IBGerm

Teams that have already secured World Cup Qualifications!!

South Africa
Japan 
Australia
Korea Republic 
Netherlands
Korea DPR
Brazil
Ghana 
England
Spain
Paraguay
Côte d’Ivoire
Germany
Denmark
Serbia
Italy
Chile
Mexico
United States
Switzerland
Slovakia
Argentina
Honduras

South America:

In the South American zone all the eyes are on whether Diego Maradona’s Argentina will miss their first finals since 1970. In a group where the top four sides qualify and the fifth-placed team goes into a play-off in November against the fourth-placed CONCACAF side, the Argentines face Uruguay who are only a point behind them in fifth. Having lost four straight games away from home Argentine is not set for a faceoff with some of the league’s most prolific scorers of Uruguay. If Diego’s men lose and Ecuador wins in their away clash with Chile, Argentina would finish sixth and will be oust from the 2010 challenge.

Five-time champions Brazil, and dark horses Paraguay and Chile have already secured  places in the South American zone.

Europe:

England, Netherlands and European champions Spain have safely occupied three of the nine automatic places on offer in September, and were recently joined by three-times champions Germany, defending champions Italy, Denmark and Serbia. Cristiano Ronaldo’s Portugal enter into tonight’s final qualifier against Malt, desperately needing a win in Group One to give the Iberians their best chance of a play-off position.

While group two leaders Switzerland only need a draw with Israel to make their second straight World Cup finals, a defeat could see Greece seal a berth instead if they beat Luxembourg. In group three, Slovakia must beat Poland to prevent Slovenia from winning the top spot if they complete an expected victory over a poor San Marino.

In group six Ukraine needs only to beat Andorra for a play-off spot while Group Nine sees Norway needing a culmination of results to go their way to grab a play-off place.

CONCACAF:

Mexico’s win over El Salvador (4-1) has secured them a place in the World Cup, while the United States qualified after defeating Honduras. Now, Costa Rica and Honduras are battling it out for the final qualification place and play the United States and El Salvador respectively, while the fourth-placed team will go into a play-off position against the fifth-placed South American nation.

Africa:

Ghana were the first country from Africa to clinch qualification, comfortably winning their group last month with two matches still to play, while the Ivory Coast joined them to leave three other places still up for grabs for the next round of qualifiers in November.

Asia / Oceania:

The four automatic places have been taken by Australia, Japan and North and South Korea, while Bahrain face a play-off against Oceania group winners New Zealand for the zones’ remaining finals spot. Bahrain were held 0-0 at home in the opening leg in Manama on Saturday, with the return leg in Wellington on November 14.

Linux is brilliant at serving files.All you need is a relatively low-powered PC, a decent amount of storage and somewhere safe to hide it.

1. Install the software

We’ve chosen to use Ubuntu Server Edition for two reasons. First, it’s the same distribution that most people know and love, only optimized for use on a server. Second, you still have access to exactly the same packages and repositories as you do with with the desktop version, which makes installing and using software easy.

Put the disc into the machine you want to use as the server and select your language followed by ‘Install Ubuntu Server’. Unlike the desktop version, there’s no graphical installer. Instead you’ll need to choose your configuration settings from the pages of options that appear throughout the installer.

Don’t let this put you off; there aren’t any questions that can’t easily be answered, and the installation is effectively no different from a standard desktop installation.

The first question asks you again for the language, the second for your location and the third for your keyboard layout. After a brief pause, you’ll be asked for a hostname. You might want to change this to something like ‘mediaserver’, rather than the default ‘ubuntu’ to avoid confusion with any other Ubuntu installations you may have running on the same network.

2. Partition the disk

The next installation step is disk configuration. This is a much more important consideration for a media server than it is for a standard desktop installation, because of the sheer volume of files that you’ll be storing on it.

The most convenient solution is to use an old disk of around 10GB (or less) for the Linux installation and a high capacity drive for your media content. You can then select ‘Guided – Use Entire Disk’ on the installation page, then select the disk to install to and give Ubuntu complete control over how it creates the installation. Your media storage disk can be configured later.

PARTITION YOUR DRIVE: If you create a separate root partition, you’ll be able to update your system without worrying about your files

The second-best option is to create two partitions on a single drive, using the smaller partition for the root file system and the other partition for your data. This way, you can update the root partition if you need to, or easily back up your data partition without infecting it with system files.

After skipping through the partition section you’ll be asked for your real name, username and password. You should give this a little more thought than with the desktop, as it’s likely that your server will be on all the time and accessible from the internet, so a secure username/password combination is vital.

Press Continue to skip the HTTP proxy installation, and choose to install security updates automatically when asked. Finally, don’t select any of the default server packages unless you want to enable SSH for remote administration, then click on Continue to install the system.

3. Configure MediaTomb

We’re now only a couple of steps away from completion. When your machine restarts after installing all the main packages, you need to log in and type sudo apt-get install mediatomb into a terminal. This will grab the media-streaming software and install it on your system.

All you need to now is type mediatomb to run the server. Watch the output, because you should see something like the following:

2009-07-16 15:20:52 INFO: MediaTomb Web UI can be reached by following this link: 2009-07-16 15:20:52 INFO: http://192.168.1.89:49152/

This is the port and the IP address for the server, and you should now be able to point a web browser on the same network at this address and use the simple user interface to add the files and folders that contain your various bits of media.

 

After a few moments, the media should appear on any UPnP streaming client, such as those on a Playstation 3 and XBox 360.

A survey by insurance company Diamond has found that a fifth of women admit to applying make-up while driving. It is estimated that the practice causes 500,000 accidents every year. 

According to Sian Lewis, managing director of Diamond, women who drive and apply make-up at the same time risk both the safety of others around them and a ticket for careless driving.

"Applying your make-up when you’re driving means your full attention is not on the road ahead… Women are generally great at doing more than one thing at once but this is definitely one area where multitasking should not be practiced," said Lewis.

Source: www.ananova.com

Alaska – The Juneau Police Department has reported life-threatening  injuries in the case of a 25-year-old man who used a .22-caliber rifle Friday afternoon to shoot himself in the mouth in order to determine whether or not it was loaded.

The release indicated that "the man joked that there was one way to find out if it was loaded and, at that point, he reportedly put the rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger." Sgt. Dave Campbell said: "It looks like it was a tragic accident."

It occurred in Lemon Creek as he and others were planning a trip to the gun range. The man was found unresponsive but alive. "It’s still a bullet and when you’re talking about close range like that, small calibers are very dangerous," said Campbell.

source: AP