Apple is on a hiring spree for silicon designers. The Cupertino based company has been amassing some impressive talent in the upper management field

Why is Apple doing this? Well they are only following in their usual paranoid development and control pattern. You see they feel that some of their designs and developments for the iPod and iPhone have been leaked out from the third party company that designs their current chips.

This would make Samsung the guilty party as they are the ones that design and produce the ARM based chips. I wonder when Apple will buy a foundry and a place to build their toys...

If you are a fan of the PSP there is good news for you today. It is looking like Sony will be launching a new version of the popular handheld gaming console at E3 this year.

This time around there will not be the UMD to deal with, as all of the games will be available through online content distribution. There could be as many as 100 classic titles as well as some new ones at launch time.

The controls for the PSP will slide out from the bottom but otherwise will remain the same layout as the current PSP.

There may be good news in VistaVille, It looks like the 2nd Service Pack for the much maligned OS has gone RTM (Release to Manufacturer).

Although there is not a firm release schedule quite yet the RTM stage means that the new update is finalized and ready to go. One nice improvement over previous SPs is a single installer for both Vista and Server 2008 making distribution easier.

Fixes in the new pack include full support for Via's 64 Bit CPU, ability to record directly to BluRay media and other improvements for performance and compatibility.

The new HD 4770 with the 40nm golden GPU is getting some attention today.

It seems that after the Asus announcement of their overclocked reference cards some of the gang over at Fudzilla took a look at the new ATi darling and deiced to see what could be done with it.

With a few simple changes using Rivatuner you can clock your HD 4770 up to around 900MHz with no extra voltage. There was no long-term stability toasts to show off but the card was able to complete a 3DMark Vantage run.

The iPhone OS 3.0 has entered the BETA 4 stage. But according to people that have the new OS there is not much new to see.

One thing they do talk about is that the formerly empty store settings pane now has some information in it. The problem is there is nothing exciting there and only seems to link you to a bland web page that allows you to edit your account information.

To get OS 3.0 working you will also need to upgrade to the new iTunes, 8.2 (which is not out just yet.)

During a recent press conference in Taipei, NVIDIA commented to Chinese press that it expected to have 40 of its Intel Atom CPU based ION platforms on the market by the end of the year.

The report says that there will be a mixture of single-core Atom 230 and dual-core Atom 330 systems available and we will probably end up seeing many of them during Computex Taipei, which is held during early June.

As expected, Intel has just announced price cuts to its line of X25 and X18 SSD drives.

Start at the top of the line, the 160GB SSD has dropped in price down to $630 and the smaller form factor sized 80GB X18-M down to $320. The popular 80GB X25-M has dropped from $390 down to $340. Finally the 32GB X25-E drive has gone from $410 to $390. All prices are in US dollars.

Intel has announced two new motherboards hoping to spur some growth in the area of small form factor computing.

First up is the D945GSEJT boarth that comes fully integrated with an Atom N270 processor and the Mobile Intel 945GSE Express chipset. Intel seems to think this low-power nettop platform is great for building all-in-one or thin client PC's.

Microsoft has made a last minute change to Windows 7 in an effort to try and increase security even more. This time around they have removed the AutoRun feature for most USB drives.

This will hopefully prevent malware from tricking users into running an application, at least that is Microsoft's intent. All USB drives won't be affected however. Drives that use specialized software such as U3 will still continue to show up as DVD drives, thus allowing them to still utilize AutoRun.

Wow, the Apple rumor mill is out in force today. The current one is that Apple is looking to cheat on long term partner AT&T by developing a pair of devices for Verizon.

The new devices would include a lower end iPhone, something Apple has repeatedly denied even considering and an iPod touch on Steroids dubbed the Media Pad by the press.

According to CNet this Media Pad could be the true source of all the Apple Netbook rumors. If true this means that Apple with dodge the Sub $500 computer question by making an overpriced media player instead.