This is what I like to hear! With NVIDIA currently on a roll with their Tegra range and Tegra 3-powered devices starting to roll out any day now (in the form of ASUS' Transformer Prime), we now have some GeForce-related new. Rub your hands together with glee! Rumor has it that NVIDIA are flushing the channel of 500-series GPUs, and should introduce some more price cuts soon.

Price cuts on 500-series of GPUs has been happening slowly, but NVIDIA believes that their next-gen 'Kepler' GPU based on a 28nm process is ready and has a strong suspicion that AMD won't be ready with their 7000-series Radeon cards until after Santa does his rounds this Christmas. NVIDIA wants to push hard for a Christmas launch, and you won't hear any complaining from me!

NVIDIA could do a few things here, launch the 600-series before Christmas and use the promise of 'something more from NVIDIA, but it is not here just yet', to try and grab a few of those GPU fans that were leaning toward a Radeon-flavored GPU, and keep them licking that sweet, green NVIDIA pie. Then we have the bundles NVIDIA are pumping out with partners, bundling games such as Mafia II and Batman: Arkham City - this is great, and it keeps customers coming back.

[US residents only] Acer are using Facebook to launch a campaign where users can enter to get a free Acer Aspire S3 Ultrabook. In order to enter the competition, users need to 'like' the sweepstake page and enter their relevant contact information.

International Facebook users need not apply, as this is a US-only competition. Acer will give away one Ultrabook per day all the way through to December 31st. That is a total of 60 Ultrabooks during the campaign. Pretty kick ass if you ask me! Acer are giving away the cheapest $899 model, which sports a 13.3-inch screen with a resolution of 1366x768, an Intel Core i5-2647M, 4GB of DDR3 RAM.

Also included in the Ultrabook to fill it out is a 20GB SSD with a 320GB 5400RPM HDD, two USB 2.0 ports, HDMI and weighs in at just 2.98lb. You can enter the competition, here.

Rainbow 6 series' new title has been confirmed today called Rainbow 6 Patriots and is the latest Tom Clancy first-person shooter which won't see the light of day until 2013. This marks a five-year gap in between Rainbow Six console releases as the most recent of them was Vegas 2 in March 2008.

The wait is possibly at the fault of Vegas 2, which was criticized at the time for being too similar to the original Rainbow Six: Vegas, released in November 2006. The setting for Patriots hasn't been confirmed with the only nugget of information to go on is that it "captures the reality of modern-day terrorism". The game is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal, "with the support of" Ubisoft Toronto and Ubisoft Red Storm.

The single-player portion of the game is said to sport a dynamic storyline with multiple playable characters with the franchise doing a GTA V and apparently going in a "bold new direction". Ubisoft creative director David Sears says:

GIGABYTE wants to have something that is more functional than the competitions' UEFI setup programs, and this is where GIGABYTE 3D BIOS steps up and into the ring to have a swing at things. When you hit DEL at POST to load up the setup program, it starts up the 3D BIOS home screen. On the home screen, you find a 3D rotatable image of your motherboard.

Cool, right? Well, you can use your mouse to spin the board around and check it out - certain parts of that motherboard image can be clicked to open up settings related to it. Let's say you want to click on the SATA ports on that image, click it and the program will open up SATA controller settings. Clicking on the memory slots brings up the memory tuning settings window. Very, very cool.

The visual elements all look spiffy, including smooth fonts, curves and lavish use of alpha. The fine tuning pages don't look like a re-skinned, mouse-enabled version of the old interface, but now include genuine GUI elements like sliders, tickboxes, radio buttons and tabs. A video demo of this is available below:

The Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive have released a critical report labeling China as the "most active an persistent" country in the world when it comes to cyber-espionage. Oh snapz is what our VGA editor would say, and I would agree with that statement. Russia also slipped into the list, together with China are "the most aggressive collectors" of U.S. trade secrets, overall.

The purpose of the report is to highlight the increasing importance cyber-espionage plays in the undermining of both private and government interests. Robert Bryant, the U.S. Counterintelligence Executive, claims cyber-espionage is a "national, long-term strategic threat to the United States" and that "failure is not an option" when it comes to dealing with those matters. In the report, there is a special focus on the undesirable consequences stolen trade secrets may impart upon the U.S. and partner economies.

The Chinese government has been accused multiple times for noteworthy acts of both high-tech and low-tech espionage. This includes infamously penetrating Google's servers, corroborating with a Ford engineer working as a spy (the engineer is a spy! TF2 joke), gaining unauthorized server access at a long list of companies that include Yahoo, Northrop Grumman, Adobe, Symantec, ciphering information from British Unive

Google completed their Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows them to crawl and index the web from fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Google have just announced that they're making quite a significant change to their ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35-percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.

Obviously, in today's world, information is power. But information can be from today, last week, the last minute, or thirty years ago depending on the search terms. Google's algorithm needs to be able to work out if a result from a week ago about a TV show is recent, or if a result from a week ago about breaking news is too old.

Google have a bit more info on it, so if you're interested, check it out. As with most things like this, it is a great read and good to know if you're asked for a random fact one day.

Well, this is beginning to get interesting. Apple are positioning themselves nicely right now, trying to secure HDD stock and supply. The story unfolds as an explanation of how business works, which helps explain Apple's position. Explaining it as a purchasing system, which creates huge advantages for the biggest, cashed-up companies, such as Apple.

Each buyer has a certain amount of money (and power) and can place big orders that the supplier could not ignore. So if the buy says "Forget everyone else you are dealing with, I want to order 1.2 million units in 2011 and I'd like them dropped off with me at the rate of 100,000 a month, but I won't be buying them until I sell them...Oh, yes, and I won't pay for them until 3 months after I sell them", then the supplier has no choice buy to drop their pants and bend over. (KitGuru's words, but they were so good I had to use them).

Dell have been doing this for years and countless other companies, too. Both sides are aware of the practice, and are compliant with it. But, throw in a massive reduction on supply and the rules are changed, completely. The supplier now has the power and with demand so high everywhere else, it [the supplier] has the power to 'give a story' to its regular customers, while they shop around for massive profits.

Zynga's next entry in their "Ville" franchise, which includes FarmVille, FrontierVille, and CityVille, is CastleVille. The latest game allows players to built mini-empires from castles, craft art and armor and trade, and defend your kingdom in a medieval world. The game was created by the Zynga Dallas team, which was part of Zynga's acquisition of Bonfire Studios.

The game starts off by letting you choose your character and build your look. Zynga Dallas director Bill Jackson says that this is the most expansive character building feature to date, with dozens of looks to choose from. The games objectives is for you to build the castle of your dreams and transform the the unexplored land into your own kingdom. There are many characters you'll meet along the way, who are all involved in the storyline of the game.

Duke is the first you'll meet, who will help you build your castle and is from a neighboring kingdom. Yvette is a beautiful songstress, Giselle is a lovely maiden, then we have the friendly village Viking, George. Filling the characters out we have Sonja as the sexy pirate, Rafael as a playboy woodsman and finally, Tom as the rough dragon slayer.

You would think that a company the size of Activision would not let this happen so close to launch, especially since Elite was announced so long ago now. Alas, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Elite will not launch on PC with the game, and will be released sometime after the game itself.

This is due to the developers saying the PC is "insecure", where they're worried people will hack the system. Those statistics can't be hacked, it would cause the world to implode and would be equal to the consequences of dividing by zero! Beachhead Studio head Chacko Sonny says:

Sony have just posted their financial results for Q2 of the current fiscal year, where they've noted significant losses in profit for its Consumer Products & Services, which is where the PlayStation products live and breathe. Sony explained that the loss was due to a number of factors, including the deterioration in the cost of sales ratio as a result of the price reduction on the PlayStation 3 earlier this year.

Other factors that led to losses, were the decline in sales of the video game business, LCD televisions and foreign exchange rates. But, during the quarter, Sony sold a total of 3.7 million PlayStation 3 units compared to 3.5 million in the same quarter of the last fiscal year. The PSP also saw a spike in sales, up to 1.7 million units compared to 1.5 million year-on-year. PlayStation 2 sales dropped from 1.5 million to 1.2 million.

Software wise, PS3 sales were up 37.4 million for the quarter, from 35.3 year-over year. The PSP saw a drop to 8.1 million from 11 million, and finally, the PS2 slid from 5.6 million to 2.8 million. For the quarter ended September 30, the Consumer Products & Services sector posted revenue of ¥779.7 billion ($10.1 billion), down 12.3 percent compared to ¥889.0 billion ($11.4 billion), and an operating loss of ¥34.6 billion ($449 million), compared to last year's ¥1.0 billion ($12.8 million) profit.