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With the release of both of the next generation consoles, we begin to see that the media world is converging into a connected world.

One of Ars Technica's many memcached server graphs. Look at all those misses!

This week, memcached, a piece of software that prevents much of the Internet from melting down, turns 10 years old. Despite its age, memcached is still the go-to solution for many programmers and sysadmins managing heavy workloads. Without memcached, Ars Technica would likely be unable to serve this article to you at all.

Brad Fitzpatrick wrote memcached for LiveJournal way back in 2003 (check out the initial CVS commit here). While waiting for new hardware to help save the site from being overloaded, Fitzpatrick realized that he had plenty of unused RAM spread across LiveJournal's existing servers. He wrote memcached to take advantage of this spare memory and lighten the load on the site.

memcached is a distributed in-memory key-value store that uses a very simple protocol for storing and retrieving arbitrary data from memory instead of from a filesystem. To store a value, a program connects to the memcached server on the default port of 11211 and issues a series of basic commands. (Note: a binary protocol is also supported.)

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Samsung is about to continue the Galaxy S4 branding in order to boost their sales even further. According to rumors, the company will soon announce the Galaxy S4 Active, Mini and Zoom.

Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

I study a theory called N=4 super Yang-Mills.

When I say this to someone, I have a pretty good idea of how the conversation will go. First, the person will spend a few moments trying to pronounce the theory’s name. Giving up, they'll then try to bring things back to something they’ve heard of.

“N=4 super… umm… so, is that something they’re testing at the Large Hadron Collider?”

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Apple is accused of being "among America's largest tax avoiders" by senators, who say the company avoided paying billions of dollars in taxes.

Yahoo revamps its Flickr photo-sharing service, offering users up to 1TB of storage if they accept adverts.

The US military's wireless internet service inside Guantanamo Bay has been shut down following threats by Anonymous hackers

How to keep drug addicts and lovers out of disabled loos

Big UK net firms have begun blocking access to two movie streaming sites accused of flouting copyright laws.

Facebook tells Newsbeat it will not rush a review of violent content after beheading videos were removed from the site.

Games developers are turning their focus towards indie games designed for smart phones or tablets, rather than traditional consoles.

A cyclist says he is lucky to be alive after he was hit by a car whose driver is later believed to have tweeted about the crash.

The world famous author of horror stories has sold more than 350 million copies. He was one of the first well-known authors to put his writings into the eBook format, releasing Riding the Bullet thirteen years ago.

Click's David Reid visits Cern to find out more about the plans to restore the world's first web page.

Robert Peston asks if Apple's tax avoidance efforts are rational

Vodafone's full-year sales slip for the first time in eight years as tough economic conditions in Europe take their toll on customers.

A study showing how ants tunnel their way through confined spaces could aid the design of search and rescue robots, say scientists.

New York University's Tisch School of the Arts explores the use of today's communications technologies - and how they might enhance people's lives tomorrow.

Recent activity on the Web site.

Buying Tumblr isn't the only big thing that Yahoo has done today. Flickr, the photo storage and sharing site bought by Yahoo way back in 2005, has been brought into the 21st century with a new look, new pricing, and a new Android app.

Gone is the old Flickr interface of small thumbnails, gobs of whitespace, and lots of metadata. In its place is a site with big thumbnails, full-screen pictures by default, and metadata for each image tucked below the fold. Flickr's Lightbox view, that removes the clutter around the page and shows pictures on their own, remains available.

The home page now shows photos of everyone you subscribe to with the most recent handful of pictures that your contacts have uploaded. Each user's photostream displays a big tiled view of their pictures. This isn't entirely new to Flickr—it was a feature of the site's Explore page—but it's new to individual user pages.

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A new Senate report (PDF from The New York Times) shows that Apple has employed potentially sketchy business methods to avoid heavier tax burdens. According to the investigation, the company dodged billions in potential taxes on $44 billion in foreign income during the past four years.

Some of the interesting bits from the Senate's report: three Apple subsidiaries in Ireland claim no responsibility to pay income taxes to any country. Apple Operations International, one of the Ireland three, reported $30 billion in income during 2009 to 2012 despite having no employees and not filing income taxes anywhere within the last five years. Apple did not violate any laws during this time according to the Senate investigation.

As The Chicago Tribune notes, many of the tactics Apple employed are common for multinational corporations (see cost-sharing arrangements). Google and Amazon were slammed by British parliament last year for their own tax-tiptoeing practices abroad. Nevertheless, the information released today cannot be welcomed by Cupertino with its CEO set to speak in front of Congress tomorrow. The Tribune quoted written testimony for that hearing which addresses this new tax spotlight. According to those statements, Apple does not use "tax gimmicks" and "has substantial foreign cash because it sells the majority of its products outside the US.” The company also reiterates that it pays plenty of US taxes, a defense it used in the face of tax accusations last year.

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