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A gargantuan Compaq supercomputer called Terascale now is up and running and will make its first public appearance Monday at a ceremony at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Terascale has 3,000 Alpha EV68 processors housed in 750 servers joined with a high-speed interconnect from Quadrics. The supercomputer is housed at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and was developed by the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Westinghouse Electric. The system can perform six trillion calculations per second, Compaq said, roughly the same power as 10,000 desktop PCs. It also has 3 terabytes of memory.

Three rewritable DVD formats are duking it out for your dollars. Is it time to buy? It's been a while coming, but the day that you'll trade both your trusty CD-RW drive and your familiar VCR for a new rewritable-DVD device is fast approaching. Why swap? How about to get more speed, greater reliability, and discs with seven times the capacity of a CD-ROM? Or to create your own digital DVD movies that are easily searchable, won't degrade over time, and can be stored more compactly than videotapes?

Bill Gates rolls out Windows XP to fanfare and controversy in New York.

A lot is riding on Windows XP, the much anticipated operating system unveiled by Bill Gates in New York Thursday morning. Touted in dozens of events around the country, XP carries with it the hopes of both Microsoft and a beleaguered PC industry for a way out of the high tech recession. Now shipping in several configurations and preloaded on an estimated 50 million PCs introduced by hopeful vendors, Windows XP offers better stability and many consumer-friendly features. The OS also promotes Microsoft's copious online services, key to its nascent .Net strategy of Web applications to be delivered to PCs, cell phones, digital organizers, and other devices.

Easier than Windows 2000 and less crash-prone than Win Me, XP is Microsoft's biggest and most controversial OS upgrade in years. We tested it to see what works, what doesn't, and if you should make the leap.

"Should I get it?" That's what everyone wants to know about Windows XP. We won't keep you in suspense: For most Windows 98 and Windows Me users whose systems can handle it, the answer is yes. Due to ship October 25 (barring unlikely last-minute court orders stemming from the still-pending antitrust wrangling), Windows XP could be the most stable version of Windows yet: It's at least as stable as Windows 2000, Microsoft claims. It's also the most feature-laden. Thank its dual bloodlines for that happy combination: From Windows NT and 2000, it inherits a secure, stable core. From Windows 9x and Me, it inherits compatibility with hardware and software, as well as tools for working with digital images, video, and audio. And in either of its two flavors--Home Edition or Professional--it's a great match for the latest PCs with their fast processors, capacious hard drives, and speedy CD burners.

Windows XP, the new operating system launched by Microsoft Corp. on Thursday, is the software giant's most stable and feature-rich consumer product yet, but it still has some hardware and software issues as well as persistent - some say menacing -- links to other Microsoft services. Thursday marked the retail debut of what the software giant called its most significant product in six years.

The product is based on the programming technology found at the heart of Microsoft's corporate operating system, Windows 2000. That means Windows XP hardly ever crashes. Individual programs might freeze, but rarely take down the whole system, a constant danger with earlier consumer operating systems from Windows 95 to last year's Windows Me.

So Windows XP is finally coming out of the chute, and after one characteristically long drumroll. I've been writing about it for months--incessantly for the past few days. Others have written reams about it, too. And I have to admit that I have been hard-pressed to think of anything more to say. Thank goodness for fellow columnist and esteemed colleague Patrick Houston, who suggested that XP's official debut is best left to restating, succinctly, the 10 most important things you need to know about Microsoft's presumably latest and greatest OS. Since he is so smart, so wise, so handsome--and did I mention that he is my boss?--I will just take his advice.

Windows 2000, says Steve Ballmer, "wasn't finished." Windows XP, he implies, is finished. For once, I almost believe him--despite the fact that I know damn well I'm going to be writing stories about faults and failings in XP over the next months. But boy, has it taken him a long time to confess to something that was painfully obvious years ago. I almost don't mind, because at last, he's done it; and it may be the biggest breakthrough ever, in Microsoft's attitude to the world. We'll know soon, when Microsoft comes clean about what it is going to do about the 64-bit Intel processor family. What Microsoft had hoped to do with Win 2K, was to provide something which ran all existing Windows software, but did it reliably. What it actually did, was tell fibs, and pretend it had done it when it hadn't.

On Wednesday, the eve of the Windows XP launch, I was among 15 journalists invited to a private dinner with the chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft. The guests included people from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, BusinessWeek --and other news organizations you'd immediately recognize. Small talk still doesn't have much appeal to Bill. My brief, "How's your family?" got a three- or four-word reply that communicated, "They're fine," and that I shouldn't delve further. The reason that Bill challenges questions, I believe, is because he lives in a world almost totally dominated by facts and intelligence. So he questions things that don't seem factual, intelligent, or both. That is, perhaps, his greatest strength.

"We're expecting twice as many sales of Windows XP as we sold copies of Windows 95," predicted Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer on his visit to London this morning to launch the new operating system. He also held out the promise of a "family pack" XP that would allow homes with more than one PC to upgrade several computers for a greatly reduced price. Ballmer gave the expected booster speech, describing XP as the "no compromise" operating system--both reliable, and compatible. He also said that "anybody committed to a corporate roll-out of Windows 2000 should go ahead with that, and not disrupt their current plans" but that anybody thinking of upgrading from NT should go straight to XP.

Consumers used to have to buy a computer to get a free Palm device or a digital camera, but the freebie bar has just been lowered with the release of Windows XP. Staples, Circuit City, Office Max and other retailers are offering a cavalcade of freebies for a limited time to customers who buy the home or business edition of Windows XP. In some instances, the value of the goodies outstrips the cost of the software. These programs, part of Microsoft's multimillion-dollar promotional campaign, highlights the company's urgent need for the new operating system to succeed at retail. Staples, for instance, will give customers buying Windows XP Home Edition 128MB of memory, three free months of MSN Internet service, a host of software titles and one of the following items: a Palm m100 handheld computer, a CD-RW drive, a digital camera or a cable/DSL router. The upgrade version of Windows XP Home Edition sells for $99; the Palm m100 itself sells for $99.