Angry Birds Space, a follow-up to the Angry Birds series of games, has been immensely popular since its release back on March 22. We reported how it rocketed past 10 million downloads in 3 days, and later 20 million downloads in 7 days. Now the company has tweeted that they have flown past 50 million downloads in just 35 days.

If my math is correct, and it usually is, the pace of downloads is slowing down, but 50 million in 35 days isn't something to scoff about. The company behind Angry Birds believes that the speed of downloads makes this game the fastest growing mobile game available today. Told you it isn't something to scoff about.

"50 Million downloads in 35 days! Proud to have #angrybirdsspace as one of the fastest growing games ever! rov.io/50MILL" the company's tweet said. Along with this announcement comes the teasing of something bigger. The company said the following in a blog post, "There's only one conclusion to draw: something even bigger is on its way."

USB flash drives can be hard to hang onto sometimes. They always seem to disappear at the worst time possible. And I'd venture to guess that most people don't run any sort of encryption on a flash drive. This new device claims to be the "only USB storage drive that protects its contents with a password spoken by its owner."

But, what if you have a cold or are in a room with other people? Don't worry! The flash drive features a back-up text version where you can type your password instead. This is for those times where you have laryngitis or just forgot the spoken password. At 8GB, it's not the largest drive on the market, or the best looking, but it certainly is cool.

If you make security easier, such as this, then people are more likely to use it. And since it analysis the voice along with the password, just knowing what to say won't allow access. Unfortunately it still has a text-based password which could get out and compromise security, but it's still a novel device to show your friends.

Google has yet another bragging point that they've used a blog post to talk about: Google Translate is used by more than 200 million people per month. What some more number stats? Break this number down, and Google translates the equivalent to as much text you'd find in 1 million books. Wow.

Franz Och, a research scientist with Google Translate discusses how Google's translation service has grown through the years. Back in 2001, Gogole offered a service that could translate eight different languages to and from English. This service used state-of-the-art commercial machine translation (MT) and whilst it worked, it wasn't efficient, or very effective.

The service didn't really go well, and in 2003 Google decided to make some changes, one of these key steps was hiring Och away from his research position at DARPA. The team was then able to use Google's massive computing infrastructure, and got some very strong results, but it still wasn't quick enough for practical use. It took Google 40 hours and 1,000 computers to translate 1,000 sentences.

NVIDIA had quite the day yesterday, with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang proudly announcing the kick-arse GEFORCE GTX 690, based on two Kepler GK104 GPUs. But, that wasn't the only big news, another thing Team Green announced was the 'GeForce Experience'.

What is that? It does sound like a trip in a fighter plane, or some really cheesy porno, but it's actually a cloud-based service with the promise of simplifying the configuration of games based on your hardware. This means that depending on your particular hardware configuration, including the CPU, RAM, storage speed and of course, the GPU, the NVIDIA tool will set the optimal in-game settings and resolution.

This is a huge step for NVIDIA, but they're confident that they have the personnel and testing systems in place to push this forward. How it'll work is pretty simple: when a user opens a game for the first time, they'll be prompted with a screen that shows the default of current game settings side-by-side with the settings recommended by NVIDIA's GeForce Experience.

This comes at quite a surprise, but daily US iPhone app downloads have dropped, considerably, with a 30-percent month-over-month drop. This is up from the 6.35 million in February to just 4.45 million in March, according to mobile marketing firm Fiksu.

Fiksu also says that it was the second straight month of decline in the course of their tracking, with a drop in January to February, but no where near as severe. January saw downloads topping 6.79 million, so a drop to 6.35 million is less than 10-percent. But a 30-percent drop the month after? That's something worth noting.

Fiksu also states that the drop is most likely due to two trends: first, the iPhone 4S is no longer a new device, so owners may be less concerned with downloading new apps. And secondly, Apple has decided to crack down on third-party marketers using bots to download apps and inflate chart rankings. This would make sense as with fewer bots, app traffic may now be coming down from its inflated numbers, down to reality.

Last week, we reported on the Ivy Bridge high temperatures, and whether it was because Intel used TIM instead of solder on the IHS, but now things seem to have changed. A PC EVA forum member has used a Core i7 3770K processor, slapped a Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler and Prolimatech PK-1 thermal grease, and has tested the chip with and without the IHS on to see if there was a difference with thermal performance.

They used AIDA64 Extreme Edition for idle and load average temperature monitoring, with Prime95 smashing the CPU to generate load. Testing was done at 4.5Ghz with 1.2V on the core. The results?

As we can see, even with the cheaper thermal paste and the IHS layer removed, the cooling performance is relatively unchanged. This also allows a 5-percent margin of error. This is another piece of evidence to show that the heating performance is nothing to do with the IHS, by most likely something to do with Ivy Bridge's revised manufacturing process. This means that an Ivy Bridge should reach lower stable 24/7 clock speeds than a Sandy Bridge chip, but offer it with lower power consumption numbers.

Being based in Australia is good for a few things, our pay over here for jobs is quite good, public health is amazing, and countless other things. But the things that I like to spend my hard-earned cash on, tech and games, is ridiculously priced compared to the rest of the world.

The Australian government is now going to be looking into this, where all major computer and software publishers will be sent invitations to defend their pricing policies at a Federal Parliament inquiry. MP Ed Husic has been campaigning for fairer local pricing, and welcomed the inquiry, saying:

People here scratch their heads trying to work out why they get fleeced on software downloads. When the Productivity Commission asked IT companies why they charge so much for downloads, even they found the answers were not persuasive.

Apple and Samsung have been at it for a while now, but it's beginning to heat up considerably. Both companies are now being ushered into a room together with their judge mediating settlement talks between the two popular companies.

Both Apple and Samsung, as well as their CEOs and chief counsels, are expected to meet up on the mornings of May 21 and 22 in a San Francisco court rather than the full trials' San Jose venue. Both sides will also have to produce statements by May 9 stating how likely they think their chances are of winning the trial.

But right now, there's absolutely no way one could guess which way this is going to go. Apple CEO Tim Cook has stated that he prefers to settle when he can, but still argues that companies should stop copying, implying that legal action might not stop without a promise of changes from GALAXY-branded maker, Samsung.

We've all been salivating at the mouth for it, well, maybe not you, but I sure have. What are we salivating for? NVIDIA's answer to the question "who is your Daddy?" Well, their answer? The GEFORCE GTX 690.

Kepler has had an interesting launch, where NVIDIA just dumped the GTX 680 onto the market and pretty much said "have at it, everyone" and it was a great contender to the already fast Radeon HD 7970. But how good does the dual-Kepler GTX 690 need to be? Usually we get two decent cards with built-in SLI, but NVIDIA have opted for dual GTX 680s for the GTX 690.

This time round, we get two fully enabled GK104 cores bursting at the proverbial seams. NVIDIA are also setting some high targets on performance per watt, where NVIDIA are able to leverage the GK104's cores onto a single GPU without having to worry about it requiring super-cooling, or sucking down serious power. The GEFORCE GTX 690 also has something else high-end up its sleeve, it's price. It will launch at $999, but did you really expect this beast to be cheap? Didn't think so.

Today has been a 'Friday Feel Good Day.' As reported earlier, TigerDirect teamed up with a Corsair and EVGA to make that computer that is being auctioned off on eBay. It's not the only charity build that's currently going on. Custom Case Modder Will Lyon has built a cool "Arctic Cat" themed case that he is now selling raffle tickets for. The proceeds from the raffle ticket sales go to support Huntington's Disease.

As originally posted by Will Lyon:

Help support a great cause and get a chance to win this custom rig built buy me. This rig includes lots of time and parts graciously donated by many great people and great companies! Huntington's Disease is a (currently) incurable and debilitating genetic disorder. You can help the HDSA to further their research and try to find a treatment or cure for this horrible disease. I personally am also giving away myr Arctic Cat computer to one lucky person who donates! All donations received will go go to the Huntington's Disease Society of America. The funds will enable the HDSA to continue their ongoing efforts to find a treatment or even a cure for Huntington's Disease. Just like with any other disease-related research they need all the help they can get! Me wife's best friend's mother died from Huntington's so the donations will be made to the HDSA in her name.