When the first plane had hit Tower I of the World Trade Center on Tuesday morning, I had been driving back with Kate from a short shopping trip for bike parts in southern Germany. We first believed that the news was false, but we rushed home to turn on the TV and find out what was really going on. Of course we were just as stunned and shocked as everyone else in the world, when we saw the horrible pictures of the burning buildings, the desperate jumps of terrified people from the upper floors and the final collapse of the twin towers that buried countless victims underneath them.

Neither Kate nor I are US-citizens, but as the majority of Europeans we were sharing the same grief about the huge loss of life, the same anger towards the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks and the same emptiness inside ourselves with the majority of Americans. What was the value of our own doings in the light of the senseless mass murder of thousands of innocent people?

I felt unable to go ahead with my plans to write about i845, NVIDIA's finally released Detonator 4 driver or the events of VTF 2001 in Taipei from last week. Who would care about this? A huge number of people were dying in a horrific terrorist attack, the world was watching, and I was contemplating how good or bad i845 is or what kind of score Detonator 4 would get on my blessing-scale? Not really! I actually felt disgusted by the mere thought of it. I also could not understand how some hardware websites suddenly turned into wannabe competitors of CNN, posting evermore of the horrible news and even pictures of the disasters where they usually listed the 25th heat sink review of some hard core super overclocker. Who would read that? Is there indeed anyone that has Internet but no television and no radio? Can't we leave the capitalization on terrible news to CNN (the main beneficiary of the such lovely events as the Gulf War, the OG Simpson trial, Lady Diana's death and the presidential election chaos) and the likes? Is there indeed 'no business like show business' even in times like that?

It might be bad business practice, but I decided to stay out of all that, because I do not think it is the place of a hardware website to capitalize on events such as this. No hardware reviews and no pictures of burning or crashing WTC-towers. An apology had to do, if the people liked it or not. There was no choice.