• Love your mom-in-law
• Ally McBeal in turmoil 
• Two Saints to confess all
• Hollywood's most surprising couple 
• Sean warns Guy over power - mad Madonna
• Techno Page
• Jagger 'gun'ned out
• Silken splendour
• The dumped and the dumpers
• Yellow
• When imaginations run wild on PCs
• Jolie femme
• Action gals
• 

Love your mom-in-law

"If you treat your mother-in-law like dirt, she's gonna treat YOU like dirt and then you'll end up divorced."

Della understands that some moms get jealous of the new woman in their son's life. And some wives get resentful when their husband spends too much time with his mother. But neither side should be jealous, she says. "When a man loves his mother, it's not gonna make him love his wife less," Della explains. "It's gonna make him respect ALL women, including his wife. Any man who adores his mother will also adore his wife." Reese speaks from experience. She says her husband was very close to his late mom Odessa, but Della was, too. "There was a bond between us that I never experienced with any other woman," she confides. "I loved her with all my heart."

Ally McBeal in turmoil 

To add to Calista's agony, it looks as though 36-year-old Robert, who was her love interest on the show, could be in more trouble. It has just emerged that he risked his life running around with a junkie who is the prime suspect in the murder of a 20-year-old girl. 

Insiders say Robert, whom Calista tried and failed to keep off drugs, got his supplies from Albert Aleixo, who partied with him in a motel room before the drugs bust. Now police want to talk to Robert to find out what he knows about the brutal murder of the girl, who was found cut in half.

Back on the Ally McBeal set, sources say 36-year-old Calista broke down in tears when she heard of her co-star's arrest for suspicion of being under the influence of drugs. 

She told friends: "I feel so horrible because I thought all our talks after his last drug bust were doing him some good. Obviously, I didn't do enough. It's such a shame." 

Insiders confirm that Calista planned to have Robert and his seven-year-old son, Indio, join her for a summer holiday in Europe. But now the severely depressed actor has been committed to a psychiatric ward at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre.

An insider said: "Calista felt she and Robert had great chemistry on the show and would have at least one more good season together. It is a terrible disappointment for the show, and a personal tragedy for Robert."

The show's producers have more problems. Now 33-year-old Charlie's Angels star Lucy Liu has her eyes on a big screen career. She has told Ally McBeal bigwigs she is thinking of leaving when her contract ends at the end of this season.

Now the show's writers have the problem of dreaming up a drastic new storyline to explain Robert's absence. Spokesman Chris Alexander says: "Fortunately, there never was a plan to have Robert's character marry Ally. Every effort will be made to incorporate scenes already shot with him."

Two Saints to confess all

The sisters' blond good looks and roller-coaster celebrity relationships have made them regular fixtures in showbiz columns and magazines, often eclipsing the band's musical achievements. 

Penguin's publishing director, Tom Weldon, said he bought the book on the basis of a 75-page synopsis in which the sisters promised to reveal the reasons for the band's split and talk about the men in their lives. 

"This is the frankest proposal for an autobiography I have ever read. Some of the stories the Appletons are going to tell are breathtakingly candid." 

Nicole Appleton was engaged to pop star Robbie Williams before moving on to his archrival, Liam Gallagher of Oasis. She is now expecting Gallagher's baby. 

Natalie Appleton is engaged to Liam Howlett from The Prodigy after going out with pop presenter Jamie Theakston and actor Jonny Lee Miller. 

The All Saints sold more than 10 million albums worldwide before splitting up in January of this year. 

The Appletons have signed a deal with Warner Bros. to produce an album together and are currently working on their first single. 

The other two All Saints, Mel Blatt and Shaznay Lewis, have embarked on solo projects. 

Weldon said the book would be published toward the end of 2002. 

Hollywood's most surprising couple 

The couple, who have kept their liaison under wraps since meeting earlier this year, went public for the first time when Nicolas was awarded an honorary doctorate of fine arts from California State University at Fullerton.

The star of Captain Corelli's Mandolin was cheered by the crowd as he arrived at the dais dressed in a traditional graduation gown. During his commencement speech, the actor spoke of his inner demons and how his career has provided a healthy outlet for feelings from his troubled childhood. He confessed to the 7,000 graduates that he couldn't live without acting.

As he received his honorary title - awarded for his contribution and philanthropy to the arts - Lisa Marie sat looking enthralled in her front-row seat. After the ceremony, she and Nicolas attended a champagne brunch at the home of the university President, where they chatted to staff and toasted the new Dr Cage. They stayed for an hour-and-a-half before heading back to Hollywood in a convoy of limousines with a police escort.

The couple first met at Lisa Marie's 33rd birthday celebration in February, but have only been seeing each other seriously in the past month. Lisa Marie, who has two children, has been married twice before - to musician Danny Keough and, more famously, to Michael Jackson for two years. She was also engaged to rock musician John Oszajca until she broke off the relationship in March.

Nicolas, who is said to do a mean impression of Lisa Marie's famous dad, was married to actress Patricia Arquette but never lived with her. More recently he has been rumoured to have had an affair with his Captain Corelli co-star Penélope Cruz.

Sean warns Guy over power - mad Madonna

"Nothing indicated the enormity of what was coming," said Sean, recalling the moments just before the wedding ceremony when he thought he could make the marriage work.

"My understanding of the direction Madonna was taking was a misunderstanding."

Madonna recently released her new single What It Feels Like For A Girl. But the warnings to Ritchie can be gleaned from interviews with 40-year-old Sean and some of Madonna's closest aides and friends in a bombshell new biography called Queen Of The World.

1. Get your finances in order, Guy, old mate:

Sean says in the book: "She had a soap opera law firm that from the very beginning was very concerned about her being married in the state of California (where alimony payments are astronomical).

"However, on no day on this earth am I going to sign a pre-nuptial agreement which I equate with a death warrant on a marriage. Nor would I, under the worst circumstances, take a penny of somebody else's change. These pressures came at the beginning and they came like gangbusters at the end.

"This bunch were in effect, accusing me of being some kind of mooch (US along for scrounger). They found out otherwise."

So far 32-year-old Guy has made all the right choices.

Madonna's lawyers asked him to sign a pre-nuptial agreement giving him just a minor stake in her estimated £300 million for tune. But proud Guy shocked them by insisting: "I don't want a single penny of the money if this marriage dies."

2. Don't try and count up her previous boyfriends... you'll run out of fingers.

Michelle Pellerin, Madonna's landlady when she was in Paris before she became a singer, tells biographer Douglas Thompson: "She dated a lot of French boys. She thought they were very old fashioned and she liked the attention, but she only really wanted one thing to be a star."

Madonna herself had admitted: "All my boyfriends turned out to be helpful to my career. But all the men I stepped over to get to the top... all of them would have me back because they all still love me and I love them."

3. If you say you're going to meet her somewhere, be there... or else.

In Thompson's biography, her first manager Camille Barbone recalls: "Before I became her manager Madonna organised a gig so I could hear her perform but I was too ill to attend.

"The next day she came into the office slamming things, 'It's my life,' she shouted at me. 'I set this gig up just for you.'"

4. If she wants to keep something a secret, humour her. For God's sake, don't make her angry.

"The Madonna Secrets Act works exactly like the Official Secrets Act," says author Thompson. "Those who join do not talk."

That's what Guy Ritchie's dad John failed to understand. "He made the awful mistake of telling the Press that his son would be wearing a kilt in the family's Hunting Mackintosh tartan for the wedding at Skibo Castle in Scotland last December," writes Thompson.

"He couldn't see the harm of it but that was before he arrived for the ceremony. John had beaten the Highland weather conditions to reach Inverness airport and only faced a 45-minute drive to Skibo Castle.

"There was no Range Rover with blackened windows waiting for him, as there had been for many other celebrity guests. Instead, he and his wife Shireen - Ritchie's stepmother - hired a modest saloon.

5. If it all goes wrong, have a drink then keep a stiff upper lip.

Sean Penn says darkly: "I can only say the marriage ended, I can't say why. We felt comfortable enough with not being together.

"Ultimately, we had different value systems... and anyway I was drunk most of the time.

- News Of The World

Techno Page

All you need to know about Processors

In addition, the processor uses gates in combination to perform arithmetic functions; it can also use them to trigger the storage of data in memory. These operate through hardware known as a digital switch. In the days of room-size computers, the switches were actually physical switches, but today nothing moves except the current itself. The most common type of switch in today's computers is a transistor known as a MOSFET (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor). This kind of transistor performs a simple but crucial function: When voltage is applied to it, it reacts by turning the circuit either on or off. Most PC microprocessors today operate at 3.3V, but earlier processors operated at 5V.

The flow of electricity through each gate is controlled by that gate's transistor. However, these transistors aren't individual and discrete units. Instead, large numbers of them are manufactured from a single piece of silicon (or other semiconductor material) and linked together without wires or other external materials. These units are called integrated circuits (ICs), and their development basically made the complexity of the microprocessor possible. The integration of circuits didn't stop with the first ICs. Just as the first ICs connected multiple transistors, multiple ICs became similarly linked, in a process known as large-scale integration (LSI); eventually such sets of ICs were connected, in a process called very large-scale integration (VLSI). 
Manufacturing process 

What differentiates the microprocessor from its predecessors constructed out of valves, individual transistors or small integrated circuits is that it brought us, for the first time, a complete processor on a single chip of silicon. It is a 'semiconductor' which, when 'doped' with impurities in a particular pattern, becomes a transistor, the basic building block of digital circuitry.

First silicon 'ingot' is grown. This must have a defect-free crystalline structure, an aspect that places limitations on its size. In the early days, ingots were limited to a diameter of 2in, although 8in is now common. In the next stage, the ingot is cut up into slices called 'wafers'. These are polished until they have a flawless, mirror-like surface. It is these wafers on which the chips are created. Dozens of microprocessors are made on a single wafer.

The circuitry is built up in layers. Layers are made from a variety of substances. For example, silicon dioxide is an insulator, and polysilicon makes up conducting tracks. When bare silicon is exposed, it can be bombarded with ions to produce transistors - this is called doping. This process continues, a layer at a time, until a complete circuit is built up. Needless to say, with the features being made measuring less than a millionth of a meter across, the tiniest speck of dust can create havoc. 

Microprocessors are manufactured in 'clean rooms' - ultra-clean environments where the operators wear space-age protective suits. In the early days, semiconductor manufacturing was a hit and miss, with a success rate of less than 50% of working chips. Today, far higher yields are obtained, but nobody expects 100%. 

As soon as all the layers have been added to a wafer, each chip is tested. The individual chips are now separated, and at this point are called 'dies'. The faulty ones are discarded, while the good ones are packaged in Pin Grid Arrays - the ceramic rectangles with rows of pins on the bottom, which most people call microprocessors.
 

CISC - Complex Instruction Set Computer is the traditional architecture of a computer, in which the CPU uses micro code to execute a very comprehensive instruction set. These may be variable in length and use all addressing modes, requiring complex circuitry to decode them. For a number of years, the tendency among computer manufacturers was to build increasingly complex CPUs that had ever-larger sets of instructions. In 1974, John Cocke of IBM Research decided to try an approach that dramatically reduced the number of instructions a chip performed. By the mid-1980s this had led to a number of computer manufacturers reversing the trend by building CPUs capable of executing only a very limited set of instructions.

RISC - Reduced Instruction Set Computer CPUs keep instruction size and retain only those instructions that can be overlapped and made to execute in one machine cycle or less. One advantage of RISC CPUs is that they can execute their instructions very fast because the instructions are so simple. Another, perhaps more important advantage, is that RISC chips require fewer transistors, which makes them cheaper to design and produce. Its proponents say that RISC machines are both cheaper and faster, and are therefore the machines of the future. Skeptics note that by making the hardware simpler, RISC architectures put a greater burden on the software - RISC compilers having to generate software routines to perform the complex instructions that are performed in hardware by CISC computers. They argue that this is not worth the trouble because conventional microprocessors are becoming increasingly fast and cheap anyway. 

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