Often times job postings give us a view into the future plans of a company. The latest example of this is one of Microsoft's job postings which is pointing towards Skype integration into the upcoming Xbox 720. According to the posting, Microsoft is looking for a London-based Lead Program Manager to bring voice and video services to the Xbox 720.

The posting says: "Skype is working on powering real-time voice and video communications on the Xbox. Xbox is a fundamental lynchpin of Skype's living-room strategy, and we are focused on enabling amazing new in-game and in-console voice and video experiences for the next generation of Xbox. This is a crucial initiative for Xbox, and it is time-critical given the hardware lead times involved."

It's not exactly clear what the Skype integration would entail, but it seems like Microsoft feels this is a pretty big deal for the upcoming Xbox 720. The rumored release date is sometime in 2013, so they have some time to get it right. It could allow others to see user's Kinect motions or to share a celebration after a rough Call of Duty match.

It would seem that PowerColor is the first GPU manufacturer to spill the beans on the upcoming 7970 X2. The new GPU will be based upon two 7970 Tahiti cores, which is the top chip made by AMD. This card is being designed to compete with the NVIDIA GTX 690, which is the current king of the video cards.

The new GPU will be cooled by PowerColor's new monster Vortex III. This new cooler was designed specifically for the new Devil 13 7970 X2 and is huge as you can see by the picture above. It features three fans blowing onto a massive heatsink and takes up 3 slots, as seen by the picture of the backplate.

The new GPU is adorned in red and black and looks beautiful. But it's not all about beauty as the card appears to have some monster stats to go along with the beauty. It will feature a total of 4096 stream processors across the two chips and have a total of 6GB of memory available. The cores will be clocked at 1GHz and require a ton of power. The card is outfitted with three 8-pin PCIe power connectors and has a TDP of 525 watts. The card should make an appearance at Computex early next month. More should be known then.

It's looking like we will soon need to change this category to "Laptops & Ultrabooks" as more and more manufacturers are dropping Netbooks from the US market. Toshiba has confirmed that they will soon be joining the ranks of Dell and Lenovo who have also pulled out of the US Netbook market. It looks like tablets and Ultrabooks have killed the Netbook star.

Part of the reason for the change is that Netbooks have very little profit margin. So not only were sales slipping, but Toshiba wasn't making very much on the few sales that remained. Instead, Toshiba has decided to focus more on their Portege Ultrabook line and Excite tablet line. Looking at the money reasoning, you can see why. An Ultrabook sells for $800 or more which allows quite a bit more profit margin.

Another reason to focus on tablets is the upcoming Windows 8 which is designed with tablets in mind. Additionally, users like the higher performance capabilities of an Ultrabook as more and more users need to do more with their computers. It's pretty hard to play any sort of game or type any long message on a Netbook. If you still want one, HP, Acer, and ASUS are still offering them in the US. They will range from $200-$500.

The AMD FX series of processors is known for overclocking pretty well. It currently holds the world record for fastest clock speed ever achieved and looks to be breaking that once again. A new CPU-z validation screen shot has shown up online. It details the feat even though HWBot rejected the the posting.

The rejection was most likely due to the fact that the overclocker didn't provide much in the way of detail about the cooling system used. When I say much, I mean any. What we do know is that the chip was clocked at a massive 8805.6MHz and was achieved by overclocker Ksin. Speed like that comes only when an overclocker uses extreme cooling such as liquid nitrogen or liquid helium.

To achieve the feat, Ksin used a base clock of 303.29 MHz and a multiplier of 29.0. To reach these clock speeds, an incredible 1.86 volts were pumped through the core. As such, it is recommended that you don't try this at home as that will kill your chip very quickly. Other components of the system include an ASUS Crosshair V Formula motherboard and 4 GB (2x 2 GB) of ADATA memory. The memory was clocked at 1417 MHz.

It's always a difficult task to choose the next profile picture that you're going to use. You put a lot of thought into the process and probably look at several photos for a while before deciding. You may even ask a friend or two what they think. It turns out that there is also some cultural influence into the decision as well.

Your profile picture has different qualities depending on your culture. According to a new study, Americans tend to focus on the face and usually have a close-up shot where the face takes up most of the frame. This is contrary to Taiwanese users who tend to have some background visible and a much smaller portion of the frame taken up by the face.

The study was done twice after the first one found the correlation. The second time around they increased the sample size and locations in which they were drawing participants from and the findings still held true. The study also showed that Americans preferred a more intense facial expression such as a huge smile while Taiwanese tended to have a less intense expression.

Details surrounding Huawei's new Emotion UI aren't plentiful or clear, but we do know somethings. Samsung, HTC, and now ZTE all have custom user interfaces for their Android phones so it seems as though Huawei doesn't want to be left behind. As such, Huawei is now working on a UI called Emotion UI, likely for ICS.

Considering the other manufacturers' UIs works on Ice Cream Sandwich, it makes sense that that is what Huawei will be targeting. The new UI will be unveiled June 9 and will become available sometime in July. Updates will be pushed to currently shipping Huawei Android phones so that they will get the new user interface.

Functionality of the new UI is not clear. Huawei is using words such as "emotional," "simple," and "smart" when describing it, but that doesn't exactly tell us that much. This UI also may not make it out of China, although it could as Huawei is trying to become a global manufacturer. The only downside to this custom UI is that updates will now take longer when new Android versions come out.

We talked about NVIDIA prepping two more GPUs, but at the time we thought they'd be GK104-based. New reports have surfaced, where it might seem like the GEFORCE GTX 660 would be a GK106-based part.

The GTX660 based on the GK106 architecture would sport 768 CUDA cores, 4 SMXs, 64 texture units, 2GB of memory with an interface of 256-bit. Pricing isn't too bad, where we should expect the GTX 660 to hit $349 or so. But, in this market, with this much competition, is that too muhc to pay?

Would you grab one of these GPUs at $349? Or would you be looking at something from Team Red if you were getting into the $350-ish territory? Thoughts?

A Microsoft-sponsored IDC report claims that the annual support costs for a Windows XP systems are five times higher than a Windows 7-based system, as part of Microsoft's latest efforts in pushing more people toward Windows 7.

Microsoft have also issued a statement that has told organizations if they have not started "the migration to a modern PC, you are late". Windows XP gets orphaned by the software company with no further support or patches in April 2014, close to 13 years since it launched.

The report states that 42-percent of Windows' non-home installed base remains on the ageing Windows XP OS. If this continues, 11-percent of all Windows users will continue to be powered by Windows XP when the security patches end in 2014. As for support costs: IT workers' time and worker productivity costs jump by 25- and 23-percent respectively in year four.

We've heard the rumors before, and with the power that social networking giant Facebook has, it would not surprise me to see them release a smartphone. But, can a smartphone really succeed in this world of super-powered smartphones, built around Facebook?

Well, according to employees of Facebook, some engineers have been sought out by engineers there, as well as others who have been briefed on Facebook's plans, reckon that the company wants to release its own smartphone by 2013. These people spoke out in anonymity, fearing their jobs or relationship with Facebook.

Facebook have reportedly hired ex-Apple software and hardware engineers who worked on the iPhone, and one who worked on the iPad, these same employees said. One thing that would boost the 'is Facebook building a phone' argument, is CEO and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has said he's worried that if he doesn't create a mobile phone in the near future that Facebook will simply become an app on other mobile platforms.

Google is sure throwing quite a bit of money and support at the Project Glass augmented reality glasses. They are trying to cram so much technology into a tiny, and hopefully fashionable, package that they should become every geek's dream gadget. We still don't know much about the project other than it's being publicly tested by Google executives.

We've seen some pictures released that have been taken using the glasses and, to be honest, they aren't that great. Most modern smartphones could easily outpace the resolution and quality, but the glasses do have one advantage: Point-of-view. Pictures can be taken hands-free and are from the perspective of the wearer.

Google has now released a 15-second video that was taken while the user was jumping on a trampoline. This really is where these glasses start to shine. It would have been near impossible to take a video like this without these glasses. The quality of the video isn't stunning by any means, but for users who video blog their lives, these glasses are an invaluable piece of technology.