As the aftermath of the ball tampering saga continues, today marked the day that the lead protagonists of the episode, Steve Smith, Cameron Bancroft and David Warner, all made public statements for the first time after the day it all began. Over the course of the past few days, the outrage from Australia has been vocal and sustained, by all accounts. I can’t imagine the Prime Minster of India taking upon himself to make a public statement over a ball tampering/ cheating incident on a cricket field! The Prime Minister of Australia, however, did. He was among the first to react and even used his office status to push Cricket Australia into action, not that they needed any pushing, of course. I made a reference to the Aussie way of cricket in my previous blog post and had highlighted the blurring of “the line”, wherever it may exist, for them. Soon after, the ball tampering scene exploded and while I have
Whose Line is it Anyway?
Those following the South Africa v/s Australia test series, would have heard about the now infamous incident involving Quinton de Kock and David Warner. De Kock is alleged to have said something unmentionable about Warner’s wife to him, which resulted in the latter’s angry reaction and having to be physically separated from the former. The Australian players have been remarkably direct in their support for David Warner’s reaction to the slur. In their view, De Kock crossed “the line” when getting personal and bringing family into sledging. The South African cricket team coach, Otis Gibson, was almost poetic in his response. Sharada Ugra commented on the Aussie way with sledging and I could not agree more with her. From the time that I can remember, the most famous sledges, on-field “banter”, flare-ups, etc. have involved Australian players. Michael Slater having a go at Rahul Dravid in a test match in India, Stephen Waugh’s sledges to Ambrose and later, to Herschelle
Switching to Data Vision
One of my favorite essays during school days used to be about Television. I still remember writing about the TV in Hindi. Invented by John L. Baird, if my memory serves me correctly. Looking back in the last 30-40 years, we have moved from no TVs, to TV being a novelty, to CRT TV sets being the norm (who can forget Dyanora?) and nowadays, to LED TVs. What next? Of course, 4K Ultra HD TVs are already here. We will move away from the cable TV or even the need for a satellite Dish enabled TV set in the future. It may sound alarming, but it is going to be the reality sooner or later. No more TV shows, a dime to the dozen, repeated in multiple languages and broadcast over an untold number of channels. Early age TVs used to have 12 channels and a remote control was unheard of. Within a few years now, we have hundreds of
High Performance Networking trends
Over the past couple of decades, the Computer networking industry has seen many trends come and go. Looking at how things stand today, the core skill sets of Routing and Switching look likely to become dated as the number of experts proliferate the market and the task of routing the packets through the Internet has become a commodity for so many deployments. Fundamentally, the core job of routing remains the same, from the perspective of a device. For it, a packet (or data) comes in and it needs to make a decision on where to send it out to. The USP for any device resides in the speed with which it can make this decision and the speed with which the packet can be forwarded out another interface, towards its ultimate destination. As with so many other technology industries that reaped the benefits of Moore’s law, it was the same with the High Performance Networking industry. Shrinking space for the
Books
One of my hobbies is reading. As long back as I can recall, I have loved reading – started off with the Amar Chitra Kathas of the world, devoured comics such as Batman, Tarzan, Phantom of course and moved on to more comics such as Archies, Tintin, Asterix, etc. Phantom was, and remains, an all-time favorite for me. The various names and the mystique remains a fascination – The Ghost Who Walks, Devil, Walker, Skull Cave and his horse – do not recall that name. The beauty of it was that it transported me to a world where it seemed that anything was possible. Live in the jungles of Africa, fighting the bad guys, move like a Ghost, have a Wolf for a pet and live behind a waterfall, move like lightning, etc. At that age, I could dream of a possibility – maybe even I can become like the Phantom, strong, mysterious, intelligent, fighting injustice and invincible. Books held
Mithun's Musings 