Football

Football. Wonderful Sport. At last a sport that has a ball that’s bigger than your foot. World Cup 2006 is like a rare steak approximately 30 per cent done. And after two weeks of football, let’s see what we have learned exactly.

Let’s start with the spelling, the English spell it football, the Mexicans have an atrocious spelling of Fuzbol, the Ukranians are no better with Fotzbal, and the Ghaneese also erroneously spell it Fietbel, which is almost as bad as the Bengali Photbole or the Malayalee’s Fatboll. What the hell are we trying to teach our children?

We’ve also learned that a fat Ronaldo is far better than a fit Ronaldo. After sleeping through two games, the world’s fattest athlete, (barring three Sumo wrestlers and In-za-mam on weekends), sprang to life with a brace of goals. Fuelled by Atkinson’s initial diet of fries, supplemented with cheeseburgers, Ronaldo finally proved Newton’s fourth law of motion to be entirely and conclusively true. Size does matter. The fatter the better.

We’re also learning that England is not only a country ruled by a Queen, (and please no asides even though it’s coming onto Elton John’s birthday. But for all practical purposes it’s the WAG’s (Wives and girlfriends of footballers), who really are wearing the shorts. These wives led by the world’s most untalented celebrity, ( a record she’s held since Milli Vaniti abdicated and Kishen Kumar retired), miss Posh Beckham, have drunk more beer in a week than the entire colony of East Germany, between 1945 and 1989.

Not to be outdone, Mrs Rooney-to-be, flew from Baden Baden or twice Baden in Germany to Liverpool, and back just to have her hair coloured by her neighbourhood barber, still obviously clinging onto old English prejudices ‘that there are no barbers in Germany, since that close shave in World War II’.

The Germans have been in sublime form and whilst proving to be superb hosts, they are inventing new Germanic phrases every day. For example a German player scratching his groin is referred to as one scratching his Michael Ballacks. Consequently a German player scratching another player’s groin is known simply as Michael Ballack.

The French, whose team’s average age is 57, are showing that you may advance in the world Cup despite having one foot in the grave. Sadly their captain is now a travelling antique,and without Zidane, France looks like Bollywood without the Bachchans. Thierry Henry is suffering from a serious flaw in his game. The flaw, of course, being that he thinks France is his club, and Arsenal his country. A common and hopefully correctable mistake.

We’ve also learnt about a similarity between goalkeeper Fabien Barthez and Zaheera Sheikh. Both keep hoping the balls in someone else’s court. Ghaneese are educating us in a more positive way.

Michael Eisson’s pure poetry with the odd phonetic muddle. But what’s amazing is a six-foot 3-inch, 220 lbs mid-fielder who answers to the name of Ping Pong. Ping Pong’s name and physique are a harsh lesson in mutual incompatibility.

Croatia vs Australia took politics to a new high. The game itself is being served in as a question for Majors in Political Sciences. Seven Australians are from Croatia. Three Croatians were born and live in Australia. Two Croatians are married to Australians. One of whom has returned to Croatia. One Croatian is half Australian on his mother’s side and four Australians speak Croatian as their first language. The good news is that three Australians hadn’t ever heard of Croatia, and one more consistently spelt Croatia with a K.

As Crosby Stills Nash and what’s his name said ‘lets keep following the World Cup and teaching are children well’. Or as more contemporary Missy Elliot says, The Miseducation will continue until further notice from FIFA.

Carved ceiling, Akshardham

Central Quadrangle, Akshardham

Fountains in Akshardham

Shri Swaminarayan statue in Akshardham

Water spigots in shape of cow head in Akshardham Temple

Window to Akshardham

Akshardham Temple

Akshardham Temple lawns

Akshardham Temple at dusk

Resplendent Akshardham at night

Night lights at Akshardham Temple

Akshardham Temple, just after dusk

Akshardham Temple

Lights in Akshardham Temple

Lights in Akshardham Temple

Carved Pillar, Akshardham Temple

The life and death of Kevin Carter

Visiting Sudan, a little-known photographer took a picture that made the world weep. What happened afterward is a tragedy of another sort.
BY SCOTT MACLEOD/JOHANNESBURG
(http://www.thisisyesterday.com/ints/KCarter.html)

The image presaged no celebration: a child barely alive, a vulture so eager for carrion. Yet the photograph that epitomized Sudan's famine would win Kevin Carter fame - and hopes for anchoring a career spent hounding the news, free-lancing in war zones, waiting anxiously for assignments amid dire finances, staying in the line of fire for that one great picture. On May 23, 14 months after capturing that memorable scene, Carter walked up to the dais in the classical rotunda of Columbia University's Low Memorial Library and received the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. The South African soaked up the attention. "I swear I got the most applause of anybody," Carter wrote back to his parents in Johannesburg. "I can't wait to show you the trophy. It is the most precious thing, and the highest acknowledgment of my work I could receive."

Carter was feted at some of the most fashionable spots in New York City. Restaurant patrons, overhearing his claim to fame, would come up and ask for his autograph. Photo editors at the major magazines wanted to meet the new hotshot, dressed in his black jeans and T shirts, with the tribal bracelets and diamond-stud earring, with the war-weary eyes and tales from the front lines of Nelson Mandela's new South Africa. Carter signed with Sygma, a prestigious picture agency representing 200 of the world's best photojournalists. "It can be a very glamorous business," says Sygma's U.S. director, Eliane Laffont. "It's very hard to make it, but Kevin is one of the few who really broke through. The pretty girls were falling for him, and everybody wanted to hear what he had to say."

There would be little time for that. Two months after receiving his Pulitzer, Carter would be dead of carbon-monoxide poisoning in Johannesburg, a suicide at 33. His red pickup truck was parked near a small river where he used to play as a child; a green garden hose attached to the vehicle's exhaust funneled the fumes inside. "I'm really, really sorry," he explained in a note left on the passenger seat beneath a knapsack. "The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that joy does not exist."

How could a man who had moved so many people with his work end up a suicide so soon after his great triumph? The brief obituaries that appeared around the world suggested a morality tale about a person undone by the curse of fame. The details, however, show how fame was only the final, dramatic sting of a death foretold by Carter's personality, the pressure to be first where the action is, the fear that his pictures were never good enough, the existential lucidity that came to him from surviving violence again and again - and the drugs he used to banish that lucidity. If there is a paramount lesson to be drawn from Carter's meteoric rise and fall, it is that tragedy does not always have heroic dimensions. "I have always had it all at my feet," read the last words of his suicide note, "but being me just fit up anyway."

First, there was history. Kevin Carter was born in 1960, the year Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was outlawed. Descended from English immigrants, Carter was not part of the Afrikaner mainstream that ruled the country. Indeed, its ideology appalled him. Yet he was caught up in its historic misadventure.

His devoutly Roman Catholic parents, Jimmy and Roma, lived in Parkmore, a tree-lined Johannesburg suburb - and they accepted apartheid. Kevin, however, like many of his generation, soon began to question it openly. "The police used to go around arresting black people for not carrying their passes," his mother recalls. "They used to treat them very badly, and we felt unable to do anything about it. But Kevin got very angry about it. He used to have arguments with his father. "Why couldn't we do something about it? Why didn't we go shout at those police?' "

Though Carter insisted he loved his parents, he told his closest friends his childhood was unhappy. As a teenager, he found his thrills riding motorcycles and fantasized about becoming a race-car driver. After graduating from a Catholic boarding school in Pretoria in 1976, Carter studied pharmacy before dropping out with bad grades a year later. Without a student deferment, he was conscripted into the South African Defense Force, where he found upholding the apartheid regime loathsome. Once, after he took the side of a black mess-hall waiter, some Afrikaans-speaking soldiers called him a kaffir-boetie ("nigger lover") and beat him up. In 1980 Carter went absent without leave, rode a motorcycle to Durban and, calling himself David, became a disk jockey. He longed to see his family but felt too ashamed to return. One day after he lost his job, he swallowed scores of sleeping pills, pain-killers and rat poison. He survived. He returned to the S.A.D.F. to finish his service and was injured in 1983 while on guard duty at air force headquarters in Pretoria. A bomb attributed to the A.N.C. had exploded, killing 19 people. After leaving the service, Carter got a job at a camera supply shop and drifted into journalism, first as a weekend sports photographer for the Johannesburg Sunday Express. When riots began sweeping the black townships in 1984, Carter moved to the Johannesburg Star and aligned himself with the crop of young, white photojournalists who wanted to expose the brutality of apartheid - a mission that had once been the almost exclusive calling of South Africa's black photographers. "They put themselves in face of danger, were arrested numerous times, but never quit. They literally were willing to sacrifice themselves for what they believed in," says American photojournalist James Nachtwey, who frequently worked with Carter and his friends. By 1990, civil war was raging between Mandela's A.N.C. and the Zulu-supported Inkatha Freedom Party. For whites, it became potentially fatal to work the townships alone. To diminish the dangers, Carter hooked up with three friends - Ken Oosterbroek of the Star and free-lancers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva - and they began moving through Soweto and Tokoza at dawn. If a murderous gang was going to shoot up a bus, throw someone off a train or cut up somebody on the street, it was most likely to happen as township dwellers began their journeys to work in the soft, shadowy light of an African morning. The four became so well known for capturing the violence that Living, a Johannesburg magazine, dubbed them "the Bang-Bang Club."

Even with the teamwork, however, cruising the townships was often a perilous affair. Well-armed government security forces used excessive firepower. The chaotic hand-to-hand street fighting between black factions involved AK-47s, spears and axes. "At a funeral some mourners caught one guy, hacked him, shot him, ran over him with a car and set him on fire," says Silva, describing a typical encounter. "My first photo showed this guy on the ground as the crowd told him they were going to kill him. We were lucky to get away."

Sometimes it took more than a camera and camaraderie to get through the work. Marijuana, known locally as dagga, is widely available in South Africa. Carter and many other photojournalists smoked it habitually in the townships, partly to relieve tension and partly to bond with gun-toting street warriors. Although he denied it, Carter, like many hard-core dagga users, moved on to something more dangerous: smoking the "white pipe," a mixture of dagga and Mandrax, a banned tranquilizer containing methaqualone. It provides an intense, immediate kick and then allows the user to mellow out for an hour or two.

By 1991, working on the dawn patrol had paid off for one of the Bang-Bang Club. Marinovich won a Pulitzer for his September 1990 photographs of a Zulu being stabbed to death by A.N.C. supporters. That prize raised the stakes for the rest of the club - especially Carter. And for Carter other comparisons cropped up. Though Oosterbroek was his best friend, they were, according to Nachtwey, "like the polarities of personality types. Ken was the successful photographer with the loving wife. His life was in order." Carter had bounced from romance to romance, fathering a daughter out of wedlock. In 1993 Carter headed north of the border with Silva to photograph the rebel movement in famine-stricken Sudan. To make the trip, Carter had taken a leave from the Weekly Mail and borrowed money for the air fare. Immediately after their plane touched down in the village of Ayod, Carter began snapping photos of famine victims. Seeking relief from the sight of masses of people starving to death, he wandered into the open bush. He heard a soft, high-pitched whimpering and saw a tiny girl trying to make her way to the feeding center. As he crouched to photograph her, a vulture landed in view. Careful not to disturb the bird, he positioned himself for the best possible image. He would later say he waited about 20 minutes, hoping the vulture would spread its wings. It did not, and after he took his photographs, he chased the bird away and watched as the little girl resumed her struggle. Afterward he sat under a tree, lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried. "He was depressed afterward," Silva recalls. "He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter."

After another day in Sudan, Carter returned to Johannesburg. Coincidentally, the New York Times, which was looking for pictures of Sudan, bought his photograph and ran it on March 26, 1993. The picture immediately became an icon of Africa's anguish. Hundreds of people wrote and called the Times asking what had happened to the child (the paper reported that it was not known whether she reached the feeding center); and papers around the world reproduced the photo. Friends and colleagues complimented Carter on his feat. His self-confidence climbed.

Carter quit the Weekly Mail and became a free-lance photojournalist - an alluring but financially risky way of making a living, providing no job security, no health insurance and no death benefits. He eventually signed up with the Reuter news agency for a guarantee of roughly $2,000 a month and began to lay plans for covering his country's first multiracial elections in April. The next few weeks, however, would bring depression and self-doubt, only momentarily interrupted by triumph.

The troubles started on March 11. Carter was covering the unsuccessful invasion of Bophuthatswana by white right-wing vigilantes intent on propping up a black homeland, a showcase of apartheid. Carter found himself just feet away from the summary execution of right-wingers by a black "Bop" policeman. "Lying in the middle of the gunfight," he said, "I was wondering about which millisecond next I was going to die, about putting something on film they could use as my last picture."

His pictures would eventually be splashed across front pages around the world, but he came away from the scene in a funk. First, there was the horror of having witnessed murder. Perhaps as importantly, while a few colleagues had framed the scene perfectly, Carter was reloading his camera with film just as the executions took place. "I knew I had missed this f--- shot," he said subsequently. "I drank a bottle of bourbon that night."

At the same time, he seemed to be stepping up his drug habit, including smoking the white pipe. A week after the Bop executions, he was seen staggering around while on assignment at a Mandela rally in Johannesburg. Later he crashed his car into a suburban house and was thrown in jail for 10 hours on suspicion of drunken driving. His superior at Reuter was furious at having to go to the police station to recover Carter's film of the Mandela event. Carter's girlfriend, Kathy Davidson, a schoolteacher, was even more upset. Drugs had become a growing issue in their one-year relationship. Over Easter, she asked Carter to move out until he cleaned up his life.

With only weeks to go before the elections, Carter's job at Reuter was shaky, his love life was in jeopardy and he was scrambling to find a new place to live. And then, on April 12, 1994, the New York Times phoned to tell him he had won the Pulitzer. As jubilant Times foreign picture editor Nancy Buirski gave him the news, Carter found himself rambling on about his personal problems. "Kevin!" she interrupted, "You've just won a Pulitzer! These things aren't going to be that important now."

Early on Monday, April 18, the Bang-Bang Club headed out to Tokoza township, 10 miles from downtown Johannesburg, to cover an outbreak of violence. Shortly before noon, with the sun too bright for taking good pictures, Carter returned to the city. Then on the radio he heard that his best friend, Oosterbroek, had been killed in Tokoza. Marinovich had been gravely wounded. Oosterbroek's death devastated Carter, and he returned to work in Tokoza the next day, even though the violence had escalated. He later told friends that he and not Ken "should have taken the bullet."

New York was a respite. By all accounts, Carter made the most of his first visit to Manhattan. The Times flew him in and put him up at the Marriott Marquis just off Times Square. His spirits soaring, he took to calling New York "my town."

With the Pulitzer, however, he had to deal not only with acclaim but also with the critical focus that comes with fame. Some journalists in South Africa called his prize a "fluke," alleging that he had somehow set up the tableau. Others questioned his ethics. "The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering," said the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, "might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." Even some of Carter's friends wondered aloud why he had not helped the girl.

Carter was painfully aware of the photojournalist's dilemma. "I had to think visually," he said once, describing a shoot-out. "I am zooming in on a tight shot of the dead guy and a splash of red. Going into his khaki uniform in a pool of blood in the sand. The dead man's face is slightly gray. You are making a visual here. But inside something is screaming, "My God.' But it is time to work. Deal with the rest later. If you can't do it, get out of the game." Says Nachtwey, "Every photographer who has been involved in these stories has been affected. You become changed forever. Nobody does this kind of work to make themselves feel good. It is very hard to continue."

Carter did not look forward to going home. Summer was just beginning in New York, but late June was still winter in South Africa, and Carter became depressed almost as soon as he got off the plane. "Joburg is dry and brown and cold and dead, and so damn full of bad memories and absent friends," he wrote in a letter never mailed to a friend, Esquire picture editor Marianne Butler in New York.

Nevertheless, Carter carefully listed story ideas and faxed some of them off to Sygma. Work did not proceed smoothly. Though it was not his fault, Carter felt guilty when a bureaucratic foul-up caused the cancellation of an interview by a writer from Parade magazine, a Sygma client, with Mandela in Cape Town. Then came an even more unpleasant experience. Sygma told Carter to stay in Cape Town and cover French President Francois Mitterrand's state visit to South Africa. The story was spot news, but according to editors at Sygma's Paris office, Carter shipped his film too late to be of use. In any case, they complained, the quality of the photos was too poor to offer to Sygma's clients.

According to friends, Carter began talking openly about suicide. Part of his anxiety was over the Mitterrand assignment. But mostly he seemed worried about money and making ends meet. When an assignment in Mozambique for TIME came his way, he eagerly accepted. Despite setting three alarm clocks to make his early-morning flight on July 20, he missed the plane. Furthermore, after six days in Mozambique, he walked off his return flight to Johannesburg, leaving a package of undeveloped film on his seat. He realized his mistake when he arrived at a friend's house. He raced back to the airport but failed to turn up anything. Carter was distraught and returned to the friend's house in the morning, threatening to smoke a white pipe and gas himself to death.

Carter and a friend, Judith Matloff, 36, an American correspondent for Reuter, dined on Mozambican prawns he had brought back. He was apparently too ashamed to tell her about the lost film. Instead they discussed their futures. Carter proposed forming a writer-photographer free-lance team and traveling Africa together.

On the morning of Wednesday, July 27, the last day of his life, Carter appeared cheerful. He remained in bed until nearly noon and then went to drop off a picture that had been requested by the Weekly Mail. In the paper's newsroom, he poured out his anguish to former colleagues, one of whom gave him the number of a therapist and urged him to phone her.

The last person to see Carter alive, it seems, was Oosterbroek's widow, Monica. As night fell, Carter turned up unannounced at her home to vent his troubles. Still recovering from her husband's death three months earlier, she was in little condition to offer counsel. They parted at about 5:30 p.m.

The Braamfonteinspruit is a small river that cuts southward through Johannesburg's northern suburbs - and through Parkmore, where the Carters once lived. At around 9 p.m., Kevin Carter backed his red Nissan pickup truck against a blue gum tree at the Field and Study Center. He had played there often as a little boy. The Sandton Bird Club was having its monthly meeting there, but nobody saw Carter as he used silver gaffer tape to attach a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and run it to the passenger-side window. Wearing unwashed Lee jeans and an Esquire T shirt, he got in and switched on the engine. Then he put music on his Walkman and lay over on his side, using the knapsack as a pillow.

The suicide note he left behind is a litany of nightmares and dark visions, a clutching attempt at autobiography, self-analysis, explanation, excuse. After coming home from New York, he wrote, he was "depressed . . . without phone . . . money for rent . . . money for child support . . . money for debts . . . money!!! . . . I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners . . . " And then this: "I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky."

Delete all emails from IRS: It is a phishing scam!!!

Beware of tax refund 'phishing' scams

It's just the news that hardworking taxpayers want to see in their inbox: an update on their refund from the Internal Revenue Service. But instead of clicking on that e-mail's links, federal officials advise you to hit the delete key.

That's because dozens of scams, known as "phishing" schemes, are making the rounds, poised to steal your personal information.

"This phishing scheme is exploding," said IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.

"Last year we got wind of seven different kinds of schemes. That was in all of 2005. This year we've already seen 65."

Even the commissioner of the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance got one of the phishing e-mails -- on his government computer.

"It's a reflection of how brazen these crooks have become," Commissioner Andrew Eristoff said.

"Here they are targeting a tax administrator with a tax refund scam. Unbelievable," he said.

Phishing is an e-mail trick that "lures" users with a promise of money or an urgent security warning that asks users to update their information. But instead of going to a financial institution or the government, the precious personal data goes to identity thieves.

IRS doesn't e-mail taxpayers
At least during this tax season, Internet users don't even have to try and distinguish real from fake information from the IRS. Anything you get in your inbox with an IRS address is a fraud.

"We do not communicate with taxpayers by e-mail so no one should respond to an e-mail purporting to be from the IRS," Everson said.

Bogus offers on the Internet are nothing new. But sneakiness and sophistication have reached a level that can fool just about any user at one time or another.

Computer researchers are studying what makes fake sites so believable, with a goal of helping Web designers beef up security.

Rachna Dhamija, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University, said anyone can be duped.

"In our study, users proved vulnerable across the board to phishing attacks," Dhamija said. "Neither their age nor their previous experience with the Web site nor their level of education had any impact on their ability to distinguish a phishing Web site from a legitimate Web site."

Researchers at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, showed a series of real and fake Web sites to 22 people, all staff or students at UC Berkeley. Their ages ranged from 18 to the mid-60s.

"Some of our most educated users and most cautious users were also very surprised at their inability to detect the legitimate versus phishing Web sites," Dhamija said.

The "best" of the "worst"?

The site that fooled 90 percent of study participants was an exact replica of the legitimate Web site of the Bank of the West. But in the address bar, instead of the word west being spelled with a w, it was spelled with two v's. That was tough for users to spot, Dhamija said.

Many phishing Web sites prey on the fears users have of making their personal information vulnerable. E-mails will arrive from banks, credit card companies or Internet Service Providers with urgent warnings to "update your account now!"

One way users can protect themselves is to lessen the chance of landing on a phishing site in the first place.

"One way to do that is to never click on a link from an e-mail. Users should always type in the URL directly into the address bar," Dhamija said. "For example, if they want to go to the IRS Web site, they need to type www.irs.gov."

And Internet users should always check to make sure they don't have a typo in the address. That's a common tactic of criminals, to create a bogus site that is a letter or two off from a legitimate one.

"If users visit Web sites frequently, a financial Web site for example, they should bookmark that site or save it in their "Favorites" in the Internet Explorer browser," Dhamija said.

Will e-mail be a part of IRS communication in the future?

"Over 50 percent of returns are now filed electronically," Everson said. "That is safe, that is secure. We look at the further use of technology, but right now, all I can say is we do not reach out and communicate with taxpayers by e-mail."

What a shameful act: Maple Grove's new Hindu temple vandalized

Police say the act appears to be random but aren't ruling out the possibility of a hate crime. The temple might not open on schedule.

MAPLE GROVE, Minn. (AP) - Authorities were trying to determine Friday who caused several thousand dollars in damage to a $9 million Hindu temple under construction in this Minneapolis suburb.

Police said they had no suspects, but that the vandalism didn't appear to be a hate crime, although they didn't rule it out, either.

Umesh Singh of the Hindu Society of Minnesota said he agrees with police that the act appeared to be random.

The vandal or vandals caused extensive damage to some of the temple's religious statues, which were carved by artisans in India.

Singh said some of the deities were decapitated and dismembered and thus cannot be used for worship, according to Hindu tradition.

"We cannot use most of them," he said, referring to Hindu tradition that does not allow damaged deities to be used for worship.

The walls of the auditorium and ceiling of a dining hall were punctured about 125 times, apparently by blows from a baseball bat, and a window was broken in one of the classrooms, according to temple officials and police.

Temple officials said it would take up to 12 weeks and four sculptors to re-carve each of the seven or eight 4-to-6-foot-figures that were damaged.

Five deities were not vandalized.

Police Capt. Tracy Stille said the damage didn't appear to fit with distinct characteristics characteristic of hate crimes.

"This was extensive," he said. "We're certainly looking at any possibility, bias-motivated or not."

There are more than 20,000 Hindus in Minnesota and between 1 million and 1.6 million in the United States. While there are Hindu houses of worship in Brooklyn Park and northeast Minneapolis, the nearest traditional-style temple similar to the one being built in Maple Grove is in Chicago.

Officials of the 42,000-square-foot temple, which is on a 40-acre site, were assessing whether it could open as scheduled in June.

"We have had dreams to have this place for the last 30 years. We worked so hard," society member Kumud Sane said.

Sridhar Ranganatha, a volunteer priest at the temple, disagreed with those who doubt the vandalism was a hate crime. He said it looks like the work of someone who had a grudge against the Hindu community.

"We're a peace-loving community," he said. "Someone has done it out of hatred."



Maple Grove Temple Vandalized

After years of planning, the new Hindu Temple in Maple Grove, Minn. was on track to open in June. But after Wednesday night, the building is a mess and leaders are asking why someone wanted to damage their future place of worship.

Someone broke into the building on Wednesday and started bashing in the walls, smashing windows, and destroying hand-crafted statues from India that had taken two years to receive.

Dr. Shashikant Sane of the Hindu Society of Minnesota wondered who would do such an act.

"We are very sad," Sane said. "The whole community is very, very sorry about it."

The precious statues can't be salvaged ... and so much care and detail went into the religious symbols.

Kumud Sane, Hindu Society of Minnesota trustee, called it a "terrible act."

“We have had dreams to have this place for the past 30 years, we have worked so hard. Why would someone come here and do this type of action," he said.

Inside the building, it looks like someone broke in through a downstairs window, and took a swing every few feet. Temple leaders said it does not look like a hate crime and they have always felt welcomed by the community.

"We don't want to call it a hate crime. If something comes up later, that's a different story," Dr. Shashikant Sane said.

"It hurts a lot and I'm not a very emotional person ... but inside it hurts," said Umesh Singh, another society member.

More than 125 holes have been smashed into the walls in the building, as if someone used a baseball bat. Now the process to clean up begins, but still temple leaders want to open the $9 million building as planned the first week of June.

As of Friday, police have not made any arrests in the case

Who reads the papers....

A little British humour...


Sir Humphrey Appleby: The only way to understand the press is to remember that they pander to their reader's prejudices.

Prime Minister James Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country. The Times is read by people who actually do run the country. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by people who own the country. The Morning Star is read by people who think that the country ought to be run by another country. The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey Appleby (smiling): Then Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard Woolley: The Sun readers dont care who runs the country as long as she's got big tits.

~ Yes, Prime Minister, BBC

Finding life’s purpose

Many spiritual traditions revolve around one central question: “Who am I ?” Even the business world ponders this crucial matter. According to business gurus, the first step on the road to success is asking yourself this very question: “What’s my mission? What on Earth am I doing? Am I in the right place?”


If you can’t answer these questions, then you are wasting 90% of your time and energy doing things that are neither your mission nor your business! You will feel an inner anxiety, urging you to search for the deeper meaning of your life. If you consider living to be painful, if you feel dissatisfied, then you have not yet found the purpose of your life.

If you are questioning the meaning of life, if you can’t find inner peace, if you are not satisfied with choices you’ve made in life, if you don’t know which way to turn, if you feel your life is stuffed with things that aren’t of your choosing and that don’t satisfy you, if you often feel burdened and bad-tempered, if you “have everything to feel happy” but don’t, then it is time for you to discover your true self !

Human beings want to feel useful. We long to give our lives some deeper meaning. As long as you have not discovered this deeper meaning, you feel frustrated and on the wrong track. We want our lives to be worthwhile. This does not mean we need to achieve ‘great feats’ to become world famous. We just need to feel in place and do the right thing surrounded by the right people. It’s about finding out our mission. It’s about finding ‘inner peace’.

Our mission on Earth is twofold. The general aspect is that we are here to learn to bring more love into the world. The personal aspect is that everyone has its own peculiar, unique way of doing this. Your mission represents the central piece of your life. The surrounding pieces represent your family, your relationship, your kids, your job, your home, your health, your friend, and so on. The centerpiece holds all of this together. That centerpiece, that’s you. You are the most important person in your life, and you came to this world to do something important. Otherwise you simply would not be here!

As long as you haven’t identified the centrepiece, you’ll be wrestling with dissatisfaction, powerlessness, frustrations and fatigue. Some people solve jigsaw puzzles by first fitting all the pieces on the borders, and then squeeze in the piece in the middle. That’s putting the cart before the horse.

These people reason: “When I find the right partner, find the right job, get paid a good salary, have some kids, have my own house, meet some friends, stay healthy, then I will be happy!” But that’s not the way things work. As long as the centrepiece is missing from the puzzle, you too will feel empty inside. It is your responsibility to discover your mission and get things under way.

Even the cells of your body react to this lack of purpose, this feeling of emptiness. They suffer from spiritual malnutrition, feel useless and bored, resulting in a physical state of sluggishness and lethargy. This physical state will eventually cause several physical discomforts and complaints.

Occupying yourself with “your disease” and “feeding” yourself with medication or other such products is just another attempt at filling the void inside. This is because the status of “being ill” allows you to identify: “I am allergic to this or that, I am a cancer patient, I am an Alzheimer, I am…” Once you have started identifying yourself by your disease, it will certainly be on your mind day and night.

If you are not in touch with your own desires, you will easily fall prey to expectations projected upon you by your environment. If you are not following your own path, then you must be following someone else’s! If you are not clear on your own life mission, you will find it hard to say “no” to what other people want you to do. This undecidedness makes you available for all who cross your path and want a piece of you, draining your energy.

As long as you are not clear on the shape of that centerpiece, you are submitted to others who may not care about what’s best for you. Just like disease, these kinds of negative relationships are a manifestation of low-level energy, showing that you have lost focus and have strayed from your own golden brick road. Your self-esteem is probably pretty low and you suffer from serious doubts and fears. The longer you put of the search, the more the feeling that something is missing will devour you. Your self-esteem will only decrease.

The best way to rebuild your fragile self is to make the search for your life mission your number one priority and dedicate yourself to it. Why is this so important? Because you can only find real joy in life by discovering and living according to the unique way of your personal evolution. But, maybe you think, can’t I just continue living life the way I have been all along? Can’t I just try to hang in there and keep the status quo?

The answer is “yes”. You can keep living your life in a monotonic, sad, senseless way. But don’t expect any real satisfaction. The need to feel useful is so fundamental that you cannot feel happy as long as you have no clue what you are here for. Your mission gives meaning to your life. Your mission is your very reason for existence. You are not alone in this search. This mission is also looking for you. It wants to be fulfilled by you and by nobody else. It is your personal mission. Nobody else is equipped to do it for you. Your mission will keep haunting you until you take it seriously and start implementing it.

Going against your mission is going against yourself. This is the same as ignoring the call of your soul, as ignoring your strongest desires, as signing a contract for eternal discontent…You can’t escape your mission. One day you will have to start dedicating yourself to it. Has this day come for you now? After all, you are reading these lines which shows your honest desire to start looking for the deeper meaning of your being.

All you wanted to know about Tsunami's

What is a tsunami?

A tsunami (pronounced su-nah-me) is a wave train, or series of waves, generated in a body of water by an impulsive disturbance that vertically displaces the water column. Earthquakes, landslides, volcanic eruptions, explosions, and even the impact of cosmic bodies, such as meteorites, can generate tsunamis. Tsunamis can savagely attack coastlines, causing devastating property damage and loss of life.



What does "tsunami" mean?

Tsunami is a Japanese word with the English translation, "harbor wave." Represented by two characters, the top character, "tsu," means harbor, while the bottom character, "nami," means "wave." In the past, tsunamis were sometimes referred to as "tidal waves" by the general public, and as "seismic sea waves" by the scientific community. The term "tidal wave" is a misnomer; although a tsunami's impact upon a coastline is dependent upon the tidal level at the time a tsunami strikes, tsunamis are unrelated to the tides. Tides result from the imbalanced, extraterrestrial, gravitational influences of the moon, sun, and planets. The term "seismic sea wave" is also misleading. "Seismic" implies an earthquake-related generation mechanism, but a tsunami can also be caused by a non-seismic event, such as a landslide or meteorite impact.



How do tsunamis differ from other water waves?

Tsunamis are unlike wind-generated waves, which many of us may have observed on a local lake or at a coastal beach, in that they are characterised as shallow-water waves, with long periods and wave lengths. The wind-generated swell one sees at a California beach, for example, spawned by a storm out in the Pacific and rhythmically rolling in, one wave after another, might have a period of about 10 seconds and a wave length of 150 m. A tsunami, on the other hand, can have a wavelength in excess of 100 km and period on the order of one hour.

As a result of their long wave lengths, tsunamis behave as shallow-water waves. A wave becomes a shallow-water wave when the ratio between the water depth and its wave length gets very small. Shallow-water waves move at a speed that is equal to the square root of the product of the acceleration of gravity (9.8 m/s/s) and the water depth. Let's see what this implies: In the Pacific Ocean, where the typical water depth is about 4000 m, a tsunami travels at about 200 m/s, or over 700 km/hr. Because the rate at which a wave loses its energy is inversely related to its wave length, tsunamis not only propagate at high speeds, they can also travel great, transoceanic distances with limited energy losses. The earthquake-generated 1960 Chilean tsunami, for instance, travelled across over 17,000 km across the Pacific to hit Japan. The wave crests bend as the tsunami travels —- this is called refraction. Wave refraction is caused by segments of the wave moving at different speeds as the water depth along the crest varies.



How do earthquakes generate tsunamis?

Tsunamis can be generated when the sea floor abruptly deforms and vertically displaces the overlying water. Tectonic earthquakes are a particular kind of earthquake that are associated with the earth's crustal deformation; when these earthquakes occur beneath the sea, the water above the deformed area is displaced from its equilibrium position. Waves are formed as the displaced water mass, which acts under the influence of gravity, attempts to regain its equilibrium. When large areas of the sea floor elevate or subside, a tsunami can be created. Large vertical movements of the earth's crust can occur at plate boundaries. Plates interact along these boundaries called faults. Around the margins of the Pacific Ocean, for example, denser oceanic plates slip under continental plates in a process known as subduction. Subduction earthquakes are particularly effective in generating tsunamis.



How do landslides, volcanic eruptions, and cosmic collisions generate tsunamis?

A tsunami can be generated by any disturbance that displaces a large water mass from its equilibrium position. In the case of earthquake-generated tsunamis, the water column is disturbed by the uplift or subsidence of the sea floor. Submarine landslides, which often accompany large earthquakes, as well as collapses of volcanic edifices, can also disturb the overlying water column as sediment and rock slump downslope and are redistributed across the sea floor. Similarly, a violent submarine volcanic eruption can create an impulsive force that uplifts the water column and generates a tsunami. Conversely, supermarine landslides and cosmic-body impacts disturb the water from above, as momentum from falling debris is transferred to the water into which the debris falls. Generally speaking, tsuna-mis generated from these mechanisms, unlike the Pacific-wide tsunamis caused by some earthquakes, dissipate quickly and rarely affect coastlines distant from the source area. What happens to a tsunami as it approaches land?

As a tsunami leaves the deep water of the open ocean and travels into the shallower water near the coast, it transforms. If you read the "How do tsunamis differ from other water waves?" section, you discovered that a tsunami travels at a speed that is related to the water depth — hence, as the water depth decreases, the tsunami slows.

The tsunami's energy flux, which is dependent on both its wave speed and wave height, remains nearly constant. Consequently, as the tsunami's speed diminishes as it travels into shallower water, its height grows. Because of this shoaling effect, a tsunami, imperceptible at sea, may grow to be several meters or more in height near the coast. When it finally reaches the coast, a tsunami may appear as a rapidly rising or falling tide, a series of breaking waves, or even a bore.



What happens when a tsunami encounters land?

As a tsunami approaches shore, we've learned in the "What happens to a tsunami as it approaches land?" section that it begins to slow and grow in height. Just like other water waves, tsunamis begin to lose energy as they rush onshore — part of the wave energy is reflected offshore, while the shoreward-propagating wave energy is dissipated through bottom friction and turbulence. Despite these losses, tsunamis still reach the coast with tremendous amounts of energy. Tsunamis have great erosional potential, stripping beaches of sand that may have taken years to accumulate and undermining trees and other coastal vegetation. Capable of inundating, or flooding, hundreds of meters inland past the typical high-water level, the fast-moving water associated with the inundating tsunami can crush homes and other coastal structures. Tsuna-mis may reach a maximum vertical height onshore above sea level, often called a run-up height, of 10, 20, and even 30 meters.

Lyrics to Chaiyya Chaiyya, (Dil Se / Inside Man)

The Inside Man starring Denzel Washington, Clive Owen and Jodie Foster has "Chal Chaiyya Chaiyya" song in the starting credits. The song is from the Hindi movie, "Dil Se". "Chal Chaiyya Chaiyya" is sung by Sukhwinder Singh & Sapna Aswathi; composed by A.R. Rahman and lyrics are by Sampooran Singh Gulzar
The lyrics are in Urdu and here is the meaning:


"Chal Chaiyya Chaiyya"


Chorus:
jinke sar ho ishq ki chhaanh He whose head is in the shadow of love
pao.n ke neeche jannat hogi will have heaven beneath his feet.
jinke sar ho ishq ki chhaanh Whose head is in the shadow of love...
chal chhaiyya Walk in the shadow.
Paon jannat chale chal chhaiyyan Walk in heaven, walk in the shadow.

vo yaar hai jo khushboo ki tarah There's a friend who is like a sweet fragrance,
jiski zubaan urdu ki tarah whose words are like Urdy poetry
meri shaam raat meri qayaamat who is my evening, my night, my resurrection.
vo yaar mera saiyya saiyya That friend is my beloved!

Chorus

gulposh kabhi itaraye kahi Sometimes (my beloved) flirts like a flower,
maheke to nazar aa jaaye kahi so fragrantly that you may see her scent.
taaweez banake pahanu use Having made it into an charm, I will wear it.
aayat ki tarah mil jaaye kahin She shall be obtained as a miracle is obtained.
mera nagama vahi mera qalama vahi She is my song, my declaration of faith
vo yaar hai jo imaam ki tarah My friend is like a priest to me.
mera nagama nagama mera qalama qalama My song... my declaration of faith...
yaar misale os chale She moves like the dew.
paon ke tale firdaus chale She walks with the garden of heaven beneath her feet,
kabhi Daal Daal kabhii paat paat sometimes through branches, sometimes amidst leaves.
mai.n hawa pe DhunDhuu us ke nishaan I shall search the wind for her trail!

Chorus

mein uske roop ka shehdaai I trade in her beauty.
vo dhoop chhanhon sa harjaai Fickle, she flits shamelessly from sun to shade.
vo shokh rang badalta hai She changes her bright colors;
mein rang roop ka saudaee I negotiate that as well.

Chorus

A Reason to stay awake ???

A remarkable magic of numbers that happened 100 years ago will take place early Wednesday - when time and date will read 01:02:03 04/05/06 exactly at two minutes and three seconds after 1 a.m.

This interesting phenomenon last happened in 1906 - on April 5 at two minutes and three seconds after 1 a.m. The clock then showed exactly what one would get to see early Wednesday just after 1 a.m.

This unusual number game will again happen after 100 years - in 2106

So keep awake and see the time at 1 a.m. Wednesday. You might never get to see it again.

Divisibility Tests

Dividing by 2
If the number ends in a even digit, it is divisible by 2
Example:
22 is divisible by 2
15421464605613404646518 is divisible by 2



Dividing by 3
Add up the digits: if the sum is divisible by three, then the number is as well. Examples:
111111: the digits add to 6 so the whole number is divisible by three.
87687687. The digits add up to 57, and 5 plus seven is 12, so the original number is divisible by 3



Dividing by 4
Look at the last two digits. If the number formed by its last two digits is divisible by 4, the original number is as well.
Examples:
100 is divisible by 4.
1732782989264864826421834612 is divisible by four also, because 12 is divisible by four.



Dividing by 5
If the last digit is a five or a zero, then the number is divisible by 5.
Examples:
125 is divisible by 5
175983421545613651120 is divisible by 5



Dividing by 6
Check 3 and 2. If the number is divisible by both 3 and 2, it is divisible by 6 as well.



Dividing by 7
Use the 3 coefficients (1 , 2 , 3). Multiply the first number starting from the ones place by 1, then the second from the right by 3, the third by 2, the fourth by -1, the fifth by -3, the sixth by -2, and the seventh by 1, and so forth.

Example: 348967129356876.

6 + 21 + 16 - 6 - 15 - 6 + 9 + 6 + 2 - 7 - 18 - 18 + 8 + 12 + 6 = 16
means the number is not multiple of seven.

If the number was 348967129356874, then the number is a multiple of seven
because instead of 16, we would find 14 as a result, which is a multiple of 7.

So the pattern is as follows: for a number onmlkjihgfedcba, calculate

a + 3b + 2c - d - 3e - 2f + g + 3h + 2i - j - 3k - 2l + m + 3n + 2o.

Example: 348967129356874.

Below each digit let me write its respective figure.

3 4 8 9 6 7 1 2 9 3 5 6 8 7 6
2 3 1 -2 -3 -1 2 3 1 -2 -3 -1 2 3 1

(3×2) + (4×3) + (8×1) + (9×-2) + (6×-3) + (7×-1) +
(1×2) + (2×3) + (9×1) + (3×-2) + (5×-3) + (6×-1) +
(8×2) + (7×3) + (6×1) = 16 -- not a multiple of 7.



Dividing by 8
Check the last three digits. Since 1000 is divisible by 8, if the last three digits of a number are divisible by 8, then so is the whole number.
Example: 33333888 is divisible by 8; 33333886 isn't.



Dividing by 9
Add the digits. If that sum is divisible by nine, then the original number is as well.



Dividing by 10
If the number ends in 0, it is divisible by 10.



Dividing by 11
Let's look at 352, which is divisible by 11; the answer is 32. 3+2 is 5; another way to say this is that 35 -2 is 33.
Now look at 3531, which is also divisible by 11. It is not a coincidence that 353-1 is 352 and 11 × 321 is 3531.

Here is a generalization of this system. Let's look at the number 94186565.

First we want to find whether it is divisible by 11, but on the way we are going to save the numbers that we use: in every step we will subtract the last digit from the other digits, then save the subtracted amount in order. Start with

9418656 - 5 = 9418651 SAVE 5
Then 941865 - 1 = 941864 SAVE 1
Then 94186 - 4 = 94182 SAVE 4
Then 9418 - 2 = 9416 SAVE 2
Then 941 - 6 = 935 SAVE 6
Then 93 - 5 = 88 SAVE 5
Then 8 - 8 = 0 SAVE 8
Now write the numbers we saved in reverse order, and we have 8562415, which multiplied by 11 is 94186565.



Dividing by 12
Check for divisibility by 3 and 4.



Dividing by 13
Delete the last digit from the given number. Then subtract nine times the deleted digit from the remaining number. If what is left is divisible by 13, then so is the original number.

How a man dresses...

Qualifying king - Schumacher or Senna?

Michael Schumacher's statistical dominance of Formula One racing is hardly news. By pretty much any objective standard you care to employ, he's already proved himself the most successful driver the sport has ever produced. But after taking P1 on the grid in Bahrain, he's now just one away from clinching the last of the major statistical records to have eluded him so far - that of the late Ayrton Senna's 65 pole positions.

Not that the seven-times world champion needs to break this final record to prove himself, of course. He's already taken 84 victories from 231 race starts. By contrast, the next most successful driver, Alain Prost, managed ‘just’ 51 wins from 199 races. Schumacher has taken more fastest laps (69), enjoyed more visits to the podium (143), scored more championship points (1256), led for more laps (4769) and led for more distance (22,469 kilometres) than any other driver in the history of the sport.

Despite all of the above, many will regard this final record - and the relative time it has taken Schumacher to reach it - as clear evidence that this is one area where he can't match the mercurial Senna. The Brazilian racked up his 65 poles in the 161 races that preceded his tragic death at Imola in 1994. Schumacher has needed almost half as many races again to reach the same mark.

Not only is that a considerably better ‘strike rate’, Senna taking pole on average every 2.5 races during his career, versus one pole for every 3.5 race starts for Schumacher - but the Brazilian was also empirically better able to ‘over-qualify’ relatively poor cars. In his first season with a front-ranking team, driving for Lotus in 1985, he managed to score seven poles, although the car's disastrous reliability only allowed him to turn one of those into a victory. The following year he bettered that with no fewer than nine pole positions for Lotus, although he emerged victorious at the end of only two of those races.

And in 1988, by now driving for McLaren, Senna put in what was possibly the greatest ever qualifying lap - taking P1 at the tight and twisty Monaco circuit with a time 1.4 seconds faster than the second-placed man - Alain Prost, who was driving an identical car. Gerhard Berger's third placed Ferrari was 2.7 seconds down on him. It was the most dominant qualifying performance in the recent history of the sport - and Senna later confessed that he had felt himself to be having a strange, out-of-body experience while he was doing it.

Schumacher has long claimed to be unconcerned with the statistical records that he is breaking - and he's long since proved himself the most successful Formula One driver of all time. But when it comes to qualifying, the black art of extracting the absolute maximum from a car over a single flying lap, many will argue that - 66 poles or not - it's still the one place he will have to defer to Senna.

Six Sigma: An introduction

(mean - 3 sigma to mean + 3 sigma = entire Bell curve)

Six Sigma at many organizations simply means a measure of quality that strives for near perfection. Six Sigma is a disciplined, data-driven approach and methodology for eliminating defects (driving towards six standard deviations between the mean and the nearest specification limit) in any process -- from manufacturing to transactional and from product to service.

The statistical representation of Six Sigma describes quantitatively how a process is performing. To achieve Six Sigma, a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. A Six Sigma defect is defined as anything outside of customer specifications. A Six Sigma opportunity is then the total quantity of chances for a defect. Process sigma can easily be calculated using a Six Sigma calculator.

The fundamental objective of the Six Sigma methodology is the implementation of a measurement-based strategy that focuses on process improvement and variation reduction through the application of Six Sigma improvement projects. This is accomplished through the use of two Six Sigma sub-methodologies: DMAIC and DMADV. The Six Sigma DMAIC process (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) is an improvement system for existing processes falling below specification and looking for incremental improvement. The Six Sigma DMADV process (define, measure, analyze, design, verify) is an improvement system used to develop new processes or products at Six Sigma quality levels. It can also be employed if a current process requires more than just incremental improvement. Both Six Sigma processes are executed by Six Sigma Green Belts and Six Sigma Black Belts, and are overseen by Six Sigma Master Black Belts.

According to the Six Sigma Academy, Black Belts save companies approximately $230,000 per project and can complete four to 6 projects per year. General Electric, one of the most successful companies implementing Six Sigma, has estimated benefits on the order of $10 billion during the first five years of implementation. GE first began Six Sigma in 1995 after Motorola and Allied Signal blazed the Six Sigma trail. Since then, thousands of companies around the world have discovered the far reaching benefits of Six Sigma.

SA: Conquering Heroes!

South Africa win the greatest match of all

March 12, 2006

49.5 overs South Africa 438 for 9 (Gibbs 175, Smith 90, Boucher 50*) beat Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79) by one wicket

Seven years ago, in the semi-final of the 1999 World Cup, South Africa and Australia contested what has widely come to be regarded as the definitive one-day international. A total of 426 runs in two innings, twenty wickets in the day and world-class performances across the board - a match that built to a pulsating finale in which South Africa threw away their place in the World Cup final with what also came to be regarded as the definitive one-day choke.


Today, however, South Africa can be called chokers no longer, after burying the ghosts of 1999 with victory in a match even more extraordinary and nail-shredding than its illustrious forebear. Never mind 426 runs in a day, Australia had just posted a world-record 434 for 4 in a single innings - the first 400-plus total in the history of the game - with Ricky Ponting leading the line with an innings of cultured slogging that realised 164 runs of the highest class from just 105 balls. And yet they still lost - by one wicket, with one ball to spare, and with the Wanderers stadium reverting to the sort of Bullring atmosphere on which it forged its intimidating reputation.


At the halfway mark of the day, South Africa had been reduced to a near laughing stock. Ponting had been the kingpin as he reprised his World Cup-winning innings on this very ground in 2003, but every one of Australia's batsmen had taken their pound of flesh as well. Adam Gilchrist lit the blue touchpaper with an open-shouldered onslaught that realised 55 runs from 44 balls; Simon Katich provided a sheet-anchor with a difference as he creamed nine fours and a six in a 90-ball 79, and Mike Hussey - in theory Ponting's second fiddle in their 158-run stand for the third wicket - hurtled to a 51-ball 81. Australia's dominance seemed so complete that Andrew Symonds, the most notorious one-day wrecker in their ranks, was not even called upon until the scoreboard read a somewhat surreal 374 for 3.


Unsurprisingly, South Africa's bowlers took a universal pounding. Jacques Kallis disappeared for 70 runs in six overs and as the innings reached its crescendo, a flustered Roger Telemachus conceded 19 runs from four consecutive no-balls. The team had squandered a 2-0 series lead and were staring at a 3-2 defeat, and not for the first time this year, Graeme Smith's penchant for speaking his mind was looking like backfiring. With the Test series getting underway in four days' time, the need for a performance of pride had never been more urgent.


And so Smith took it upon himself to deliver, responding to his team's indignity with a brutal innings laced with fury. He made light of the early loss of Boeta Dippenaar, whose anchorman approach would not have been suited to the chase at any rate, and instead found the perfect ally in his former opening partner, Herschelle Gibbs. On a pitch that might have been sent from the Gods, the pair launched South Africa's response with a scathing stand of 187 from 121 balls, to send the first frissons of anxiety through the Australian dressing-room.


Smith made 90 from just 55 balls, and seemed set to trump Ponting's 71-ball century when he swatted the spinner, Michael Clarke, to Mike Hussey on the midwicket boundary. But Hussey's celebrations were manic and betrayed the creeping sense of foreboding that had taken hold of Australia's players. Just as South Africa had suffered for the absence of Shaun Pollock, so too was Glenn McGrath's constricting influence being missed. His understudies were simply not up to the task, with Mick Lewis earning an unwanted place in history as his ten overs were spanked for 113 runs - the most expensive analysis in any form of one-day international cricket.


Now it was Gibbs who took centre stage. The man who, memorably, dropped the World Cup at Headingley in that 1999 campaign has redeemed himself a hundred times over in the intervening years. But this was to be his crowning glory. With AB de Villiers providing a sparky sidekick, Gibbs carved great chunks out of the asking-rate, bringing up his century from 79 balls and rattling along so briskly that, by the 25-over mark, South Africa had 229 for 2 on the board, and needed a mere 206 to win. .

Only one contest could compare - the extraordinary C&G Trophy contest between Surrey and Glamorgan in 2002, when Alistair Brown scored 268 out of a total of 438 for 5, only for Glamorgan to track his side all the way with a reply of 429. In both instances, the sheer impossibility of the task galvanised the batting and turned the fielders' legs to jelly, and with Gibbs on 130, Nathan Bracken at mid-off dropped a sitter off a Lewis full-toss, and could only contemplate his navel as the Bullring roared its approval.


It was undeniably the decisive moment of the match. Bracken finished with a creditable 5 for 67, but this faux pas was written all across his features at the post-match presentations. Cashing in superbly, Gibbs hurtled to his 150 from exactly 100 balls, bringing up the landmark with his fifth six of the innings and the 21st of a bedlamic contest. He had reached a glorious 175 from 111 when Lee held onto a scuffed drive at mid-off. The stadium stood in acclaim, but with 136 runs still required and their main source of momentum gone, South Africa had plenty still to do.


Kallis and Mark Boucher regrouped with a steady partnership of 28 in six overs, but when the big-hitting Justin Kemp went cheaply, it took a blistering intervention from Johan van der Wath to reignite the chase. He drilled Lewis over long-off for two sixes in an over then added a six and a four in Bracken's eighth, as the requirement dropped from a tricky 77 from 42 balls to a gettable 36 from 22. He perished as he had lived, holing out to extra cover, and Telemachus followed soon afterwards, but not before he had clubbed an invaluable 12 from six balls.


And so it all came down to the final over, just as it had done at Edgbaston all those years ago. Brett Lee had seven runs to defend, and South Africa had two wickets in hand. A blazed four from Andrew Hall seemed to have settled the issue, but in a moment reminiscent of Lance Klusener's famous aberration, he smeared the very next delivery into the hands of Clarke at mid-on. Two runs needed then, and the No. 11, Makhaya Ntini, on strike. Lee's best effort was deflected to third man to tie the scores, and it was left to Boucher - with visions of Edgbaston swirling through his head - to seal the deal with a lofted four over mid-on. The most breathtaking game in one-day history had come to a grandstand finish, and all that remained was for the participants to pinch themselves.





Searching for a reason


Okay, why did that happen? Nearly 900 runs in one day, that doesn't happen - ever. Not in Twenty20, not in club cricket, not even in my back garden against my eight-year-old brother. So my question is why? I really want to know because I was there.


The pitch was a flat, quick deck with a carpet for an outfield, but games have been played in these conditions before. There've been plenty of flat decks and plenty of shorter boundaries with worse bowlers and big hitters. It's at altitude, the air is thinner, the ball flies further. Yes, but it's not the first game to be played on the high veld, no single batsman has ever gone massive here, Tests tend to be won [or lost] not dominated by the bat and ODIs do produce big scores, but nothing like this. Maybe there was a fix - come to think of it, there was a chap outside on a mobile phone with what looked like 22 leather jackets ... but that's a hideous thought.


Actually, the Wanderers, one of South Africa's most picturesque grounds set in the rolling, tree-lined suburbs of Johannesburg, does have previous. And usually to Australia's advantage. Steve Waugh and Greg Blewett batted all day in a Test in 1996-97 [I was there for that as well] and Adam Gilchrist smashed the then-fastest Test double-hundred as an emotional retort to personal abuse from the crowd in 2001-02. They won the 2003 World Cup here with a then-mammoth 359. And there was the Twenty20 earlier in the tour where the Australians fell two runs short chasing 200. If that was a signal of things to come, no one spotted it.


The key factor, though, was the absence of two players, Glenn McGrath and Shaun Pollock. This was a like-for-like loss - both bowl maidens in their sleep, causing much of the crowd to doze, and set the tone and pace for a day's play. Without them, anything can happen - and it did.


The game was cricket anarchy. Rules were ignored, conventional wisdom flown against, high-risks equalled high reward in every situation. Every gamble paid off, every scooped slog fell into space, every shy at the stumps missed. As the pressure and the run rate mounted so did the ferocity of the South African onslaught. Bat first, win the toss and bury the game - that is exactly what the Australians did and although they protested there was no "job-done" mentality, when you've just smashed a world record that's stood for ten years, you don't expect it to get beaten in the next three hours. South Africa has experienced a lawless past - for one glorious afternoon, the country re-visited it.


What was it like to be there? I'm not sure. The whole game was a blur of batting and you couldn't pick out the detail. Every time the bowler ran in, the ball disappeared to the boundary, often for six. Every time you looked at the scoreboard you had a double-take, could there really be that many overs left? Is that really the run rate?


And this was for both teams. With each run scored by the home side, the crowd went mad. When Herschelle Gibbs struck one of his seven sixes, the crowd made so much noise you worried for the structure of the stands. When Mark Boucher struck the winning runs, they couldn't control themselves and for a brief period real anarchy took over as the crowd on the pitch out-numbered the yellow jackets chasing them.


But it wasn't always like this - the South African faithful had suffered several stages of mourning through the Australian innings as Ricky Ponting, Adam Gilchrist, Michael Hussey and Simon Katich made South Africa's best looked like school girls. First there was anger as Andrew Hall bowled badly, followed by disbelief as Ponting swept Jacques Kallis on one knee for six, then hope (Gilchrist out) then despair. The 400 was passed with three overs left to bowl. By the end of the Australian innings, the crowd was smiling - that is all you could do. The game was up, let's sit back and enjoy this immense display of hitting and witness how many records the Australians could break. Little did they know.


As with all sporting moments of brilliance there are failures and victims. In this particular game, they were collectively known as bowlers. Superiority of bat over ball was such that you felt a bit dirty, like watching a 7-6 thriller in football - amazing but only because both defences were rubbish. It didn't matter because the South Africans love the tacky excess of one-day cricket. It is for them what Test cricket is for England fans, so this was a day of nail-biting clichés, tense faces, unable-to-watch syndrome, the nerve-shredding Ashes emotions of "I am glad I was around to witness it but I never want to go through that again".


Similarly to the Ashes, this game was a culmination of on and off pitch drama that started before Christmas in Australia, came to a head in Durban on Friday where the visitors levelled the series with a one-wicket win, and exploded with unbearable tension on what surely is the greatest one-day game ever.


Cricket is heading in this direction, though, and however tempting it might be to say this game will never be matched, you'll be wrong. When Fred Trueman took his 300th Test wicket, they thought that'd never get beaten. Now 400 has been passed twice in the same game - 500 is next. I just hope I'm there to see it.



Ponting in awe of Gibbs


Ricky Ponting has praised Herschelle Gibbs's "amazing" batting that launched South Africa to a mind-blowing one-wicket victory after Australia set a world-record 434 for 4. Gibbs pummelled 175 from 111 balls in a sensational reply before Mark Boucher's unbeaten half-century sealed the win with a ball to spare in what is already being called the greatest one-day game in history.


"We had no defence mechanisms whatsoever against the way they were hitting the ball," Ponting told AAP. "Herschelle was out in the 32nd over for 175 - that's amazing batting. We obviously bowled very, very poorly, but they certainly played exceptionally well and deserved the win."


Ponting's batting was also special - his 164 came from only 105 balls - but he did not accept the joint Man-of-the-Match award, preferring to give it to Gibbs. "I don't know where that innings came from; I don't think I've played better," Gibbs said in The Guardian. "We were smashing the ball everywhere early on, but I looked up at the scoreboard and we still needed 350 to win. We couldn't have batted any quicker and the total still wasn't coming down."


Graeme Smith, who belted 90 off 55 balls, described their success as "a bit sick really". "The pitch was great but you can't sit down and plan to chase 434," he said. "We said it was a freaky game at the halfway point, so who knows. Our initial target was 185 in 25 overs but we got way past that. It's a massive night for all of us."


Ponting was angry at what has become a regular occurrence. "We can't defend totals," he said. "There was always a chance because we did it, but there is no way they should have scored that many runs." However, he told AAP it was "just an amazing day". "You just can't fathom the sort of batting that has taken place today," he said.



It all happened at The Wanderers


South Africa's 438 for 9 is the highest total in ODIs beating the previous best by, well, a few hours. In fact, the last 12 months have seen a couple of astonishing team totals close to the 400 mark, like England's 391 for 4 against Bangladesh and New Zealand's 397 for 5 against Zimbabwe. Click here for a full list of highest team scores. This also equals the highest total in List-A games (inclusive of domestic limited-overs games): Surrey had made 438 for 5 against Glamorgan at The Oval in 2002. Click here for the full list of highest team totals in List-A matches.


South Africa have broken the world record for the highest successful chase in ODIs. Australia now have the embarrassing record of being at the receiving end of the two highest successful chases in ODIs. The previous record was not too long ago - when they conceded 332 against New Zealand at Christchurch in December, another record-breaking match as the tables will indicate below.


A total of 872 runs were scored in this match, making it the highest match aggregate in ODIs, going past the previous highest of 693, made by India and Pakistan at Karachi in 2004. Click here for the full list of highest match aggregates.


Mick Lewis, who conceded a whopping 113 runs, has the most expensive bowling figures in a ten-over spell in ODIs. He went past Muttiah Muralitharan, who held the previous record not too long ago, in the second final of the VB Series against Australia. Murali went for 99 runs and certainly wouldn't mind settling for second place.


Australia have lost a bilateral ODI series for the first time since June 2002, when they lost a three-match series to Pakistan 1-2.


Herschelle Gibbs's 175 is the tenth-highest individual score in ODIs and the second-highest by a South African, after Gary Kirsten's 188 against UAE in the 1996 World Cup. Click here for the list of highest individual scores.


The blinding knocks by Ricky Ponting and Herschelle Gibbs rank among the three most explosive knocks by batsmen who have made 130 or more in an ODI innings. Sanath Jayasuriya's 134 off 69 balls against Pakistan at Singapore is on top, with a strike rate of 206.25. Gibbs is second with a strike rate of 157.65 (175 off 111 balls) and Ponting comes third with 156.19 (164 off 105 balls).


One can be pardoned for mistaking this to be a Twenty 20 match. Fans at the Wanderers could well have gone home with cricked necks, watching the number of hits sail over the ropes. As many as 87 fours and 26 sixes were hit in all, making it another world record. The tables below list out the top-five in each category.

Most sixes in a match Number Match At
26 South Africa v Australia Johannesburg, 2005-06
21 New Zealand v Australia Christchurch, 2005-06
21 Sri Lanka v Kenya Kandy, 1996
20 New Zealand v Australia Christchurch, 1999-00
20 Pakistan v Sri Lanka Nairobi, 1996-97


Most fours in a match Number Match At
87 South Africa v Australia Johannesburg, 2005-06
79 Pakistan v India Peshawar, 2005-06
73 Pakistan v India Lahore, 2005-06
66 England v Bangladesh Trent Bridge, 2005
65 New Zealand v Australia Christchurch, 2005-06



South Africa have won the greatest one-day international in the history of the game.


Andrew Hall seem to have the match in the bag when he pulled Brett Lee for four through the vacant midwicket region but, with two runs needed from four balls and two wickets in the bag, he spooned his very next delivery to Michael Clarke at mid-on. That meant that it would be the No. 11, Makhaya Ntini, on strike to face the decisive deliveries.


His first delivery was clipped down to third man for a single, which left the scores level and Mark Boucher on strike. He made no mistake.


48.2 overs South Africa 423 for 8 (Boucher 43*) need another 12 runs to beat Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79)


Mick Lewis became the most expensive bowler in the history of one-day cricket, as his 10 overs disappeared for 113 runs, and suddenly South Africa needed 13 runs from 12 balls, and the match was more or less in the bag. Lewis's final over was cracked for four, two, one, four, two, four, as Mark Boucher and Roger Telemachus carried their side to the brink of the most glorious win in history. But when Telemachus spooned an attempted drive and was brilliantly caught by a sprawling Mike Hussey at long-off, a final twist was on the cards.


46.3 overs South Africa 399 for 7 (Boucher 31*, Telemachus 0*) need another 36 runs to beat Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79)



When Justin Kemp steered Nathan Bracken to backward point to be caught for 13, South Africa were 355 for 6 and it seemed their heroic challenge was beginning to fade. Instead, Johan van der Wath strode out to the middle to transform the equation once again with another wave of blistering hitting.


van der Wath belted Mick Lewis over long-off for two sixes in an over then added a six and a four in Nathan Bracken's eighth, as the requirement dropped from a tricky 77 from 42 balls to a gettable 36 from 22. But then van der Wath holed out to extra cover, and the scales tilted again.

40 overs South Africa 342 for 5 (Boucher 10*, Kemp 14*) need another 93 runs to beat Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79)


Jacques Kallis fell for 20 to a smart return catch from Andrew Symonds, as the Wanderers run-fest hurtled towards a thrilling conclusion. With ten overs remaining, South Africa needed 93 runs to win with five wickets still standing, and the crucial pair of Mark Boucher and Justin Kemp at the crease.

31.5 overs South Africa 299 for 4 (Gibbs 175, Kallis 1*) need another 136 runs to beat Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79)


Herschelle Gibbs's joyride came to an end on 175 from 111 balls, as Australia saw a glimmer of salvation amid the wreckage of their bowling performance. Having just smacked the sixth and seventh sixes of his monumental performance, Gibbs got underneath his next attacking stroke against Andrew Symonds, and chipped a simple chance to Brett Lee at long-off.

Australia were cockahoop and little wonder, but with batsmen of the quality of Jacques Kallis and Mark Boucher at the crease, the chase was still very much on.

30 overs South Africa 279 for 2 (Gibbs 156*, de Villiers 14*) need another 156 runs to beat Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79)


Herschelle Gibbs hurtled to 150 not out from just 100 balls, and brought up the landmark with his fifth six of the innings and the 21st of a bedlamic contest, as South Africa continued to close in on the most remarkable run-chase in the history of one-day cricket.


Needing the small matter of 435 for victory, Gibbs kept the flows coming at a torrent, with Mick Lewis taking the brunt of his onslaught, with 72 runs coming from his seven overs. Brett Lee returned to the attack as Ponting played the last of his three Powerplays and for a moment Australia seemed to be regaining some control, but then AB de Villiers slotted him over the top for a one-bounce four, and the momentum had been maintained.


de Villiers eventually fell just after the drinks break, caught on the cow-corner boundary as he heaved Nathan Bracken into the deep. But Gibbs was still there, and as Jacques Kallis came out to join him, South Africa were still in the box seat.

27 overs South Africa 247 for 2 (Gibbs 131*, de Villiers 7*) need another 188 runs to beat Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79)


Graeme Smith produced an innings laced with fury and Herschelle Gibbs blazed a 79-ball century to give their side a fighting chance of pulling off the most extraordinary run-chase in one-day history. By the halfway mark of the innings, South Africa had rattled along to 229 for 2, and needed a mere 206 to win with eight wickets in hand. Given everything that had gone before, few doubted they could achieve it either.

Only one contest could compare - the extraordinary C&G Trophy contest between Surrey and Glamorgan in 2002, when Alistair Brown scored 268 out of a total of 438 for 5, only for Glamorgan to track his side all the way with a reply of 429. Just as South Africa had discovered in the absence of Shaun Pollock, Australia badly missed the accuracy and reputation of Glenn McGrath.


In McGrath's absence, the likes of Mick Lewis and Stuart Clark were proving to be mere cannon fodder. Smith made a brilliant 90 from 55 balls before holing out to deep midwicket, but Gibbs and the combative AB de Villiers were still going strong - aided by some increasingly nervy Australian fielders. On 130, Gibbs had a massive let-off when Nathan Bracken at mid-off dropped a lobbed drive off a Lewis full-toss, and could only contemplate his navel as the Bullring roared its approval. Something remarkable was afoot.


15 overs South Africa 120 for 1 (Smith 52*, Gibbs 53*) need another 315 runs to beat Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79)


Graeme Smith and Herschelle Gibbs played their shots to keep the decisive fifth one-day international at the Wanderers alive. Even though South Africa needed the small matter of 435 to win, the pair had added an unbeaten century partnership in double-quick time. After 15 overs they were well up with the required run-rate of almost nine an over, with Smith in particularly bullish form, on 52 from 36 balls.


South Africa's response got off to the worst possible start when Boeta Dippenaar - a centurion in Friday's match at Durban - played on to Nathan Bracken's second delivery and was bowled for 1. Even so, Dippenaar is not one of nature's strokeplayers, and his early departure allowed Smith and Gibbs to resume their prolific partnership.


With runs flowing freely on a brisk outfield and against an attack lacking the steadying services of Glenn McGrath, Brett Lee was cracked for 41 runs in his first five overs and the support cast of Stuart Clark and Mick Lewis leaked runs as well. Ponting opted not to play his third and final Powerplay, and instead brought on the spin of Andrew Symonds, in a bid to slow the scoring rate.


50 overs Australia 434 for 4 (Ponting 164, Hussey 81, Katich 79) against South Africa


Ricky Ponting produced one of the most sensational one-day innings of all time as Australia powered to a world-record total of 434 for 4 - the first 400-plus score in the game's history. In a display of cultured slogging that first broke his opponents' resolve then scattered their dignity to the highveld, Ponting creamed 164 sublime runs from 105 balls, with 13 fours and an astonishing nine sixes. It was the finest exhibition of clean-hitting that the Wanderers crowd had witnessed ... since Ponting's last performance on this ground, in the World Cup final in 2003, when he belted 140 not out against India to secure Australia's defence of the title.


By the time Ponting was finally plucked on the cover boundary by a leaping Boeta Dippenaar (a foot either side and he would instead have registered his tenth and most spectacular six of the innings), South Africa had been reduced to a pale imitation of a cricket team. Andrew Symonds - not a bad man to bring out to bat at 374 for 3 - and the promoted Brett Lee helped themselves to 27 runs from the final 14 balls of the innings, and Graeme Smith was left wondering how the series could have gone so wrong.


Smith will need little reminding that his team had led this series 2-0 after two matches, with Australia crumbling for just 93 in the second game at Cape Town. But now, with the Test series getting underway in just four days' time, Ponting and pals had served a stark reminder of where the balance of power really lies. A day that began with Shane Warne fuelling the war of words between the two camps culminated with the sight of Roger Telemachus losing the plot so spectacularly that, just prior to his fortuitous dismissal of Ponting, he managed to serve up four consecutive no-balls that were smeared for a total of 19 runs.


South Africa's bowling figures were a universal horror story. Telemachus went for 87 in his ten overs, Makhaya Ntini, Andrew Hall and Johan van der Wath fared little better, while Jacques Kallis - whom Ponting carted for consecutive leg-side sixes to bring up his fifty and open the floodgates - was clattered for 70 runs in just six overs. And, in one of the most comprehensive team batting performances of all time, each of the four Australians to be dismissed racked up at least a half-century in their time at the crease. Mike Hussey, Ponting's supposed sidekick during their 158-run stand for the third wicket, contributed the small matter of 81 from 51 balls, with nine fours and three sixes.


In theory, this innings ought to have been a good contest between bat and ball. With a hint of moisture in the surface and good bounce and carry being generated for South Africa's pace attack, Australia's openers had some early moments of discomfort. But far from being cowed by the occasional ball that beat the outside edge, Simon Katich and Adam Gilchrist embarked on a thrilling counterattack. With the metronomic Shaun Pollock still absent from South Africa's attack, the remaining seamers lacked the wicket-to-wicket discipline to cope with Australia's intent.


Gilchrist, as ever, was at the forefront of the assault. He survived a tough chance on just 8, when Herschelle Gibbs parried a scorching one-handed leap to his left at point, and thereafter he was in the mood to open his shoulders. Ntini was punished for every error in line with pushes down the ground for four and whips off the legs through midwicket, and Gilchrist's half-century had come from just 35 balls when Hall at mid-on took an incredible one-handed tumbling catch, as he swooped low to his left to intercept a fierce pull shot.


Such brilliance ought to have been an uplifting moment for South Africa, but at 97 for 1 in the 16th over, Gilchrist had done the damage and Ponting was in the mood to cash in. At first he was measured in his approach, restricting himself to clipped boundaries off his legs as Katich, hitherto the more silent partner, took up the cudgels by hoisting van der Wath for a vast six over wide mid-on. He had made 79 from 90 balls before Ntini got one to climb on him and Telemachus at third man completed a simple lobbed catch.


At the halfway mark of the innings, Australia were already cruising towards a vast total, but when Hussey started climbing into Kallis, clubbing him for four, six, four to bring up the fifty partnership, South Africa truly had no place to hide. The final ten overs of the innings realised 133 runs, with sixes being smacked almost at will - seven in consecutive overs, including - appropriately enough - Symonds' heave down the ground off Telemachus to bring up the 400.


It was a performance of awesome power and intent, and it came almost ten years to the day since Sri Lanka posted 398 against Kenya on their way to the 1996 World Cup. Ponting had that World Cup feeling himself today, as Johannesburg was treated to a re-run of that 2003 tour de force that few at the time imagined could ever be bettered.

A thing or two about buses

PCI (Peripheral Component Interface)

The idea of a bus is simple -- it lets you connect components to the computer's processor. Some of the components that you might want to connect include hard disks, memory, sound systems, and video systems and so on. For example, to see what your computer is doing, you normally use a CRT or LCD screen. You need special hardware to drive the screen, so the screen is driven by a graphics card. A graphics card is a small printed circuit board designed to plug into the bus. The graphics card talks to the processor using the computer's bus as a communication path.
The advantage of a bus is that it makes parts more interchangeable. If you want to get a better graphics card, you simply unplug the old card from the bus and plug in a new one. If you want two monitors on your computer, you plug two graphics cards into the bus. And so on.

Twenty or 30 years ago, the processors were so slow that the processor and the bus were synchronized -- the bus ran at the same speed as the processor, and there was one bus in the machine. Today, the processors run so fast that most computers have two or more buses. Each bus specializes in a certain type of traffic.

A typical desktop PC today has two main buses:

The first one, known as the system bus or local bus, connects the microprocessor (central processing unit) and the system memory. This is the fastest bus in the system.

The second one is a slower bus for communicating with things like hard disks and sound cards. One very common bus of this type is known as the PCI bus. These slower buses connect to the system bus through a bridge, which is a part of the computer's chipset and acts as a traffic cop, integrating the data from the other buses to the system bus.

Technically there are other buses as well. For example, the Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a way of connecting things like cameras, scanners and printers to your computer. It uses a thin wire to connect to the devices, and many devices can share that wire simultaneously. Firewire is another bus, used today mostly for video cameras and external hard drives.




Quick History

The original PC bus in the original IBM PC (circa 1982) was 16 bits wide and operated at 4.77 MHz. It officially became known as the ISA bus. This bus design is capable of passing along data at a rate of up to 9 MBps (megabytes per second) or so, fast enough even for many of today's applications.
Several years ago, the ISA bus was still used on many computers. That bus accepted computer cards developed for the original IBM PC in the early 1980s. The ISA bus remained in use even after more advanced technologies were available to replace it.

There were a couple of key reasons for its longevity:

Long-term compatibility with a large number of hardware manufacturers.
Before the rise of multimedia, few hardware peripherals fully utilized the speed of the newer bus.
As technology advanced and the ISA bus failed to keep up, other buses were developed. Key among these were Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA) -- which was 32 bits at 8 MHz-- and Vesa Local Bus (VL-Bus). The cool thing about VL-Bus (named after VESA, the Video Electronics Standards Association, which created the standard) is that it was 32 bits wide and operated at the speed of the local bus, which was normally the speed of the processor itself. The VL-Bus essentially tied directly into the CPU. This worked okay for a single device, or maybe even two. But connecting more than two devices to the VL-Bus introduced the possibility of interference with the performance of the CPU. Because of this, the VL-Bus was typically used only for connecting a graphics card, a component that really benefits from high-speed access to the CPU.

Along Comes PCI

During the early 1990s, Intel introduced a new bus standard for consideration, the Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) bus. PCI presents a hybrid of sorts between ISA and VL-Bus. It provides direct access to system memory for connected devices, but uses a bridge to connect to the frontside bus and therefore to the CPU. Basically, this means that it is capable of even higher performance than VL-Bus while eliminating the potential for interference with the CPU.

The frontside bus is a physical connection that actually connects the processor to most of the other components in the computer, including main memory (RAM), hard drives and the PCI slots. These days, the frontside bus usually operates at 400-MHz, with newer systems running at 800-MHz.

The backside bus is a separate connection between the processor and the Level 2 cache. This bus operates at a faster speed than the frontside bus, usually at the same speed as the processor, so all that caching works as efficiently as possible. Backside buses have evolved over the years. In the 1990s, the backside bus was a wire that connected the main processor to an off-chip cache. This cache was actually a separate chip that required expensive memory. Since then, the Level 2 cache has been integrated into the main processor, making processors smaller and cheaper. Since the cache is now on the processor itself, in some ways the backside bus isn't really a bus anymore.
PCI can connect more devices than VL-Bus, up to five external components. Each of the five connectors for an external component can be replaced with two fixed devices on the motherboard. Also, you can have more than one PCI bus on the same computer, although this is rarely done. The PCI bridge chip regulates the speed of the PCI bus independently of the CPU's speed. This provides a higher degree of reliability and ensures that PCI-hardware manufacturers know exactly what to design for.


PCI cards use 47 pins.

PCI originally operated at 33 MHz using a 32-bit-wide path. Revisions to the standard include increasing the speed from 33 MHz to 66 MHz and doubling the bit count to 64. Currently, PCI-X provides for 64-bit transfers at a speed of 133 MHz for an amazing 1-GBps (gigabyte per second) transfer rate!
PCI cards use 47 pins to connect (49 pins for a mastering card, which can control the PCI bus without CPU intervention). The PCI bus is able to work with so few pins because of hardware multiplexing, which means that the device sends more than one signal over a single pin. Also, PCI supports devices that use either 5 volts or 3.3 volts

PCI vs. AGP

The PCI bus was adequate for many years, providing enough bandwidth for all the peripherals most users might want to connect. All except one: graphics cards. In the mid 1990s, graphics cards were getting more and more powerful, and 3D games were demanding higher performance. The PCI bus just couldn't handle all the information passing between the main processor and the graphics processor. As a result, Intel developed the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP). AGP is a bus dedicated completely to graphics cards. The bandwidth across the AGP bus isn't shared with any other components. Although PCI continues to be the bus of choice for most peripherals, AGP has taken over the specialized task of graphics processing.


Plug and Play

Plug and Play (PnP) means that you can connect a device or insert a card into your computer and it is automatically recognized and configured to work in your system. PnP is a simple concept, but it took a concerted effort on the part of the computer industry to make it happen. Intel created the PnP standard and incorporated it into the design for PCI. But it wasn't until several years later that a mainstream operating system, Windows 95, provided system-level support for PnP. The introduction of PnP accelerated the demand for computers with PCI, very quickly supplanting ISA as the bus of choice.
To be fully implemented, PnP requires three things:

PnP BIOS - The core utility that enables PnP and detects PnP devices. The BIOS also reads the ESCD for configuration information on existing PnP devices.
Extended System Configuration Data (ESCD) - A file that contains information about installed PnP devices.
PnP operating system - Any operating system, such as Windows XP, that supports PnP. PnP handlers in the operating system complete the configuration process started by the BIOS for each PnP device. PnP automates several key tasks that were typically done either manually or with an installation utility provided by the hardware manufacturer. These tasks include the setting of:

o Interrupt requests (IRQ) - An IRQ, also known as a hardware interrupt, is used by the various parts of a computer to get the attention of the CPU. For example, the mouse sends an IRQ every time it is moved to let the CPU know that it's doing something. Before PCI, every hardware component needed a separate IRQ setting. But PCI manages hardware interrupts at the bus bridge, allowing it to use a single system IRQ for multiple PCI devices.

o Direct memory access (DMA) - This simply means that the device is configured to access system memory without consulting the CPU first.

o Memory addresses - Many devices are assigned a section of system memory for exclusive use by that device. This ensures that the hardware will have the needed resources to operate properly.

o Input/Output (I/O) configuration - This setting defines the ports used by the device for receiving and sending information.

While PnP makes it much easier to add devices to your computer, it is not infallible.
Variations in the software routines used by PnP BIOS developers, PCI device manufacturers and Microsoft have led many to refer to PnP as "Plug and Pray." But the overall effect of PnP has been to greatly simplify the process of upgrading your computer to add new devices or replace existing ones.


How It Works

Let's say that you have just added a new PCI-based sound card to your Windows XP computer. Here's an example of how it would work.

1. You open up your computer's case and plug the sound card into an empty PCI slot on the motherboard.
2. You close the computer's case and power up the computer.
3. The system BIOS initiates the PnP BIOS.


This motherboard has four PCI slots.

4. The PnP BIOS scans the PCI bus for hardware. It does this by sending out a signal to any device connected to the bus, asking the device who it is.
5. The sound card responds by identifying itself. The device ID is sent back across the bus to the BIOS.
6. The PnP BIOS checks the ESCD to see if the configuration data for the sound card is already present. Since the sound card was just installed, there is no existing ESCD record for it.
7. The PnP BIOS assigns IRQ, DMA, memory address and I/O settings to the sound card and saves the data in the ESCD.
8. Windows XP boots up. It checks the ESCD and the PCI bus. The operating system detects that the sound card is a new device and displays a small window telling you that Windows has found new hardware and is determining what it is.
9. In many cases, Windows XP will identify the device, find and load the necessary drivers, and you'll be ready to go. If not, the "Found New Hardware Wizard" will open up. This will direct you to install drivers off of the disc that came with the sound card.
10. Once the driver is installed, the device should be ready for use. Some devices may require that you restart the computer before you can use them. In our example, the sound card is immediately ready for use.
11. You want to capture some audio from an external tape deck that you have plugged into the sound card. You set up the recording software that came with the sound card and begin to record.
12. The audio comes into the sound card via an external audio connector. The sound card converts the analog signal to a digital signal.
13. The digital audio data from the sound card is carried across the PCI bus to the bus controller. The controller determines which device on the PCI device has priority to send data to the CPU. It also checks to see if data is going directly to the CPU or to system memory.
14. Since the sound card is in record mode, the bus controller assigns a high priority to the data coming from it and sends the sound card's data over the bus bridge to the system bus.
15. The system bus saves the data in system memory. Once the recording is complete, you can decide whether the data from the sound card is saved to a hard drive or retained in memory for additional processing


All aboard the PCI Express

As processor speeds steadily climb in the GHz range, many companies are working feverishly to develop a next-generation bus standard. Many feel that PCI, like ISA before it, is fast approaching the upper limit of what it can do.
All of the proposed new standards have something in common. They propose doing away with the shared-bus technology used in PCI and moving to a point-to-point switching connection. This means that a direct connection between two devices (nodes) on the bus is established while they are communicating with each other. Basically, while these two nodes are talking, no other device can access that path. By providing multiple direct links, such a bus can allow several devices to communicate with no chance of slowing each other down.

HyperTransport, a standard proposed by Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), is touted by AMD as the natural progression from PCI. For each session between nodes, it provides two point-to-point links. Each link can be anywhere from 2 bits to 32 bits wide, supporting a maximum transfer rate of 6.4 GB per second. HyperTransport is designed specifically for connecting internal computer components to each other, not for connecting external devices such as removable drives. The development of bridge chips will enable PCI devices to access the HyperTransport bus.



PCI-Express, developed by Intel (and formerly know as 3GIO or 3rd Generation I/O), looks to be the "next big thing" in bus technology. At first, faster buses were developed for high-end servers. These were called PCI-X and PCI-X 2.0, but they weren't suitable for the home computer market, because it was very expensive to build motherboards with PCI-X.

PCI-Express is a completely different beast - it is aimed at the home computer market, and could revolutionize not only the performance of computers, but also the very shape and form of home computer systems. This new bus isn't just faster and capable of handling more bandwidth than PCI. PCI-Express is a point-to-point system, which allows for better performance and might even make the manufacturing of motherboards cheaper. PCI-Express slots will also accept older PCI cards, which will help them become popular more quickly than they would if everyone's PCI components were suddenly useless.

It's also scalable. A basic PCI-Express slot will be a 1x connection. This will provide enough bandwidth for high-speed Internet connections and other peripherals. The 1x means that there is one lane to carry data. If a component requires more bandwidth, PCI-Express 2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x slots can be built into motherboards, adding more lanes and allowing the system to carry more data through the connection. In fact, PCI-Express 16x slots are already available in place of the AGP graphics card slot on some motherboards. PCI-Express 16x video cards are at the cutting edge right now, costing more than $500. As prices come down and motherboards built to handle the newer cards become more common, AGP could fade into history.






Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) slots are such an integral part of a computer's architecture that most people take them for granted. For years, PCI has been a versatile, functional way to connect sound, video and network cards to a motherboard.




But PCI has some shortcomings. As processors, video cards, sound cards and networks have gotten faster and more powerful, PCI has stayed the same. It has a fixed width of 32 bits and can handle only 5 devices at a time. The newer, 64-bit PCI-X bus provides more bandwidth, but its greater width compounds some of PCI's other issues.




A new protocol called PCI Express (PCIe) eliminates a lot of these shortcomings, provides more bandwidth and is compatible with existing operating systems.


High-Speed Serial Connection

In the early days of computing, a vast amount of data moved over serial connections. Computers separated data into packets and then moved the packets from one place to another one at a time. Serial connections were reliable but slow, so manufacturers began using parallel connections to send multiple pieces of data simultaneously.


It turns out that parallel connections have their own problems as speeds get higher and higher -- for example, wires can interfere with each other electromagnetically -- so now the pendulum is swinging back toward highly-optimized serial connections. Improvements to hardware and to the process of dividing, labeling and reassembling packets have led to much faster serial connections, such as USB 2.0 and FireWire.


Sizing Up
Smaller PCIe cards will fit into larger PCIe slots. The computer simply ignores the extra connections. For example, a x4 card can plug into a x16 slot. A x16 card, however, would be too big for a x4 slot.



PCI Express is a serial connection that operates more like a network than a bus. Instead of one bus that handles data from multiple sources, PCIe has a switch that controls several point-to-point serial connections. These connections fan out from the switch, leading directly to the devices where the data needs to go. Every device has its own dedicated connection, so devices no longer share bandwidth like they do on a normal bus.



When the computer starts up, PCIe determines which devices are plugged into the motherboard. It then identifies the links between the devices, creating a map of where traffic will go and negotiating the width of each link. This identification of devices and connections is the same protocol PCI uses, so PCIe does not require any changes to software or operating systems.





Each lane of a PCI Express connection contains two pairs of wires -- one to send and one to receive. Packets of data move across the lane at a rate of one bit per cycle. A x1 connection, the smallest PCIe connection, has one lane made up of four wires. It carries one bit per cycle in each direction. A x2 link contains eight wires and transmits two bits at once, a x4 link transmits four bits, and so on. Other configurations are x12, x16 and x32.





PCI Express is available for desktop and laptop PCs. Its use may lead to lower cost of motherboard production, since its connections contain fewer pins than PCI connections do. It also has the potential to support many devices, including Ethernet cards, USB 2 and video cards.



Two by Two
The "x" in an "x16" connection stands for "by." PCIe connections are scalable by one, by two, by four, and so on.



But how can one serial connection be faster than the 32 wires of PCI or the 64 wires of PCIx? How is PCIe able to provide a vast amount of bandwidth in a serial format?



Faster Speeds, Fewer Connections
The 32-bit PCI bus has a maximum speed of 33 MHz, which allows a maximum of 133 MB of data to pass through the bus per second. The 64-bit PCI-X bus has twice the bus width of PCI. Different PCI-X specifications allow different rates of data transfer, anywhere from 512 MB to 1 GB of data per second.


Devices using PCI share a common bus, but each device using PCI Express has its own dedicated connection to the switch.



A single PCI Express lane, however, can handle 200 MB of traffic in each direction per second. A x16 PCIe connector can move an amazing 6.4 GB of data per second in each direction. At these speeds, a x1 connection can easily handle a gigabit Ethernet connection as well as audio and storage applications. A x16 connection can easily handle powerful graphics adapters.


How is this possible? A few simple advances have contributed to this massive jump in serial connection speed: Taking Apart and Putting Together


PCIe breaks data into packets, marks the packets for reassembly at their destination and reassembles the packets very quickly -- so quickly that the process goes unnoticed by the rest of the computer.


Prioritization of data, which allows the system to move the most important data first and helps prevent bottlenecks

Time-dependent (real-time) data transfers

Improvements in the physical materials used to make the connections

Better handshaking and error detection

Better methods for breaking data into packets and putting the packets together again. Also, since each device has its own dedicated, point-to-point connection to the switch, signals from multiple sources no longer have to work their way through the same bus.




Slowing the Bus
Interference and signal degradation are common in parallel connections. Poor materials and crossover signal from nearby wires translate into noise, which slows the connection down. The additional bandwidth of the PCI-X bus means it can carry more data that can generate even more noise. The PCI protocol also does not prioritize data, so more important data can get caught in the bottleneck. Using the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) slot for video cards removes a substantial amount of traffic, but not enough to compensate for faster processors and I/O devices.



PCI Express and Advanced Graphics
So PCIe can eliminate the need for an AGP connection. A x16 PCIe slot can accommodate far more data per second than current AGP 8x connections allow. In addition, a x16 PCIe slot can supply 75 watts of power to the video card, as opposed to the 25watt/42 watt AGP 8x connection. But PCIe has even more impressive potential in store for the future of graphics technology.



With the right hardware, a motherboard with two x16 PCIe connections can support two graphics adapters at the same time. Several manufacturers are developing and releasing systems to take advantage of this feature:


NVIDIA Scalable Link Interface (SLI): With an SLI-certified motherboard, two SLI graphics cards and an SLI connector, a user can put two video cards into the same system. The cards work together by splitting the screen in half. Each card controls half of the screen, and the connector makes sure that everything stays synchronized.



ATI CrossFire: Two ATI Radeon® video cards, one with a "compositing engine" chip, plug into a compatible motherboard. ATI's technology focuses on image quality and does not require identical video cards, although high-performance systems must have identical cards. Crossfire divides up the work of rendering in one of three ways:

splitting the screen in half and assigning one half to each card (called "scissoring")
dividing up the screen into tiles (like a checkerboard) and having one card render the "white" tiles and the other render the "black" tiles
having each card render alternate frames

Alienware Video Array: Two off-the-shelf video cards combine with a Video Merger Hub and proprietary software. This system will use specialized cooling and power systems to handle all the extra heat and energy from the video cards. Alienware's technology may eventually support as many as four video cards.




The Future of PCI Express
Since PCI, PCI-X and PCI Express are all compatible, all three can coexist indefinitely. So far, video cards have made the fastest transition to the PCIe format. Network and sound adapters, as well as other peripherals, have been slower in development. But since PCIe is compatible with current operating systems and can provide faster speeds, it is likely that it will eventually replace PCI as a PC standard. Gradually, PCI-based cards will become obsolete.