awesomeness
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 is working with a consortium of carriers to become part of an intra-Asian submarine cable system, tentatively called the Southeast Asian Japan Cable (SJC). The cable would be Google’s second play in the sub-sea category. The new cable links various different cities to Chikura, Japan Guam, the landing site of a transpacific cable called Unity.
Earlier this year, Google invested in this transpacific cable along with a bunch of other carriers. The Unity cable is expected to cost about $300 million. The new SJC cable has pretty much the same carrier partners as the ones in the Unity cable, reports Telegeography, a research company.
Companies that are participating in both consortia are Google, Bharti, SingTel, KDDI and Global Transit. Pacnet, which will control two fibre pairs on Unity, already operates the EAC-C2C intra-Asian mesh cable system and consequently is not involved with SJC. Globe Telecom of the Philippines and TOT of Thailand are also members of SJC and will be the landings parties for the cable in their respective countries.
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. The high performance cluster is built using Sun Fire X4150 servers, with each having two Intel Quad Core CPUs and 16 gigabytes of memory. The cluster includes a Sun StorageTek 2530 array with six terabytes of storage, an Extreme Networks Summit 1GBE switch and the Sun Grid Engine job scheduler. “There are 168 cores in total,” says mechanics division head within the department of mechanical and mechatronic engineering, professor Gerhard Venter. “In testing we have been using between 80 and 120 cores at any given time and without any problems.” Venter says “the university had no shared resource for this before. Instead, various departments ran their own box-clusters that typically have less than 20 cores. These are used to crunch numbers in research in fields such as chemistry and physics.” He says that several departments within the university have already begun testing the solution in their research projects. “Mechanical and mechatronic engineering, electrical and electronic engineering, computer science, bio-chemistry, physics and applied mathematics are just some of the departments that will be loading the system with work once the testing phase is done,” says Venter.
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.”
I will probably expand on this at some stage, so for now it's going to be short, but I recently put Debian onto a Sun Netra, which was pretty cool, but I decided to cross-grade from Debian to Ubuntu which I've done before without having any issues, and I ran into issues. Tons of them in fact. But only one was bad enough that I almost gave up, and by bad enough I mean that anybody who is good with dpkg would have solved this quickly but no matter how hard I searched (at first), all I could find was whining about how if you have this problem it's your own fault because you've mixed Debian and Ubuntu, but not giving any clues as to how to solve the problem. I had mixed the two, but I also hadn't. My /etc/apt/sources.list had only Ubuntu sources, but some of the software on the machine was Debian. Anyway to get to the point if you have this problem:
Selecting previously deselected package sysvutils.
(Reading database ... 168107 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb (--unpack):
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Then please fix it by doing the following:
$ sudo dpkg --force-overwrite -i /var/cache/apt/archives/sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb(Reading database ... 168508 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking sysvutils (from .../sysvutils_2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9_i386.deb) ...
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/mesg.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/last.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/lastb.1.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man8/pidof.8.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/share/man/man8/killall5.8.gz', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/last', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/mesg', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/sbin/killall5', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/usr/bin/lastb', which is also in package sysvinit
dpkg - warning, overriding problem because --force enabled:
trying to overwrite `/bin/pidof', which is also in package sysvinit
Setting up sysvutils (2.86.ds1-14.1ubuntu9) ...
And when you are done, thank these guys.
Updated: it appears that somebody other than me is actually reading my website, so I wanted to make a point of noting that the problem I had was exactly as above, but obviously not with i386 debs, so please don't try fixing it exactly as pasted above, but rather apply that to a sparc64 setup. I'm kinda thinking that if you're having this issue then you already knew that, but I had to mention it :)
Early YouTube Engineer Tells All - When we recently heard about the history of YouTube’s growth strategy from CEO Chad Hurley’s point of view, he described it as “hanging onto a rocket.” But an engineer’s take is always going to be a bit less rose-colored and a bit more about the terrifying situations you brained your way out of. So we were particularly interested to tune in to a talk at YouTube’s developer conference Thursday by Cuong Do, an early software engineer who’s now manager of the site’s Core Product Engineering group. Do’s talk was titled “Behind the Scenes: A Look Into YouTube’s Infrastructure,” and he didn’t disappoint, with harrowing tales of outages; gory details about the specific languages, architectures, and tools YouTube uses; and a flow-chart level view on the way the site handles uploads and video delivery while undergoing the massive usage it sees on a daily basis. “One of the key phrases we had in the early days was ‘These are good problems to have,’” Do said. “And after a while we’re like, ‘I’m going to kill the next person who says that.’” YouTube promised it would post video from the talk on its site eventually, but I don’t see it there yet, so check out the version from my handheld camera.