PORTABLE VIDEO - It's been almost a quarter-century since Sony's portable cassette
player changed the way people listen to music on the go. Now another form of
entertainment is getting the portable treatment. Palm-size portable video players are
beginning to change where and how people watch movies and other motion visuals. The
players, which play compressed video files on a small screen, are designed to be generally
less expensive and more convenient than portable DVD players, which have been
available for several years. None of these new-generation players, in fact, play DVDs.
Instead, they use advances in storage and compression technology. Most of them store
video on hard drives or memory cards. (New York Times, 17 Jul 03)

NEXT-GENERATION SUPERCOMPUTERS - As Massively Parallel Processors
(MPP) reach their limits, the Cray computer approach is again coming to the
foreground. Purchased by Tera in 2000, the Cray approach is now seen as a
natural alternative to MPP. New computing challenges require fundamental new
designs like the new Cray machine, called Cascade. Cray's revival was helped
last month when the company became one of three computer makers, along with
IBM and Sun Microsystems, chosen by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency to develop prototypes of next generation supercomputers that can
reach peak speeds of a petaflop (a quadrillion mathematical operations per second)
by the end of this decade. (CIO Insight, 5 Aug 03)