Steam reaches mobile through Android and iOS app

Valve’s popular cloud-based PC gaming platform Steam will now be accessible from your iOS and Android-based mobile phone, according to a press release sent out today by Valve.

You won´t be able to play out your favorite PC games on your phone but thats not the purpose. The ideia is for you to be able to track Steam sales anywhere from your phone and check out the latest Steam bargains that apear once in a while. It will also allow you to chat with friends, view profiles, screenshots and user generated content.

Mozilla releases programming language Rust 0.1

After more than five years in the pipeline, Mozilla Labs and the Rust community have released the first alpha — version 0.1 — of the Rust programming language compiler.

The Rust language emphasizes concurrency and memory safety, and — if everything goes to plan — is ultimately being groomed to replace C++ as Mozilla’s compiled language of choice. Browser prototypes programmed in Rust will eventually emerge, and then one day Firefox — or parts of Firefox — might be re-written in Rust.

Rust is a strongly-typed systems programming language with a focus on memory safety and concurrency. The compiler is supported on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Feature-wise, Rust intentionally doesn´t bring any new ideas, and instead builds upon existing, known features that are present in other languages.

YouTube Reaches 4 Billion Daily Views

YouTube, Google Inc's video website, is streaming 4 billion online videos every day, a 25 percent increase in the past eight months, according to the company.

The jump in video views comes as Google pushes YouTube beyond the personal computer, with versions of the site that work on smartphones and televisions, and as the company steps up efforts to offer more professional-grade content on the site.

Robert Kyncl, vice president of content at Google and a former architect of the Netflix streaming business, said that YouTube serves 3 billion hours per video every month and tops 800 million unique visitors per month.

YouTube also said today that users are now uploading an hour of video every second equaling 60 hours of video every minute.

Aquired by Google for $1.65 billion in 2006, YouTube represents one of Google's key opportunities to generate new sources of revenue outside its traditional Internet search advertising business.

Reuters notes however that most of the 4 billion videos viewed on YouTube today don’t make money. Only 3 billion YouTube videos a week are being monetized.


                                                                                                     Source: http://www.reuters.com

Google Q4 earnings disappoint, shares down 10 per cent

Google has suffered the rare indignity of falling below Wall Street expectations after announcing its earnings for Q4 2011.

Company stock dropped a whopping ten per cent in after-hours trading after reporting net revenue of $8.13 billion (£5.25bn) and $9.50 (£6.13) in earnings per share.

While those figures still put the company in a position to be envied by almost every other publicly traded entity in the world, Wall Street was expecting more. Experts had predicted $8.40 billion in net revenue and $10.49 in earnings per share.

Not everything is bad, although it's rare that Google misses the mark, the company is heralding it's first $10 billion+ quarter, before "traffic acquisition costs." and a 25 per cent gain on the corresponding quarter in 2010.

Apple Starts a Recycling Program for Electronic Equipment such as iPhone and iPad

Apple has launched a recycling scheme that could help you make money from your old iPhone, iPad, Mac or even Windows PC.

The Reuse and Recycling Programme will be operated by Dataserv GmbH and will allow you to dispose of old or unused electronic equipment.

We can read from the official site:
"Apple’s commitment to the environment includes finding the most efficient ways to reuse or recycle electronic equipment at the end of its useful life, including iPhone, iPad, Mac or PC computers, and displays from any manufacturer. You may even get some money for your old equipment."

IBM Brains Turn 12 Atoms Into World's Smallest Storage Bit

“We’re trying to answer a simple question,” said IBM Research physicist Andreas Heinrich in an interview. “How small can you make a magnetic structure and still make it useful for data storage?”

The answer the IBM scientists came upon was 12. This grouping of atoms, while dramatically reduced, still behaves in the same ways our memory drives do to grab and store information. They were able to accomplish this by using antiferromagnets. These magnets are much different that your traditional magnet. A ferromagnetized atom acts the same as the magnets you put on your refrigerator. If one atom in this magnet is polarized north, all its neighboring magnets will also be polarized north. Having this kind of polarization gives off a magnetic field, or that resistance you feel when you try to put two magnets together.

Antiferromagnetic atoms, however, do not act the same. If one neighbor is polarized north, its direct neighbor would be polarized south. This allows these magnets to sit much closer together, as it does not give off the same field. The downside to these magnets is that they are very difficult to deal with.

Sudoku puzzles must have at least 17 clues to have a valid solution

An Irish mathematician has used a complex algorithm and millions of hours of supercomputing time to solve an important open problem in the mathematics of Sudoku, the game popularized in Japan that involves filling in a 9X9 grid of squares with the numbers 1–9 according to certain rules.

Gary McGuire of University College Dublin shows in a proof posted online on 1 January that the minimum number of clues — or starting digits — needed to complete a puzzle is 17; puzzles with 16 or fewer clues do not have a unique solution. Most newspaper puzzles have around 25 clues, with the difficulty of the puzzle decreasing as more clues are given.

The rules of Sudoku require puzzlers to fill out a 9X9 grid with the numbers 1–9 so that no digit is repeated within the same column, row, or 3X3 subgrid. The clues are the numbers that are filled in to begin with, and enthusiasts have long observed that although there are some puzzles with 17 clues, no one has been able to come up with a valid 16-clue puzzle. That led to the conjecture that 16-clue puzzles with unique solutions simply do not exist.

Linux Kernel 3.2 Officially Released

After seven release candidates, Linus Torvalds announced a few hours ago, January 4th, the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.2.

Among the new features incorporated in Linux kernel 3.2 we can mention better support for large files by supporting block sizes bigger than 4KB and up to 1MB in EXT4, upper limits of CPU time can now be set in the process scheduler, lots of Btrfs improvements, and much more.

"So 3.2 is out, and the merge window for 3.3 is thus officially open. I delayed 3.2 first a few days to wait for the final linux-next ("final" in the sense that that's what I'll fetch to decide whether something has been in linux-next for 3.3 or not), and then some more as people were coming back from holidays and sorting out some regressions. So we do have a few last-minute reverts and small fixes."

Android Market Tops 400,000 Apps

Google's Android Market now hosts more than 400,000 active applications from about 100,000 publishers, with the majority of apps available for free, according to an independent study. 

The Market's app store catalog crossed the 400,000 benchmark over the New Year’s weekend, four months after the Market topped 300,000 apps. Earlier in 2011, the Market also took four months to make the jump from 200,000 to 300,000 apps, according to Distimo, a metrics firm specializing in mobile application stores.

Distimo's 400,000 app count includes only active applications and does not include any apps that may have been recently removed from the Market because of claims of copyright infringement or the recent Android malware scare.