Mainstream media doesn't seem to be covering this as much as I thought, as it goes against their Global Warming agenda. But, how about we mix up our tech-related news, with some real-world news, shall we?

For the past fortnight or so, Europe has been stopped in its tracks. A cold snap is responsible for this, stranding people at home, in their cars, resulting in hundreds of deaths, and thousands upon thousands affected. Venice's canals have frozen over, Amsterdam's canals have people ice skating on them, people sledding in Slovenia, and cross-country skiing in Pamplona.

The sad results of this is that the Ukraine has been hit quite hard, resulting in more than 135 deaths, many more have been sent to hospital with hypothermia, massive traffic havoc and have left several Bosnia-based villages completely cut off from the outside world. These things are not reported on your TV as much as they should be.

Team Red have just lost another player, after a few resignations and changes within the company throughout 2011 and even this year, news has hit the Internet that AMD's Corporate Vice President & CTO, Graphics Division, Eric Demers, is leaving the company. He has hung up his Team Red shirt for good.

AnandTech have reported that he isn't leaving for Intel, or Team Green (NVIDIA), but suspect that Eric's talents will continue to be seen within the industry. Considering AMD's current success within the GPU industry, it's hard to see Eric out of work for a long period of time. An official statement has arrived from AMD, too:

[UPDATE] And we're good! We're good people! Amendments will be made to the Classification Act 1995 and Broadcasting Services Act 1992 and will roll through in January 2013. I cannot believe this actually happened, and this shows the power of the people, and the Internet. When they work together, they can really push through new things!

News from last month told us that the new Federal Minister for Home Affairs, Jason Clare, had announced his intentions to stick to former Federal Minster for Home Affairs, Brendan O'Connor's previous plans in regards to the introduction of an R18+ adult classification for video games in Australia.

Clare stated that he would follow O'Connor's decision to introduce the R18+ bill in the February 2012 session of parliament. Well, it's February 2012, and here we are. Clare has stayed true to his word, with news arriving today that the R18+ legislation has been cleared by the Federal Parliamentary Caucus of the Australian Labor Party in its meeting in Canberra, and is now ready to be introduced in parliament.

Next-gen consoles and next-gen graphics engines are something that I have quite close to my heart. It's something I think needs to really evolve. I see the AAA gaming market as something that is stuck inside of a bubble.

The cause of that bubble? Consoles. I've covered this a fair bit in a few of my editorials, where I've talked about smartphones and tablets getting close to, and will eventually pass the power in current-gen consoles. Once this happens, consoles will have a hard time selling, unless we see next-gen consoles.

The previous generation of consoles teased "Full HD gaming", but delivered sub-HD gaming. Most AAA titles run at a resolution lower than 1280x720 and at frame rates less than 30fps. Of course, there are some games that run at either slightly higher resolutions, or slightly higher frame rates, but never both. We don't see games like Halo, Gears of War, Uncharted or Metal Gear Solid running at 1080p with 30fps.

We've reported a few times now that the upcoming next-generation Apple iPad 3 would launch in "Q1 2012", or "early-March" or "the first week of March". It now seems that we could expect an announcement of the iPad 3 on March 7th, 2012, to be specific. It was also reported that it would sport a quad-core chip, and LTE support.

This new information comes from iMore, where they've reported that Apple will hold their iPad 3 announcement on March 7th. iMore also reports that the iPad 3 will feature the 2048x1536 Retina Display, as well as the quad-core A6 processor and possibly, 4G LTE support. They cite sources "who have been reliable in the past".

iMore seems certain of LTE support in the iPad 3:

Intel's new processor architecture codenamed "Haswell" won't see the light of day until 2013, but that doesn't stop information from leaking out onto the Internet about it. The successor to Ivy Bridge now has some more details on its embedded graphics processor, with DonanimHaber detailing the integrated GPU (iGPU) plans.

Haswell's iGPU will be DirectX 11.1 compliant, which means it will take advantage of API optimizations that improve performance, for "typical desktop usage scenarios". It also supports OpenCL 1.2, which will help in GPGPU-optimized applications, and is designed around a new stereoscopic 3D standard called Auto-Stereoscopic 3D (AS3D), which will benefit Blu-ray 3D acceleration, stereo 3D photos, and more.

It would be compared to entry-level GeForce or Radeon GPUs for acceptable performance with stereo 3D.

It was only a few weeks ago that a 'hack' was made available for VLC that allowed the program to have Blu-ray compatibility, where it could playback encrypted Blu-ray images. Now we have the first release candidate (RC) of VLC 2.0.

VLC 2.0 has some big changes, the biggest of which is the OS X version that sports a new user interface that does look quite swish indeed, as well as Blu-ray playback support. Windows doesn't get missed out, which now features a 64-bit version, as well as support for multiple video files found inside RAR archives.

Apple doesn't officially support Blu-ray, as they have no Blu-ray hardware in any form, and the software support is not that great, if applicable at all. Blu-ray discs are encrypted, so you can't just download a program and away you go. Because Apple don't support Blu-ray, Blu-ray on OS X has been barely existant, but there have still been work arounds. MKV files, as well as the ability to rip and encode video with the OS X version of MakeMKV.

Get ready for more Special FX pr0n, as Michael Bay is now confirmed to direct yet another sequel to the phenomenally successful Transformers series. The movie doesn't have an official name outside "Transformers 4" at the moment, and it doesn't even have a cast, or story yet.

The news was rumored last year, but confirmation has now come from producer Lorenzo DiBonaventura, where he says that a fourth Transformers is planned and should hit in 2014, with veteran Transformers director Michael Bay to direct. MTV spoke to the producer, who said:

This years Grammy Awards enjoyed a very tidy 40 million viewers, making it the second-largest audience that the Grammy's have ever enjoyed, a number that is up 50-percent versus the 2011 Grammy's. Why the huge 50-percent jump in viewers? Well, most would presume it has to do with Whitney Houston's untimely death the day before, but we also have the digital side of things pumping along.

Big, live TV events are huge on social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, where online chatter expands like nothing else, and this draws more viewers to TV, where they expand with even more chatter of said event. 2012's Grammy Awards saw 13 million "social media comments", says "social TV" tracker Bluefin Labs. That's more than even the successful Super Bowl, which had more viewers than the Grammy's.

CBS say they worked hard to generate online interest for the show, where they point to a fact that they attracted a million visitors to the various sites and iPad/iPhone apps it operated over the three days leading up to the show. CBS say they attracted a peak of 165,000 concurrent viewers to the livestream of pre-Grammy's red carpet coverage on Sunday afternoon.

Valve's Steam has had quite the press lately, last year they announced Steam Guard, which featured increased security for gamers, but in November of last year, we reported that Steam confirmed they had been hacked. This was after the Steam Forums went down for "maintenance".

This year, Valve released Steam for Mobile, which was a step in a different direction, and then just a few days ago confirmed that last year's hack was actually worse than previously thought. So as you can see, they're having a hard time. Those hard times got worse over the weekend when Steam suffered a worldwide failure, leaving users unable to play games, as well as taking down the Steam user forum and various associated websites.

There were, of course, claims that Steam was under attack once again from hackers, but it turned out that it was actually a failure of their central datacenters uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system. An engineer posted on Steam's forums yesterday saying: