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The company that made Steve sweat.

SanDisk has been building on their position as a Flash memory-card manufacturer to offer music players. Search Amazon.com, and you'll find that the company's solid-state players come up as often as their highly rated SD cards, putting them at the forefront of iPod competition. The Sansa e280's main attraction—a compelling one—is 8 gigabytes of storage, making it one of the most capacious memory-based players out there.

The CEO of Philips Electronics North America seems to be having a midlife crisis. Or at least, his company is. Asks Paul Zeven: "Have we gone too far? Are we in step with the needs of today's American consumer?" Philips research suggests that manufacturers have gone astray. "My company has studied the relationship between technology's complexity and consumers' attitudes and found that two out of three Americans have lost interest in a technology product because it seemed too complex to set up or operate. We also found that only 13 percent of Americans believe technology products in general are easy to use. The study concluded that only one in four consumers reports using the full range of features on most new technology products. If these findings aren't enough of a wake-up call, the study also found that more than half of Americans believe manufacturers are trying to satisfy perceived consumer needs that may not be real." It's telling that Zeven looks not to the hardware sector for a new role model, but to the likes of Google and Craigslist. The solution, he says, is "design, manageability and functionality."

Stop me if you've heard this one. Wild animal breaks out of a New York zoo to return to the wild. Other animal friends follow to bring him back. They travel by boat to a strange, jungle environment.

The story of a well-intentioned but ultimately failed U.S. 1993 military mission in Somalia, where American Rangers and Delta Force troops tried to capture a savage warlord who was ravaging and starving his own people into submission, is not a pretty one. Nor is Black Hawk Down an easy film to watch. But while it's often gritty, depressing, and filled with violent, bloody imagery, it also paints a very positive, uplifting image of American troops and what they're willing to risk for the mission and for each other. It's hard to imagine mainstream Hollywood producing such a film today, five event-filled years after Black Hawk Down first hit the screens.