Brink made its debut to the world over a week ago now and with the PSN being down at the time - fail number one occurred, Xbox 360 reviews were a bit hard on the game, fail number two occurred. The PC version seemed to be OK, apart from serious frame rate issues (for me at least), FOV issues (console port) but other than that it seemed to be stable. Well, that's what I thought. 5 or so minutes into the game and it's absolutely abysmal FOV (it really is bad) and I get a CTD.

YAY. It was thrilling. Yet another release of a game from a developer where they promise the PC won't get shunted to the side in favor of console releases. I tried tweaking the config, re-downloading my Steam files, downloading the new NVIDIA beta drivers I posted up yesterday but nothing worked. Tried it again last night after I installed the Beta drivers and CTD. This was really pissing me off. I wake up this morning to find "Frustrated Gamer" has e-mailed me with a forwarded e-mail he sent to Kotaku asking them about this issue.

As my readers would know, I'm against console ports and I hate seeing the destruction of the once great PC gaming industry. Sure it's still there, with releases from Valve strong, but from everyone else? Not so good. Splash Damage used id Tech for this game, you would think it would be perfect on PC - wrong. Bethesda have a great track record of PC games too, well, not anymore.

I've decided, with the power vested in me, that today be renamed "NVIDIA Day". On with the news, NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has stated that Android-based tablets (and more specifically, Honeycomb-based tablets) will overtake Apple's iPad in 30 months. The tattoo-clad Huang was quoted at the Reuters Technology Summit saying:

NVIDIA is cementing their place into the tablet market by releasing very powerful Tegra 2-based tech and their line up for the future is looking nothing short of amazing. Especially after it's named after my favorite superhero, Kal-El. Kal-El is something I typed up a news piece about a few months ago, it will be a quad-core NVIDIA chip that will most likely be called Tegra 3. Kal-El has been sampling for the last three months and might find it's way into products as early as August.

Google have just announced that the Chrome OS beta has hit R12 release 0.12.433.38 which includes Chrome 12 Beta, new trackpad, new flash player and several "stability and functional improvements over the previous release". This new release includes various security fixes:

There are a tonne of new features in Chrome 12 as well as a number of Chrome OS improvements such as:

Senator Ellen Corbett wants to force social network sites such as Facebook to allow parents access to their child's account. Excuse me? I thought I was living in a technology-welcoming, plugged-in liberal utopia here in San Francisco (so liberal in fact, that the public transportation has completely abandoned fascist principles like punctuality and reliability), but evidently I was incorrect.

Parents would be able to request that any content be removed from any social network (Twitter, Foursquare, etc) within 48 hours upon his or her request. More importantly, any social network that would fail or refuse to comply with these requests would be fined $10k for each refusal of compliance. This is a clear case of conservative "well-meaning" protection / governmental "nannying" that would have extraordinarily pernicious consequences for both social network sites and the concept of privacy as a whole. It's understandable that parents would want some kind of oversight over their children's public information, but won't this encourage a demographic backlash of secretive and encoded information? If the kids know the parents are "watching", won't they just find new and different forms of communication within that system to maintain their privacy? When I was a young upset, my group of friends most certainly had codewords for behavior or intentions we didn't want to expose publicly to our parents. Also, how are they going to logistically control the number of requests? Authentication? Verification? What's to stop an adult from sending an arbitrary request to remove content from an under-18 user's profile to whom he or she has no relation? Especially when a network has to respond within 48 hours before incurring $10k in fines.

Also, since when are minors not entitled to privacy and/or freedom of speech in any outlet? Does no one remember Tinker? If minors do not shed their constitutional rights at the school house door, why would they at the log in page?

PlayStation outlined its "Welcome Back" policy to users in Europe and Australia, offering all sorts of free stuff. Nick Caplin, Head of Communications SCEE wrote today in the PlayStation Blog that users will net up to four games for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable for their troubles earlier this month.

Details are below in the full post, but some of the games for PS3 include LittleBigPlanet and WipeoutHD/Fury, and Killzone Liberation for PSP. Doesn't really make up for all that crazy stuff, but hey, it's something.

Normally I wouldn't bring the world of reality TV to TweakTown, but this news is quite hilarious. I've been watching snippets of Dancing with the Stars (#dwts) and its funny. The show features a bunch of 'celebrities' and they dance. If you haven't heard of it, then start painting that rock you live under in a better colour. Anyway, the show feels rigged because the three (to me anyway) main stars are Manu from My Kitchen Rules, Lara Bingle (I'm sure you all know her) and Damien Leith (Australian Idol winner). These 3 seem to dance the best and I'm sure they were picked up by producers months in advance and told to get practice, now.

During the show, I hear the word "Twitter" at least 3,219 times and have noticed they have "live" tweets scrolling down the bottom of the screen. These tweets are nearly all positive tweets, hash-tagging various dancers and the show itself (#dwts). SMH has picked up on this and has had various results. The accounts that are tweeting are new (created just hours before #dwts aired) and have been inactive since. Strange, huh?

Mr Nassar, who operates the social media monitoring service TweeVee TV has said that five out of the 17 tweets broadcast had come from "unusual Twitter profiles". He has messaged them and until now there has been no reply, the accounts have been inactive since the broadcast. Channel Seven declined to address questions about authenticity of the accounts, saying:

Ready for some truly different news today? Look no further than the following HTML 5 music experience based on the Arcade Fire song "We Used to Wait." "3 Dreams of Black" is Google's latest music experience for the browser, written and directed by Chris Milk and developed by a few of the talented lot at Google. The song, "Black," comes off the album ROME, presented by Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi, the track features Jack White and Norah Jones vocals and is soon to be released on the record label Parlophone/EMI.

ROME has inspirations from Italian soundtracks from the 1960s and the classic Indian Western genre. As for an explanation of what you're about to experience, here is the sum up of it:

Edit: After the jump is an update on this news.

Most of us know someone who has been through the trauma that is cancer, with all of this technology at our fingertips, we should be putting limitless funds into the creation of a cure. But, are we too late? It seems so, as it has now been cured. Yet major pharmaceutical companies are not interested.

Researchers from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada cured cancer last week - but just like any other world-changing, yet positive news - the mainstream media aren't reporting on it. The cure involves a basic drug which employs dichloroacetate, which is currently used to treat metabolic disorders. This means there are no side effects or worries of long term effects or problems.

I wouldn't be surprised if executives now compose confidential letters and emails as if they would be leaked anyway. And if they don't- they really should because nothing is sacred on the internet anymore. Industry Gamer leaked an email that Rob Dyer, SVP of Sony PR sent out to publishers regarding the recent troubles with the PlayStation Network, QRocity and the Sony Online Entertainment Network.

77 Million user accounts were compromised by an attack from an unknown source, and Sony will be adding all sort of new security features, including a brand new Chief Information Security Officer.

Hot off the trails of their 600,000x-viewed Keynote at Google I/O earlier this week, Google announced today that Google News is now available for mobile on iPhone and Android.

It's pretty simple: just use the feature in the Google App once and opt in to the location sharing, and Google News does the rest. Above is an example Google provided for someone in Topeka, Kansas. Users should see something similar for wherever they're located (in the US that is). The implications are however, not that simple. Check out ReadWriteWeb's op-ed on how Google might be killing off other hyperlocal news outlets by providing a service that costs Google, well, pretty much nothing.

For more information on the feature and how to us it, try news.google.com, or just start playing around with it on your mobile device Original post below).

Earlier today I ventured back to the BitFenix labs in Taipei where we were given an exclusive look at their upcoming chassis called the Outlaw.

BitFenix launched with the monster Colossus case and has since worked its way down to smaller and more affordable options for the mass market and those on a budget. The Outlaw is the smallest case I've seen from BitFenix to date, but does small always mean not as good?

At least it seems, not in this case. From the early sample we got to see today and that you can see in the video above, there are plenty of good things happening with the Outlaw. For starters and one of the key features is that the motherboard position has been switched so that the PCI slots are up high near the top exhaust fans which should mean high-end video cards are kept cool and the case in general.

Superman is something very important to me, as a child I grew up with the Christopher Reeve movies and since then have been a big fan of anything Superman. I've watched Smallville for ten years now and have enjoyed the show, it has evolved into something so much better than the Freak of the Week and with introductions with actors such as the great Cassidy Freeman as Tess and Justin Hartley as Oliver, the show has really started to shine.

Out of season 7 came the departure of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar departed the show and their rule of "no tights, no flight" left too. In came maturity and an ever-growing story of Clark finally meeting his destiny of becoming Superman. At this time season greats such as Michael Rosenbaum who plays (in my opinion) the best Lex Luthor in the Superman mythos left, but, this is the big thing - he comes back for the Series Finale tomorrow night.

If you're a fan of the show, don't miss out on this - it's a big moment in entertainment, one of the longest running shows on TV is coming to a close with quite possibly the most well-known superhero ever. I for one will dearly miss seeing the actors put on a great show each week and will most likely be a teary mess over the weekend. Thank you to everyone who works on this show for keeping us fans happy and delivering a show that somehow got better over time.

The future of Atom is looking rosey, Intel are touting that the new Atom-based "micro-architecture" which is codenamed "Silvermont" is due in 2013 and should be rocking a new architecture as well as a new transistor structure. Intel's new Atom when combined with the powers of 3D transistors, should push forward new levels of integration, performance and most of all power efficiency.

Silvermont will be a system-on-a-chip design just like current smartphone and tablet chips, even including Intel's upcoming Z760 processor which is a SOC design. Intel are looking to move the Atom processor road map at speeds faster than Moore's Law (here's hoping they don't get a speeding ticket) which generally states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a chip doubles roughly every two years.

Atom SoCs are currently shipping with 45nm-based tech, moving to a 32-based process in volume this year, Silvermont is right behind them with the SoC-based design and is looking to ship with its new architecture in 2013. This results in three process generations and one new architecture inside of a three year timespan. Intel needs this to work as there is ever-increasing competition coming rom virtually all sides - AMD, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and NVIDIA... all pumping away releasing pretty exciting stuff.

In case you missed the Google I/O Livestream and the coverage by every online tech blog in the world, here's what Google posted on their blog yesterday, as well as some great video including a Chromebook promo and the Day 2 Keynote where they announced it:

You've undoubtedly heard about the controversy surrounding Facebook's attempt to smear Google via what turned out to be a pretty shady public relations firm. If you haven't, here's a quick summary:

Last night, Dan Lyons of The Daily Beast exposed that the social network had hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to get newspapers and news outlets to publish stories about how Google was invading its users' privacy:

Google I/O 2011: Subscriptions for laptops, eh? Sounds like mobile phones but, for a laptop. This is a grand step for Google as they're now going to be snapping at the heels of the old-school big boys and the old hand shakes in dark alley companies such as IBM, Dell, etc. Chromebook is to not be mistaken as a Windows or OS X-based solution, Google is grabbing one hand on the internet and cloud-based solutions such as GMail, Docs, Calendar and with the other hand, firmly squeezing the notebook market and by the power of greyskull (or something like that) they've infused these two sections of the IT market and created Chromebook.

But, that's just the beginning, using a subscription-based model, Google can sell these Chromebook's on the cheap and get into the market faster than corporations, companies or schools dumping $1000 or $2000 per machine. How will the subscriptions work? Enterprise users will pay $28 per user, education users are $20 per user. Customers will enter a three-year contract if they want to take on that pricing model - three years sounds like a long time but for business and educational use, is there a need for more power over time?

Google advertise it themselves that the Chromebook's will update over time via over-the-air updates, saying that the Chromebook will actually be faster over time. Because it's an all-in-one solution,it will act like a smartphone, which also gets faster via firmware updates.

This is what we've all been waiting for- everyone watching this keynote wanted to hear about the Chrome OS Netbooks, now dubbed "Chromebooks". All morning, Sundar Pichai has been speaking briefly before turning it over to various other Google reps, but the last part of today's keynote was his time to shine. He had the good fortune of being able to announce to the world that Google Chrome OS Chromebooks will be shipping June 15 of this year. Seeing as how my birthday is a mere month after that, I might be preordering....now. Daddy needs a Chromebook.

Also, I wasn't lucky enough to be in the audience when Pichai announced that everyone in the audience was getting a voucher for a free Chromebook. Bastards! At least they still have to wait for June 15 like the rest of us though. These lucky people, and the rest of us who will shell out the dough for these devices have, as of right now, two choices (seen above), Samsung or Acer.

The Samsung Chromebook has a 12.1", 300-nit display, with an 8-hour battery, headphone jack, built in Wifi, and 3G available from Verizon, who will undoubtedly brutally rob us on data packages. Pichai noted that it came in "two colors" (2nd big Apple stab!) to the delight and laughter of the audience.

Koblin relinquished the stage to Sundar Pichai once again, and he began with the following:

I think this was the moment as the Keynote was nearing its finish that everyone in the audience started to get very, very excited. We've all been waiting for word on Chrome OS netbooks after the CR-48 pilot program was announced six months ago. Of course, Pichai referred to it this part of the speech as a "Chromebook". Awesome. Pichai invites Kan Liu to the stage, who demos some of the new features of Chrome OS when it comes to multitasking.

After Peter Vesterbaka of Rovio left the stage (tough act to follow), Aaron Koblin of the Chrome team got up and showed everyone some pretty amazing HTML5, javascript and WebGL demos using the new and improved Chrome. The project, called Three Dreams of Black, is a musical mixed-media compilation similar to the work that Arcade Fire had previously done wth HTML5 and Chrome in the past. This particular project was directed by Chris Milk and uses music from DJ Dangermouse's newest collaboration album, called RO.ME.

This is one of the trippiest things I've seen in a while. The music is great (as expected), and the 3D rendered environment is completely navigable and customizable. There's even a bit of a narrative in the experience that you can follow, but honestly the visual effects are so engaging that it could have as much narrative as a Blue's Clues episode and you'd still be enthralled. Dragging the mouse around the experience not only shifts perspective but creates all sorts of cool stuff in real-time, while watching.

Peter Vesterbacka, CEO of Rovio, the firm that gave us the most popular mobile gaming application of all time, got on stage at Google I/O today and told everyone exactly what they wanted to hear:

As we already told you , Angry Birds is now available for download in beta at the Chrome web store, right here. It runs on Firefox 4 and IE 9, but it was originally designed for Chrome, and that's what I recommend anyway after seeing this Keynote.