Baseball is a team sport that is popular in the Americas and East Asia.
In its standard form, the game of baseball is played between two teams of nine players on a playing field consisting of four bases, arranged in a diagonal square ("the diamond") and a large outfield extending from two adjacent sides of the diamond. The main pieces of equipment are the baseball and the baseball bat which is used to hit the ball. The sport is closely related to cricket, sharing many rules and a similar play strategy.
In the United States, baseball has often been called the "national pastime" and the total attendance for Major League games is more than that of all other American professional sports combined. In Japan, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and several other countries, baseball is the most popular sport by any measurement. Among American television viewers, however, it has been surpassed in popularity by American football and car racing.
The 1998 Football World Cup Tournament was held from June 10 through July 12 at various venues throughout France. For match results and statistics, see Football World Cup 1998.
The World Cup opened with 1994 champions Brazil's 2-1 victory over Scotland. Norway pulled the shock of Group A, topping the holders 2-1 after two late goals. Still, both teams advanced to the next round. Italy easily won Group B, with Chile's three draws enough for them to get through.
France swept Group C, with the lone blemish being the red card explusion and two-game suspension of Zinedine Zidane in a 4-0 win over Saudi Arabia. Denmark also moved on from the group. Nigeria was the surprise winner of Group D, dubbed the Group of Death, as Spain once again failed to live up to high pre-cup expecations. Nigeria beat them 3-2 in a thrilling game and moved on to the next round together with Paraguay.
Netherlands and Mexico moved on from Group E, a group that saw four games and in draws. Germany and Yugoslavia made easy work of Group F.
A late goal for Romania saw them beat England 2-1 and take the top spot in Group G; the English finished second. Argentina swept Group H, joined by Croatia in the second round.
In the second round, Italy beat Norway 1-0 and Brazil made easy work of Chile, 4-1. Laurent Blanc of France scored the first Golden Goal in World Cup history as the hosts beat Paraguay, 1-0. Denmark surprised Nigeria, crushing them 4-1. Germany beat Mexico and Netherlands topped Yugoslavia by identical 2-1 scores. Croatia upset Romania 1-0. Perhaps the best game of the tournament saw Argentina beat England on penalties after tying them 2-2 in a game that saw a wondergoal from 18-year-old Michael Owen. The game was marred by England's David Beckham being sent off after kicking Diego Simeone.
France beat Italy in the quarterfinals on penalties after a scoreless draw. Brazil topped Denmark 3-2 in an exciting game. A late goal from Dennis Bergkamp of the Netherlands eliminated Argentina, 2-1. Croatia pulled perhaps the biggest shocker of the tournament, crushing Germany 3-0.
In the semifinals, Patrick Kluivert equalized late for the Netherlands to make it 1-1, but the Dutch couldn't pull it out in the penalty shootout, sending Brazil to the final. They were joined by France, as defender Lilian Thuram scored two goals to offset Golden Boot winner Davor Suker's opener for Croatia. The Croats beat the Dutch for third place.
In the final, Zinedine Zidane took over. He scored two goals, with Emmanuel Petit adding one late to give France a 3-0 win over Brazil and their first World Cup title.
Coral is an open source, peer-to-peer content distribution network designed to mirror web content. Coral is designed to use the bandwidth of volunteers to reduce the load on websites and other providers of web content. To use coral, simply add .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname in a URL. So, for, example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_page becomes http://en.wikipedia.org.nyud.net:8090/wiki/Main_page. The latter is known as a coralized link.
One of Coral's key goals is to avoid ever creating hot spots that might dissuade volunteers from running the software for fear of load spikes. It achieves this through a novel indexing abstraction called a distributed sloppy hash table (DSHT), and it creates self-organizing clusters of nodes that fetch information from each other to avoid communicating with more distant or heavily-loaded servers.
The project has been in an open beta testing phase since March 2004. During beta testing the Coral node network will be hosted on PlanetLab, a large scale distributed research network of 400 servers, instead of third party volunteer systems. Of those 400 servers about 120 are currently running Coral. The source code is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL.
The Hatak (Ha'tak) class of Goa'uld warships are the primary ships of the fleets of the System Lords, characters from the television series Stargate SG-1.
In the center of the ship is a large, golden pyramid, where all major functions and stations are maintained. It is not clear whether the pyramid can split from the other portion, as was seen in the movie when Ra attempted to escape via a pyramid 'ship.' However, all Goa'uld invasions tend to include a Hatak bombardment that is meant to either instill fear in the populace and force them to submit to the rule of the 'god,' or completely annihilate them.
The Ha'tak is protected by powerful shields, pulse weapons, dozens of lighter vessels (including gliders and Al'kesh) and scores of Jaffa troops. It's able to travel at around 32,000 times the speed of light via hyperspace. Although capable of transporting troops to the surface of a planet via the standard Goa'uld ring device, a Ha'tak may also land on the surface of a planet (preferably on a properly constructed pyramid). Capable of supporting several thousand troops, it is little more than a flying garrison with shields and weapons.
A larger and more powerful version of the craft is used as the command ship for the System Lord in control of the fleet. Generally the strength and speed of the mothership and size of his or her Ha'tak fleet is based on his or her strength. No Goa'uld ship however is currently more powerful than an equal size Asgard vessel, however recently the System Lords have made progress with the level of technology.