industry united at darpa for its high productivity computing system, already in phase III, they say: in this episode: ibm and cray and their petascale storage systems.

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to calculate more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second.... | enterprise storage

last year sun+carnegi mellon already published their report on ultra large scale systems.

after trying several recorders in different price categories: from edirol r 09 (€398,-) to tascam hd p2 ( €~1.000) i guess i will have to wait again, as i am not satisfied and managed to get problems where others didn't. maybe due to some failure of the test machines. anyhow, fostex fr2 le is in the pipe and should be out there in april. estimated price, dealers in europe say, between €500 - 600. it comes with xlr, longer battery life as fostex fr2, but hopefully with the same sound quality as its bigger brother; and better mic pre-amps as marantz; the latter - it seems - has worked on that probem, though.

textile trends hospitals, military, automotive industrie and their new fabrics. from sensors, new bandage to nonwoven fabrics, cost of selfcleaning, antibacterial functions, expanded lifetime up to 60 years, ...

vacuum plasma, cellulose fibers, ceramic fiber, self assembled nanofibers, spider silk, titanium, photonic, ...

let's see what they are talking about.