A Steam Machine is a PC that can do fewer things, and run fewer games, than the system you have in your home right now.

That's the marketing challenge that’s in front of Valve and its partners, and the fact that Valve had a rare CES press conference was interesting, but there were precious few details about what the platform adds to the world of gaming.

Valve officially showed off the 13 official Steam Machines during its brief CES press event this evening, but it was in the aftermath where we got a closer look at the devices. Below, Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson snapped photos of all the Steam Machine variants in their glorious array of shapes and sizes.

Samsung's goal with the new tablets is to better straddle the gap between a normal tablet and a laptop computer. The Galaxy NotePro and 12.2-inch Galaxy TabPro feature new four-pane multi-window multitasking, while all of the tablets offer multiple layered pop-up windows for multitasking. The panes in the multi-window system can be resized freely, and it's possible to open two instances of the same app at once to compare them side-by-side.

On the eve of LG's launch, I sat down with webOS's head of product management and design, Itai Vonshak, as well as Colin Zhao, director of product management for LG's Silicon Valley Lab. As they demoed LG's new interface to me, I was by turns intrigued, bemused, and doubtful that it was up to the task of convincing people that it would be worth buying a new TV for. Most of all, I was impressed by the clarity of vision behind the new interface. For better or worse, webOS has an opinion about how smart TVs should treat their users, and by all appearances that opinion is executed very, very well. LG is better known for pretty schizophrenic Android skins on its smartphones, so to see the company produce something this coherent was a shock.

I came across a website whose purpose was to provide a super detailed list of every handheld computing environment going back to the early 1970's. It did a great job except for one glaring omission: the first mobile platform that I helped develop. The company was called Danger, the platform was called hiptop, and what follows is an account of our early days, and a list of some of the "modern" technologies we shipped years before you could buy an iOS or Android device.

The PC industry isn't doing so well. Sales have dramatically slumped, despite the industry's efforts to tempt consumers with Windows 8 tablets and transforming touchscreen laptops. But next week, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas may be the launching pad for a new push - a new brand of computer that runs both Windows and Android.

Sources close to the matter tell The Verge that Intel is behind the idea, and that the chipmaker is working with PC manufacturers on a number of new devices that could be announced at the show. Internally known as "Dual OS," Intel's idea is that Android would run inside of Windows using virtualization techniques, so you could have Android and Windows apps side by side without rebooting your machine.

A cool UI doesn't hide the fact that it's slow and unresponsive. A cool UI doesn't hide the fact that the underlying system is unoptimised. A cool UI doesn't hide the fact that it sucks battery like a there's no tomorrow. A cool UI doesn't hide the fact that the hardware was of appallingly low quality.

A cool UI doesn't hide the fact that the operating system has absolutely nothing to do with what Palm is supposed to stand for.

The findings, published in Nature, are probably best described as "mind blowing." Devices with this level of complexity were not seen again for almost 1,500 years, and the Antikythera mechanism's compactness actually bests the later designs. Probably built around 150 B.C., the Antikythera mechanism can perform a number of functions just by turning a crank on the side.

All in all the new Mac Pro is a good update to its aging predecessor. Apple did a great job with the new chassis and build a desktop that's extremely dense with compute. When I had to dust off the old Mac Pros to prepare them for this comparison I quickly remembered many of the reasons that frustrated me about the platform. The old Mac Pro was big, bulky, a pain to work on and was substantially behind the consumer Macs in single threaded performance. The new Mac Pro fixes literally all of that. If you have a workload that justifies it and prefer OS X, the Mac Pro is thankfully no longer just your only solution, it's a great solution.

The main scheduler logic has been completed and now I am concentrating mainly on bug fixes, adjusting tunables and some minor improvements. I also removed gSchedulerLock, a spinlock I mentioned in my last post, and replaced it with more fine grained locking. An new interfaces for cpufreq and cpuidle modules has been created together with a cpufreq module for Intel Sandy Bridge or newer cores and cpuidle module for all processors that support C-states and invariant TSC. Furthermore, IRQs (including MSI) can be now directed to an arbitrary logical processor. Implementation of inter-processor interrupts has been improved so that it avoids acquiring any lock if it is not necessary and supports multicast interrupts. And, last but not least, 8 processor limit has been removed.

The CDC6600 and its family members are part of the computer industry history. A decade before the Cray 1, the members of the CDC6000 family were not only expensive and the most powerful systems at the time of introduction. They were also lean and wonderful architectures ! The elegance was also conveyed in several publications (many by CDC), where all the necessary knowledge was explained from the ground up. All you needed to know was supplied, clearly laid out, not just hints for efficient programming. Basically, you could rebuild your own computer by reading these books. 50 years later, they are invaluable reminders and tools, we can see where the computer industry comes from and realise that it is not that hard to do it ourselves, too.

Rockstar produces no products and practices no patents. Instead, Rockstar employs a staff of engineers in Ontario, Canada, who examine other companies' successful products to find anything that Rockstar might use to demand and extract licenses to its patents under threat of litigation.

On information and belief, Rockstar contacted and met with these California-based companies in order to discourage them from continuing to use Google's Android platform in their devices, and to interfere with Google's business relationships.