son is still playing video games. Blake calls it working "the late shift."

He didn't enjoy school, he says, and especially didn't like the rules associated with attending the Christian academy. Shaggy hair is more his style.

He's good at video games. "I wasn't really good at anything else that I liked."

His "Guitar Hero" skills certainly have impressed the local gaming community.

"He's amazing," says Mike Gibson, the good-natured owner of two local Play N Trade Video Games stores. "I can't have tournaments for that anymore. I might as well just give him the prize."

Blake dreams of making a living playing games, and scoring a contract with Major League Gaming.

But Terry Lindle, aka Terry15, knows how tough it can be to make it. Lindle, 23, lives in Illinois and has been a competitive gamer for about eight years. He won the national championship for "Halo 2" in 2005 and traveled to England earlier this year to compete in a world championship for the game "F.E.A.R."

Lindle came in sixth and won $4,500. He estimates that he has earned about $25,000 in his years of gaming.

"When you want to go somewhere with this gaming stuff, you've got to be in the top 1 percent," he says.

Lindle is impressed that Blake qualified for the tournament in California. But in gaming, coming in third or fourth doesn't mean much.

"You've got to win these major tournaments, otherwise you don't get noticed by advertisers and sponsors."

Lindle believes there's a future to competitive gaming, one in which more people can make more money. He points to Major League Gaming's recent deal with ESPN, which includes live-streaming tournaments on ESPN360.com.

Right now, Blake is concentrating on "Guitar Hero," working to get the "Dreminem" name out there. "Guitar Hero" isn't a big money game on the tournament circuit, as most of the cash goes to the people who play "Halo 3."

Blake is biding his time to the next big thing, so he can get ahead of the curve.

"The next big game that comes out, I'm just going to focus on that one," he says.

And why not? The guy is self-employed. He sets his own hours.

This is unbelievable! "300 billion GBs per month served"...

http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/

By Yi-Wyn Yen

Google’s acquisition of ad server DoubleClick is supposed to help the search giant make a splash in the display advertising market. But it’s YouTube that Google is hoping will make it a big player on Madison Avenue.

“We’re spending a lot of time on YouTube right now because that happens to be a clear objective and clear opportunity,” said Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising at a recent Bear Stearns media conference.

What isn’t clear is why Google (GOOG) hasn’t figured out how to make a profit from YouTube yet.

Google built its multi-billion empire by delivering text-based ads that appeal to marketers looking for a direct response. Now the search engine’s going after major brand advertisers who see video as an opportunity to connect with consumers on an emotional level.

For a company consumed by organizing the world’s information, Madison Avenue is an unfamiliar turf. “They’re starting to think about branding,” said Matt Sanchez, CEO of video ad network VideoEgg. “There’s a culture shift going on at Google.”

While display marketing isn’t Google’s forte, the company has created an appealing branding opportunity with YouTube. The videosharing site has become the go-to site for short, snacky clips. But some advertisers worry that, unlike watching an episode of Lost on ABC.com or a Saturday Night Live clip on Hulu, most of YouTube’s vast collection of campy, user-uploaded clips are unmarketable.

“This is a challenge for advertisers,” said Chris Allen, the video innovation director for media agency Starcom. Roughly 10 to 20% of YouTube’s content is professionally produced. That really starts to diminish the opportunities for brand advertisers.”

One media buyer takes a glass-half full approach. “We’re trying to figure out what is the value in brand association with content that’s not premium,” said Curt Hecht, chief digital officer for GM Planworks, which handles advertising for General Motors (GM). “The approach we take is, how can we package this in front of a ton of eyeballs.”

YouTube is the King Kong of online videos, and what it lacks in marketable clips it makes up for with its massive and engaged audience. In January, nearly 79 million viewers, or a third of all online viewers in the U.S., watched more than three billion user-posted videos on YouTube, according to comScore’s latest report.

However, delivering all those free video clips isn’t cheap. YouTube sends a staggering 1,000 gigabytes of data every second, or nearly 300 billion GBs each month. Several industry insiders estimate that YouTube spends roughly $1 million a day just to pay for the bandwidth to host the videos. By that number, YouTube downloads would account for roughly 3% of Google’s $11.5 billion operating costs for 2007.

YouTube, which makes the bulk of its revenue from selling display ads that run on the right-hand side of the site’s homepage, has not been a moneymaker for Google. The company states YouTube’s revenues last year were “not material” in a regulatory filing. The search giant paid $1.6 billion for the company in October 2006. “I’d be surprised if they broke $20 million in revenue in ’07,” said Anton Denissov, an online video analyst with the Yankee Group.

Part of the problem is that advertisers and companies like Google are still experimenting with what works in the web video market. Advertisers will spend $1.35 billion on online video advertising in the U.S. this year, according to eMarketer. That represents 1.5% of television advertising spending this year, and just 5% of all Internet advertising spending. The research firm forecasts that U.S. spending for web video ads will triple to $4.3 billion in 2011.

Wall Street is anxious for Google to turn the videosharing site into a cash cow. Last October during its earnings call with analysts, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said making money wasn’t a top priority. The company has focused heavily on refining a user’s experience and collecting data on how viewers find videos on YouTube. Dave Eun, who runs Google’s content businesses, said the company would “turn up the dial on monetization” next year.

Last fall Google introduced several types of ad formats with moderate success. Its says viewers are responding favorably to its overlay ads, which run on the bottom of a screen like a sports ticker 10 seconds after a video starts. A viewer can choose to close the ad or click on it to expand the ad before returning to the original clip. The overlay ads only appear on YouTube’s select premium content.

“We’ve been careful about testing different monetization approaches,” Eun said at the Bear Stearns conference on March 10. “We’ve purposely not taken the easy money. And frankly, there was a lot of easy money out there. We could have taken cut-down TV ads and pushed them down our users’ throats with pre-rolls.”

Not everyone is convinced that just because Google flips a switch, the YouTube money will start pouring in. “All of Silicon Valley has a hard time understanding that it’s not some spigot you turn on,” said VideoEgg’s Sanchez. “Maybe that’s how direct marketers work, but media buyers on the brand side don’t spend money that way.”

“There’s no silver bullet,” he added. “Google’s been testing and pushing and marketing its product, but it’s not suddenly going to do a billion dollars in revenue off YouTube.”