Despite the disparity in cost and convenience, DVD and Blu-ray rentals through mail and physical retailers still outnumbers streaming. Rentals through retail stores, kiosks, and Netflix's mail service made up more than 62 percent of all movie rentals in the first half of the year according to NPD Group.

In stark contrast to the figure above, subscription streaming, pay TV video on demand, and Internet VOD made up only 38 percent of movie rentals. Even though rentals are still the majority, the size of their majority has been shrinking. Rentals are down 17 percent from last year and stores continue to be replaced with kiosks.

45 percent of rentals came from kiosks, up 5 percent from last year. Netflix's push to streaming has also contributed to the decline in physical rentals. Netflix announced 530,000 new streaming customers while at the same time losing 850,000 of its DVD service. Part of what is keeping streaming down is the lack of extra features and availability of all movies. Often times a movie is only available as a physical copy.

Valve, the company behind Steam, is keeping itself busy. Gabe Newell has publicly bashed Windows 8 and is working towards making Linux into a viable alternative for gamers. Valve is working on porting the Steam client and Left 4 Dead 2 to Linux and has achieved some great results. Now, Steam will be expanding into software other than games.

Starting September 5, software will begin to show up in the Steam store. Options will include creativity and productivity software and a majority will feature Steamworks integration. "Many of the launch titles will take advantage of popular Steamworks features, such as easy installation, automatic updating, and the ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you."

Furthermore, Indie developers will be able to submit their software through Steam Greenlight. Steam has some competition in this market as Mac already has its own store and Windows 8 will be coming with a Windows store. "The 40 million gamers frequenting Steam are interested in more than playing games," said Mark Richardson at Valve. "They have told us they would like to have more of their software on Steam, so this expansion is in response to those customer requests."

Today, Google has been doing a lot of talking. They debuted their exclusive field trial of integrating Gmail emails with searches and they've been talking about the future of search. But, how can you look towards the future without knowing the present? You can't and that's why Google has provided us with some incredible numbers about the current state of search.

To make an average day, Google crawls an incredible 20 billion pages. However, to put that number in perspective, there are about 30 trillion URLs on the Internet. An average month is made up of serving 100 billion searches. Google's current Knowledge Graph is composed of 500 million items and that is just a baby step towards the future of search.

Google's vision of the future of search:

Apple.pro have posted scans from Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily showing off the new "iPhone 5" enclosures that have been available for the past couple of weeks, and even went as far as taking measurements of them.

The thickness of the next-gen iPhone enclosure measures in at 7.6mm, with the rest of the dimensions appear to be equivalent to the specifications that are making the rounds of sites across the world, and the same as the leaked specs by case manufacturers in June:

One manufacturer we spoke to said that he was sure that the leaked images were accurate - so sure that he was already preparing to construct iPhone 5 cases and he'd be willing to ship replacements for free if they turned out not to be perfect. He enumerated three big changes from the old iPhone 4S to the iPhone 5:

Zombie apocalypse game, Day Z, if you haven't heard about it, is a mod for ArmA II, and has been quite successful. It's talked about quite often, and started out as just as play around mod by Dean Hall. But, his mod for ArmA II has just passed one million players, after only being available in April of this year.

The mod hasn't even reached beta status yet, and has been announced its going to be featured in its own standalone game. The announcement of the game was made on the official Day Z Tumblr this morning, with Bohemia Interactive, who is the studio behind ArmA II handling development. Hall will serve as project lead. Hall has some words on the standalone release:

Development and updates of the mod will continue in parallel with the development of the game, so anyone who is playing the mod now will be able to continue to do so. The project will follow the Minecraft development model; fast iterations with the community alpha available for a heavily discounted price.

Samsung have been accused by activist group China Labor Watch of a bunch of infractions, with one of them being quite serious: employing workers as young as 14 years old at its supplier's factory in China. Samsung, in response to the allegations, issued a statement where the company said they've re-inspect the factory in question, but have claimed that it had previously passed all inspections. Samsung said:

Samsung Electronics has conducted two separate on-site inspections on HEG's working conditions this year but found no irregularities on those occasions. Given the report, we will conduct another field survey at the earliest possible time to ensure our previous inspections have been based on full information and to take appropriate measures to correct any problems that may surface. Samsung Electronics is a company held to the highest standards of working conditions and we try to maintain that at our facilities and the facilities of partner companies around the world.

China Labor Watch didn't just find underage employees, but the factory's management would reportedly abuse workers, and also failed to treat, or compensate those who experienced work-related injuries. It doesn't stop there, with more accusations that the factory forced excessive overtime, sometimes to as much as 11 hours per day with just a single meal break, in 'extremely dangerous conditions'. Also, those who reported product defect were fined severely, rather than rewarded.

So, Apple have cut YouTube out of iOS 6, and now they've added an extra row for icons. There just doesn't seem to be anything worth drooling over for the next-gen mobile OS from Apple. BGR reports from a 9to5Mac post that we could be looking at a fifth row of icons on iOS 6.

Using Apple's Xcode development application, BGR used a simple tweak to show what iOS 6 would look like when the resolution is bumped up to 640x1136, as shown above. 9to5Mac says that five rows of icons will fit on the screen instead of 4 on the current iPhone's, and that apps will scale accordingly to take advantage of the extra height.

So, if Apple are using more icons, are we going to see widgets like Android uses? Will we see portrait use on the home screen, like Android? It seems Apple are falling further and further behind in the mobile OS department. Don't get me wrong, I love me some iOS on my third-gen iPad, but for a smartphone, iOS feels just so claustrophobic. What do you think? Are Apple finding it hard to evolve iOS, but not copy Android?

Imagine a self-driving car, want to go on that long drive but don't want to sit behind the wheel and concentrate for 8 hours straight? Well, the future is self-driving cars, and search, mobile OS and cloud giant, Google, with their self-driving car project has been a success.

The self-driving car project has hit the milestone of 300,000 test miles without an accident. The cars have been spotted in Mountain View around the Google Plex, on highways, and more. Too bad I live in one of the smallest states of Australia, I'd laugh if I saw one of these on the road, but feel jealous all at the same time. Google have talked about the self-driving project, where they've said:

Our vehicles, of which about a dozen are on the road at any given time, have now completed more than 300,000 miles of testing. They've covered a wide range of traffic conditions, and there hasn't been a single accident under computer control.

And so they should. After having the joy of a daisy-changed hack, Mat Honan has been keeping the tech world up-to-date on the going ons of the recent hack over at Apple, and what companies are doing to make sure that it doesn't happen to anyone else.

Apple have improved their services, issuing a 24-hour ban on calling Apple support to change your Apple ID password. Honan's hack involved some social engineering, meaning that a hacker actually made a voice call, setting up accounts pretending to be him. Wired reported on the ban, saying:

Apple on Tuesday ordered its support staff to immediately stop processing AppleID password changes requested over the phone, following the identity hacking of Wired Reporter Mat Honan over the weekend, according to Apple employees.

Windows 8 is bringing a lot of new changes to the Windows operating system. Beyond a completely new Start/desktop interface, Microsoft has fully integrated Windows and Xbox as shown by the new "Xbox Windows" branded games. These games will live separately from the Games for Windows Live service.

The games that fall under this banner will provide in-game achievements which award Gamerscore to players. This way you can boost your Gamerscore while killing time at work. As of right now, the games that fall under this title give up to 50 Gamerscore and are Microsoft productions: Minesweeper, Solitaire, and Majong.

Minesweeper provides the most chance to increase your Gamerscore with a possible 50 spread out over 4 achievements. You get 5 Gamerscore just for being blown up by your first mine. Solitaire provides up to 40 Gamerscore with 10 being awarded for just flipping over your first card. Majong has 25 Gamerscore with 5 being awarded for changing the game's theme.