ASUS are really going for gold with the AM3+ platform by including the Republic of Gamers (ROG) teaming of two motherboards in the form of the ASUS Crosshair V Formula and The Ultimate Force (TUF) Sabertooth 9900FX which go hand-in-hand with AMD's 990FX chipset that is designed to run up to four discrete graphics cards. ASUS are keeping the color scheme in line with other TUF-series boards and it doesn't look too bad at all.

The board comes with ultra-durable components, 10-phase Digi+ VRM, four DDR3 DIMM slots supporting dual-channel DDR3-1866MHz memory and connects to the 990FX chipset over a HyperTransport 3.1 link. The board includes four PCI-Express 2.0 16x (capable of 16/4/8/8x or 16/4/16/nc - depending on what is installed). The electrical x4 slot is wired to the SB950 southbridge and is placed there to hold PCI-Express SSDs (such a great addition).

One each of the PCI-E x1 and PCI end the slots in a slower fashion. Storage wise the board sports six internal SATA 6Gbit ports supporting RAID, two internal SATA 3Gbit from a third-party controller, one power-eSATA/USB combo and one normal eSATA on the rear. To finish the board off we have 8+2 channel HD audio powered by a Realtek ALC892 with optical SPDIF output, one GbE port, four USB3.0 ports (two rear, two via header), a bunch of USB2.0 ports and Firewire.

Rovio's famously awesome Angry Birds has reached a very amazing milestone. Downloads have topped 200 million, Apple's iPad and iPhone have contributed to this success by a large portion but the franchise has grown up a little bit. Angry Birds has seem phenomenal success even on Google's Chrome Web Store with 5 million downloads.

Keep in mind that Rovio had more than fifty games before they struck gamers across the globe with the amazing Angry Birds. Rovio's Peter Vesterbacka has shown off Angry Birds hoodies (omg!) and has said that he sees Angry Birds as a huge entertainment platform which isn't just limited to merchandise and movies but he will be experimenting with location-based services and other schemes to blend the game's footprint into the real world. Interesting, huh?

Seven customers have been connected to the National Broadband Network (NBN) trial services in Armidale ahead of the official launch. The launch of the NBN marks the start of trial customer services for various ISPs such as Telstra, iiNet, Internode and Primus. iINet and Internode have two customers each, Primus with a single lucky customer and Telstra has a "handful" of customers on NBN services.

Each telco had connected to the NBN on a trial basis with no cost to the customer (where's my invite?). iiNet has their two customers on 100Mbps services with 1TB of data per month. One of the iiNet customers said he would use his new 100Mbps NBN service to work from home. Peter Erskine is a researcher at the University of New England and has said:

I work as a researcher at the University of New England; however, I prefer to work from home. The NBN connection makes it possible for me to teleconference online and keep in touch with my university colleagues online more reliably than before.

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:

The Android phone took only two and a half years to achieve the momentum that we're talking about. I would expect the same thing on Honeycomb tablets. As a result of so many different parties working together, the first versions tend to be a bit clumsy to roll out. However, as is the nature of these organic industries with very, very large players, you have continuous improvement at a very rapid pace. Everyone recognized the shortcomings of Honeycomb 3.0, jumped in working on Honeycomb 3.1, and if you haven't had a chance to play with it -- it's just delightful.

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:

Disallow root escalation by creating /var/lib/chromeos-aliases.conf and inserting commands. [Credit to Chrome OS Team (Sean Paul)]

Disallow modification of about:flags in Guest mode [Credit to Chrome OS Security Team (Jim Hebert)]

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.

Now that certain PSN services have been restored and you're once again enjoying online gaming, it seems a good time to confirm what is being offered as part of the Welcome Back programme.

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:

"3 Dreams of Black" is a visual voyage through three dream worlds, told through rich 2D drawings and animations that are interspersed with interactive 3D sequences. At various points in this web experience, you can take control with your computer's mouse and guide your journey through the unfolding narrative. You can even contribute to the dream by creating your own relics using a 3D model creator. Some of the best user creations will be integrated into the experience and become a part of others' "3 Dreams" exploration.