Apparently Google’s CR-48 won’t be the only ChromeBook around anymore. We’ve heard about rumours of Samsung developing netbooks running on Chrome OS, and now Google has made it official on stage at their second day of Google I/O event. Well, Samsung won’t be the only one as Acer is also said to be one of the ChromeBook supplier. Samsung’s ChromeBook will be the 5 Series 12-inch netbook.

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Google’s Chrome OS is getting bigger as Google adds more stuff into it. Netflix and Hulu will be supported right out of the box for the pair of new Chromebooks (one from Samsung and one from Acer).

The file manager has also been improved, along with an offline version of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs.

Far more monumental, Google’s also just announced the cost of these Chromebooks and there’s no upfront payment to speak of. Instead, Chrome OS laptops will be distributed on the basis of a recurring monthly subscription, which will cost $28 per user for businesses and $20 per user for schools. That includes regular software and hardware upgrades.

That’s right. Whenever Google upgrades the hardware, you’ll get that too (presumably, that’s what Google said). Then again, you can’t play Call of Duty and World of Warcraft on this, and there’s no photoshop and 3D Studio Max. Also, when the internet’s down, presumably most of your functions will also be down. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

My guess is, this Chrome OS won’t work in our country with shitty 3G connection and awful Shitmix.

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Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processor is awesome, even my X58 with i7-920 has to smell the smoke of the i7-2600k. But there’s yet another new chipset for Sandy Bridge. Sandy Bridge launched with a big bang, and bring along two new chipsets, the P67 and H67. But there’s another Z68 Express that didn’t appeared until now. So why is it important that you know about it?

Aimed at high performance machines, the first wave of Z68 boards from ASUS, MSI and Gigabyte are around the same price as the outgoing P67 chipset. And there are a lot of other similarities between the two. For example, there’s the Z68 gives you full access to overclocking controls in the BIOS, with switches that aren’t available on the most keenly priced H67 and H61 boards, even if you have an unlocked CPU. Yes, the P67 also has them.

The biggest thing that Z68 has which P67 doesn’t is support for the built-in GPU that Sandy Bridge has on its die. Sandy Bridge comes with an integrated graphics compartment, and can be used on H67 chipset, made for those budget setups. The processor has a QuickSync video encoding engine for crunching HD movies. In most tests this has been obliterating the performance of GPU-accelerated video encoding, but if you dropped a Core i7 or Core i5 into a P67 motherboard, QuickSync was frustratingly disabled. Thanks to the inclusion of Lucidlogix’ Virtu tech on the Z68, you can switch between integrated or discrete graphics, and use QuickSync all the time. Sounds just like Nvidia’s Optimus.

The Z68 is also used for high end system, which means that most of you with high end rigs will most probably be jumping into the SSD bandwagon already. Yes, you can have very fast loading time and boot time, but I’m sure you all know that SSD comes in very small sizes, and so you can’t put many things into the SSD drive. The Z68 chipset comes with the new Smart Response Technology (SRT), by creating one big virtual drive out of your traditional disk and an SSD, and intelligently moving commonly used files onto the faster flash memory of the SSD.

But all these are small matters that can be neglected, and you will be getting similar performance with a P67. So is Z68 chipset motherboard worth getting?

SOURCE via Anandtech

A conspiracy has surfaced over in the Silicon Valley. Someone submitted an internal email that shows a famous PR firm requesting a blogger to say something bad about Google, and got rejected. So what happened?

Burson-Marsteller is a top public-relations firm, and it’s hired by someone to pitch some anti-Google stories to newspaper, claiming that Google was invading people’s privacy, which they hope will spark some investigation by some people into Google. Now, Burson wanted the conspiracy to have a bigger impact, so they offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which they hope it would be featured in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

But who was the mysterious unnamed client? While fingers pointed at Apple and Microsoft, The Daily Beast discovered that it’s a company nobody suspected—Facebook. The company that has the most privacy issue!

So what did Facebook say about this issue? Well, a Facebook spokesman has confirmed that Facebook hired Burson, citing two reasons: First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.

Read the full story over at Yahoo!News, but I just wanted to say something about this. Facebook is indeed a big portal for this new age. It’s enjoying its glory days just like how Facebook and MySpace used to be, but in a larger scale thanks to iPhone and Android, but I’m saying this, Google is the REAL Skynet! You just see how things unfold later.

Google I/O second day has just ended, and there are bunch of new announcement by Google yet again. We’ll hopefully be able to look through all of them one by one. The first that we’ll be looking is the Google TV. Google TV didn’t actually go through a good launch last year, but Google isn’t giving up, and has slightly revamped the UI of Google TV. It now resembles Honeycomb quite a lot actually, because it’s based on it.

The new icon layout should make getting back to live TV a simpler process, while there’s also that large space above for widgets and support for notifications. Developers will be able to run their ADBs on devices later this summer, but prior to that it will have a “Fishtank” program for some developers to take home their internal test units to run apps on now — no hardware modification necessary.

The team also just announced that the source code to the existing Google TV remote app for Android is being open sourced, so anyone who thinks they can do better (it wouldn’t be difficult) can have a crack at building their own. Also available is code for the Anymote Protocol it runs on so developers can make tablet or phone apps that integrate with and control the Google TV

Other features mentioned included support for 3D, and game controllers using Android 3.1′s expanded USB compatibility. There were no product announcements before the session ended, and no word on the rumored and expected ARM base for new products, but the project manager confirmed new product announcements “later this year.” This will be crucial to the pickup of Google TV in the lucrative market.

The new UI will be released later this year.

Looks like Modern Warfare 3 is getting very near, because the box art of the PC version of the next Call of Duty game has just surfaced. The logo on the cover image is the same as the one uncovered by a separate leak on the Electric Hydra forums, suggesting that this box art could be legitimate. There’s also a logo for “Call of Duty Elite,” which could be the premium Call of Duty online service that Activision have hinted at in the past.

In the recent Activision Blizzard earnings call, Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg discussed the formation of another Call of Duty “platform” in addition to Modern Warfare 3 and the micro-transaction funded Call of Duty Online.

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Right, they teased us with Hitman: Absolution teaser trailer, but that’s it. Now IO has come up front to talk a slight bit about the return of this popular game.

According to IO Interactive, the developer of Hitman: Absolution, the game has been built “from the ground up” in the new Glacier 2 engine, developed in-house by IO too. The game will see Agent 47 running from the law “on a personal journey through a corrupt and twisted world” that will “both a familiar and yet significantly different experience to any of the other Hitman games.”

Agent 47 has been betrayed by his most trusted allies (again), and must take on a new and dangerous contract to uncover the truth behind the conspiracy that surrounds him. IO says that Absolution will be “something our silent assassins will relish as well as those who are new to the Hitman world.”

Hitman Absolution is slated for release next year. That’s all folks.

SOURCE via Hitman Absolution

Sometimes, I wonder how people bring a large object into a very small room. I’ve seen people bringing parts of a cabinet into the house, and assemble it there on the spot, but what about a car?

Sant’Agata just recently launched its latest raging bull, the Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4. The Raging Bull’s new range topper features a 691-horsepower V12 that can propel the world’s fanciest door stop to 60 miles per hour in a scant 2.9 seconds. It might be very fast on straight lines and also perhaps corner, if under good hands. But what about a tiny room? How do you fit this gigantic car into a room, say your house living room?

They’re not actually trying to squeeze the car into somebody’s living room, or a very small showroom, but it’s something quite similar too. The folks at Lamborghini needed to deliver an Aventador to a Lamborghini Museum exhibition called “La Forza del Toro” at Chiostro del.

Unfortunately, the Great Room-sized space reserved for the exotic contained no entryway large enough to drive the Aventador through, but that’s when Italian ingenuity comes into play in the simplest solution. Instead of knocking down a wall or lifting a ceiling, Team Lambo simply delivered an Aventador in pieces, and then put them together on the spot. The end result is a fully functional Aventador for the “La Forza del Toro” exhibit.

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