Cake smashes at kids birthday parties look so awesome. My daughter turns one in March next year and we're going to have one. I'm so excited. Why didn't Sony do this with the 5-year anniversary of the PS3? A giant PS3 cake and have various devs and management smash it up. I need to work for their PR department, ha. This week is definitely the week of anniversaries and birthdays! First up we had the Xbox's 10-year anniversary, and Intel's 40-year anniversary of their first microprocessor, the Intel 4004. Today, Sony stands on the podium with the PlayStation 3 turning five today.

Five years since the PlayStation 3 launch. I still remember the pre-launch buzz, dual-HDMI, 1080p, this, that. Then it launched and people were selling PS3 consoles on eBay for ridiculous prices, or selling just the empty box and getting suckers to purchase it in the craze of the launch.

The PS3 did launch before this day five years ago, but in Japan. Today marks the release in the US. The PS3 ushered in some truly great things to the gaming world, it pushed forth today's standard for high-definition video, Blu-Ray. It introduced the great Sixaxis controller, introduced Move to the world, 3D is now available on it, great titles such as the Uncharted series and Killzone.

The Australian retail market has always been a funny thing, something available online for say $19.99 (like the t-shirt I'm wearing) is $49.99 here in stores, if not more. It's ridiculous and it seems that even a powerhouse retailer like JB Hi-Fi is feeling that pinch.

Today they very quietly launched an online-only direct sales model, at first just selling DSLR cameras and accessories. These prices won't be offered in-store, with only the online store the only way to take advantage of the super-cheap pricing. The store is dubbed "direct import" and offers DSLR camera, lenses, flashes and grips. Funnily enough, it's undercutting its own bricks and mortar JB Hi-Fi stores in the process.

For example, a Nikon D3100 with a single lens through JB Hi-Fi's online store is $777. The direct import price? $596. This kind of pricing really shows how much price-gouging is done at a wholesale level in Australia.

The WarpDrive has been a really good product for LSI and datacenter owners. The product has been so successful the successor has already been announced and production is ramping up quickly for a Q4 or early Q1 launch. That information has been public for the last month or so, released at IDF.

LSI is already working on an even newer product, one that they don't really want to talk too much about. So without an official name I'm going to designate this one WarpCache.

The LSI MegaRAID controllers have two distinct add-ons. We've covered them both in the past, FastPath, an IOPS accelerator and CacheCade, an HDD cache system fed by solid state drives. By placing an SSD or an array of SSDs in front of the HDDs to hold hot data the data can be read at the pace of SSDs. This also reduces wear on the traditional platter drives as frequently read data is pulled from the much faster SSD cache.With CacheCade 2.0 the SSD cache can write incoming data as well, a large bonus for write intensive apps.

Newegg are currently running a special on OCZ SSD drives, all you need is the coupon code "BLKNOVSSD". The specials are pretty good and include both the Vertex 3 and Agility 3 drives from OCZ. The specials include all three drive sizes, 60, 120 and 240GB.

Vertex 3 in 60, 120 and 240GB have original prices of $109, $190 and $475, respectively. With the 15-percent off and mail-in rebate, this brings the pricing down to $73, $142 and $374 for the 60, 120, and 240GB drives, respectively. For the Agility 3 drives, we see the same discount apply, 60, 120, 240GB drives with original prices of $107, $171 and $360, respectively, taken down to $71, $125, and $276, respectively, after the 15-percent off and mail-in rebate.

These are some seriously nice prices for the SSD drives from OCZ and would make quite the Christmas present if Mrs TweakTown reader is watching. Get one and stuff it into your partners' stocking for some Christmas morning SSD surprise!

We've seen some pretty amazing advances in mobile technology over the past decade, and even more so in the past two to three years. Battery life is one thing that has not kept up with the fast pace of the industry and this is set to [hopefully] change.

A team of engineers at Northwestern University claim to have discovered a breakthrough that could revolutionize the industry. The researchers have developed an electrode for lithium-ion batteries that could increase the capacity and recharge rate by 10 times. If this can be done, we could see smartphones lasting for an entire week before requiring a recharge. Oh, what's that? You need to recharge it to last another week? That'll only take a few minutes versus a few hours.

Currently, lithium-ion batteries are charged by a chemical reaction that causes litium ions to move between the anode and cathode. As energy is used, litium ions travel from the anode to the cathode through the electrolyte. This is reversed when its charging. The anode is composed of carbon-based graphene sheets and they can only handle one lithium atom per six carbon atoms.

Airport body scanners that use X-ray technology have been banned across Europe. Officials have said in a press release that the X-ray technology is now deemed off-limits in order to not risk jeopardizing citizens' health and safety.

Tiny bits of radiation emits from X-rays and have long since been connected to cancer in rare instances by physically damaging DNA. In a letter to ProPublica from the FDA, the agency claims that the risk of fatal cancer from scanners is 1 in 400 million.

Another report from ProPublica says that anywhere between six and 100 US airline passengers could develop cancer each year from walking through the machines. The TSA has responded to the EU's decision to ban the X-ray scanners, revealing that 300 dangerous or illegal items have been found on passengers by using the X-ray scanners. One would think that over the entire course of years using the scanners that finding 300 dangerous or illegal items, is worth the better chance of not getting cancer from the scanners?

Boxee Box is set to receive an upgrade in the form of the Boxee Live TV. Boxee Live TV is a dongle that allows you to connect an antenna to your Box and watch channels such as ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC in HD without a monthly fee.

Most people are watching less traditional TV, because of Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, Vudu and Vimeo. Boxee wants to get in on this, by providing something that allows you to still use those great services through Boxee Box, but allows broadcast TV channels such as ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC over the air in HD through Boxee Live TV.

The traditional TV model is changing, we know that. Most people (like myself) don't sit down and watch TV when it is happening, live. They'll pre-record, DVR, download, or stream it over the Internet, to watch it later. Cable companies don't understand this, as their decades-old business model is fading, and they don't know how to stop it. Companies like Boxee understand you, most importantly, the new-age of TV viewers.

Apple have been having quite the hard time lately, with iOS updates flying thick and fast lately. iOS is rumored to be hitting some time next week, with another attempt from the Cupentino-based company to fix their battery life issues that went unresolved with iOS 5.0.1.

Battery drain has been a serious, recurring issue with iOS updates, although most devices are usually unaffected. iOS 5.1 is set to include a bunch of upgrades to Siri, expanding its functions. iOS 5.1 should include the ability to take a photo or record video using voice commands, as well as toggling Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on or off. iOS 5.1's release date? TBA.

Apple officially considers Siri to be in a beta state, with some functions unavailable to those outside of the US and currently only supports just a few languages. Siri currently installs on just the iPhone 4S, but it has been hacked to work on older products.

Google have just unleashed Google Music from its beta hold, and have also announced a music store that is built into the Android Market. Google Music is available to anyone in the US without an invitation requirement, and includes the ability to upload 20,000 songs to the cloud for free.

Google Music will have an app for Windows, Mac and Linux devices that will help you upload songs to the cloud, and the songs uploaded to the cloud can be either streamed or "pinned" for offline listening. The Android Market music store will include millions of songs, sortable by genre, sub genre, top albums, and top songs.

There are Staff Picks and a New Releases section, song prices range between $0.99 and $1.29 and every song is 320kbps MP3s with 90 second previews for each song. There will be a new free song every day and the first one is David Bowie's "Sound and Vision", Google have said there will be hundreds of free songs from the get-go. Big major labels have joined in, such as Universal, EMI and Sony music, as well as a number of smaller, independent labels.

Toshiba 24nm MLC flash isn't exactly breaking news, SandForce had this drive on display at IDF 2011. We did learn today that Toshiba's 24nm flash should cost less than IMFT 25nm flash so all of those SandForce SF-2281 controlled drives could become a little cheaper in 2012.

We still are scratching our heads on what performance will be like but Toshiba's 3Xnm flash with the 2281 is the current speed king on the market today. Drives like the OCZ Technology MaxIOPS, Patriot Wildfire and OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G are just a few examples that use Toshiba flash already.

Also on display at AIS 2011 were several non-standard form factors produced by companies that are supplied with SandForce controllers.