I stumbled across some interesting news today, with EA's financial results for the first quarter of this year, which have some interesting facts for the games industry. EA's report is broken down into platforms, PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

EA made $292 million from the Xbox 360, $276 million from the PC and $267 million from the PS3. This means that as one of the world's biggest publishers, EA made more money on the PC than they did from the PlayStation 3, which to me, is quite surprising. EA's surge in business for the PC is looking to be attributed from digital sales.

EA has made $342 million from digital sales, up considerably from $232 million last year. Physical sales represent $592 million, dropping from $647 million last year. So, we're seeing that more and more people are going digital, like myself, compared to buying physical copies of games. If this trend continues, we could see digital thrashing physical copies, and when (note that I'm not using the word if) this happens, we're going to see an interesting shift in the gaming world. This is coming from a company who has said that it's "inevitable" that they'll become a 100% digital company.

Apple have today expanded the available options for configuring a new Retina MacBook Pro. The company is now offering a heap of individual upgrade options on the base model that starts at $2199. Previously, if you wanted a base model rMBP, you were stuck with the 2.3GHz Core i7 model with 256GB of SSD storage, with the only configurable onboard option being a RAM upgrade from 8GB to 16GB for $200.

If you wanted a faster CPU, or more flash storage, you were required to jump to the high-end $2799 model, which sports a 2.6GHz Core i7 processor, and 512GB of storage. But now, Apple are offering a slew of upgrades to the processor, memory and storage options. Customers can now upgrade storage on the base $2199 model from the stock 256GB to 512GB for an additional $500, or 768GB for an additional, wait for it, $1000.

The CPU options can also get upped from the base 2.3GHz Core i7 to the 2.6GHz model for $100 extra, or for $350 extra you can get it ramped up to 2.7GHz. Memory options stay the same with an upgrade option to 16GB for the same $200. Apple still has a 1-2 week shipping estimate for the rMBP, as they try to keep up with demand. I really want one, but dumping down that much moola on a single product is hard.

Google have finally opened up an official Android blog, as up until now, all of the Android-based news had to find its home in the Google Mobile blog. Now, it has its own home, its own man cave, dungeon and experimental lab. Call it what you will, but Android has its own home within a blog.

The Google Mobile team had some words to express for the new home for Android:

You know what? I love numbers. I think this is why I love technology so much, specs, GHz, core clocks, frame rates, power consumption, I could go on forever. Social networking site, Facebook, have released their energy usage report for the year of 2011, with some interesting details.

Facebook's total annual carbon footprint for each monthly active Facebook user is 269 grams. Facebook have put this into context in the report as detailing that for one person's Facebook use for the entire of 2011, had roughly the same carbon footprint as one medium latte, or three large bananas, or a couple of glasses of wine. I'll take the latter, thanks.

Facebook's total energy usage from office space, data centers, and other facilities was approximately 532 million kWh. Greenhouse gas emissions, also known as our carbon footprint, comes from many different areas: data centers, office space, employee commuting, employee air travel, data center construction and server transportation totaled approximately 285,000 metric tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent, which includes greenhouse gases CO2, CH4, N2O, and HFCs).

So it looks like its not just Valve's Gabe Newell, or Blizzard who are against Microsoft's Windows 8, which just hit RTM, by the way. Minecraft developer Notch is cautious of the shift to the Windows Store, and third-party outlets.

Notch sees any further lockdown of Windows 8 as potentially "very very bad" for indie game developers, and overall competition in the gaming business. It was all during an interview on Reddit, where the Minecraft dev predicted a bright future for indie game developers, as long as there are "open and free" platforms to support their work. Notch says:

Google Wallet, since its launch, has been held back by numerous limitations, the biggest was its lack of support for most major credit and debit cards. But, the Mountain View-based company, Google, have just opened up Google Wallet's heart to the cloud.

Google Wallet now supports any credit or debit card, and allows you to take them from one Google-based device, to the next. Early versions of Wallet used the phones secure storage to protect your card details, but now these details sit in the cloud allowing you to sync your preferred payment method across more than one device, as well as keeping track of both your in-store, and online purchase's through Google's web Wallet.

Worried about security? Google have your back, as they allow you to disable individual devices. So if you were to lose your Nexus for example, and you were scared someone might use the device to buy something, you can just jump online and disable that single device. Once you've acquired a new device, your details can slide over onto the new device, all with a few taps of your finger.

AMD has been losing talent left and right over the past year. December saw the loss of VP of strategy Patrick Moorhead and Product Director Carrell Killebrew, among others. Just last week week, AMD lost the person responsible for getting AMD GPUs into every single one of the current consoles to NVIDIA.

AMD hasn't been very competitive on the CPU front, and the GPU front seems to be falling behind NVIDIA. Bulldozer had lackluster performance and Piledriver improvements don't seem to be enough to put AMD back into direct competition with Intel. Enter Jim Keller.

Jim Keller worked at AMD between 1998 and 1999 where he led development of the K8 architecture, arguably AMD's biggest lead over Intel, and co-authored the x86-64 specification. Even though he was only there for a short time, he certainly left his mark on the company. His resume is even more impressive with the work he has been doing lately.

Windows 8 is getting closer and closer to be released and today sees another major milestone for the latest operating system. Today, Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 testing and production has been completed and that the new operating system has been released to manufacturing. This means that OEMs now have access to the OS and can start building PCs with it.

Of course those PCs built won't go on sale quite yet. They will hit the market with the general release of Windows 8, which comes on October 26. Upgrades will be offered for $39.99, or if you have recently purchased a Windows 7 PC, the upgrade will only cost you $14.99. Various audiences will get access to Windows 8 RTM before the rest of us:

The Windows 8 release preview is still available for users to check out and can be downloaded from Microsoft. As of August 15, developers will have access to the final build of Visual Studio 2012, which will include resources they need to design, build, and sell apps in the Windows Store. We're just under 3 months away from seeing the final version of Microsoft's latest OS.

A few weeks ago, there were reports of Dropbox users started to receive spam on the e-mails tied to Dropbox. The major problem with this was that some of these user's e-mails were only tied to their Dropbox account which meant that the spam or address leak was coming from Dropbox itself as there would be no other way for the e-mail to be released.

Dropbox enlisted the help of "an outside team of experts" to aid their own security team and law enforcement. Dropbox's VP of Engineering, Aditya Agarwal, said in a blog post that a number of usernames and passwords were stolen from third party websites. These combos were then used to sign into "a small number of Dropbox accounts."

One of those stolen password combos belonged to an employee. The employee's Dropbox contained a project file which had a list of e-mails. The company believes "this improper access is what led to the spam." Dropbox is taking several steps to prevent something like this from happening in the future. These are laid out below:

Facebook have not had a good time since their IPO launch, where they began trading at $38 per share. But at the close of Tuesday this week, shares were down another 6-percent, reaching just $21.71 per share. This represents a drop of 43-percent since the social networking site went public.

Even after Facebook's first ever earnings report as a public company was released, there are still concerns over the social networking sites growth, which just don't seem to be going away. Investors had hoped to have seen more progress in terms of the user growth, and how the company is capitalizing on the rapid increase of mobile usage. Investors wanted Facebook to "show confidence they could grow the company, and they didn't", said Francis Gaskins of IPODesktop.com.

But, are we at the bottom of the barrel yet? It appears not. Come August 16, just a mere 91 days after the IPO, insiders such as company officers, directors and employees, can sell a whopping 268 million shares of stock. Between 91 and 181 days after the IPO, insiders can sell an additional 137 million shares. If these shares are to see any move, it could spell quite the disaster for Facebook, and drive their share price much, much lower.