Valve has been thumping the concept of the “Steam Machine” for years now. There have been some misstarts along the way to be sure, so many so that manufacturers like Dell’s Alienware division actually decided to move on with straight-up Windows version of their original Steam Machine designs, like the Alpha, for example. The Alpha has a custom-built 10 foot interface and integrated Steam Big Picture mode layered on top of Windows. It was a good half-step but Valve’s vision of a Linux-based, purpose built, SteamOS console alternative with the abundance of Steam’s game library and services was far from realized. And it was getting long in the tooth, having been announced two CES shows ago in 2014. Late this year however, Valve’s SteamOS was baked enough that manufacturers like Alienware launched full-fledged Steam Machines with SteamOS under the hood.

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An international team of researchers based in the Netherlands used weather radars to monitor the movements of wild birds on New Year’s Eve. Radar data revealed that tens of thousands of birds explode into flight promptly at midnight when public fireworks shows begin. The panicked birds reached altitudes of 500 metres where they flew in dense flocks for 45 minutes. The highest flock densities were detected over grasslands and wetlands, and over conservation sites, which are the wintering homes where many tens of thousands of waterfowl, wading and shorebirds, and seabirds rest and feed.

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Network Attached Storage continues to be a hot commodity as enterprise and personal users alike amass more and more digital content and data. And making network attached storage easier to configure and access continues to be a key area of focus for NAS providers. A long time player in the space, Thecus, targets a wide range of potential NAS users, from end users to sys-admins, and the company recently announced a new operating system for many of its devices designed to maximize performance and accessibility, while at the same time simplifying setup and administration.

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Entrepreneurs in Ireland’s Galway are creating what they hope will be a startup mecca out of an abandoned Guinness storehouse.

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How a visit to Cairo brought home one of the fundamental lessons of entrepreneurship.

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Rumors have been circulating about a small-form factor Xbox One since the original console launched a couple of years back. The current Xbox One features a custom 8-core AMD APU, cooled by a relatively large heatsink / fan combo, an optical drive, and an internal hard drive. All of that stuff takes up a lot of space inside the system, and eliminating or optimizing those components would make it relatively easy for Microsoft to shrink down the Xbox One considerably. Factor in some PCB optimizations and chip-level consolidation, and bringing a future Xbox One “Slim” down to a size down more in-line with an Intel NUC or similar small-form-factor device is entirely possible.

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What are the top 10 Cyber security breaches of 2015? This question was originally answered on Quora by Sai Ramanan.

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