It’s called the Orbis, and if everything goes according to plan, you or your children will want one come the holidays 2013.  So, here’s the question:  what’s the Orbis?  That’s simple, it’s the next generation of Sony’s venerable PlayStation line of video games.  That’s right, Sony’s future-proofed system with a 10 year development lifespan is already about to be replaced.  So why is it going to be replaced?

Well, for one thing, the rumor is that the new PS4 will be capable of running a 3D game at 1080p, rather than the 730p it can currently manage.  It will offer support for a 4096×2160 display, which is significantly more than current HD televisions, and it will feature the latest in AMD processors, both CPU and GPU.

There are a couple of reasons, but it comes down to this:  Sony wants to control the used game market, and apparently Orbis is going to have some sort of online verification system that locks your game in with your PSN account (if you buy the disc version) or adds it to your PSN as a download (as they’re going to provide downloads of full titles, apparently… not sure how that’s going to work considering a Blu-ray disc is 10 gigabytes or more of data).

Facebook, the largest and most ubiquitous social network in the nascent history of social networks, has had a lot of privacy concerns.  While there are data leaks, apps stealing information, and that sort of thing, the latest in Facebook’s concerns with privacy isn’t nefarious hackers, but supposedly-responsible organizations, businesses, and the like.  Increasingly, businesses are asking for the Facebook passwords of potential employees, but Facebook is having none of that, telling employers that they’re willing and able to take legal action to protect user privacy.

“Facebook takes your privacy seriously,” wrote Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan in a post on Facebook.  ”We’ll take action to protect the privacy and security of our users, whether by engaging policymakers or, where appropriate, by initiating legal action, including by shutting down applications that abuse their privileges.”

You have to give credit to Facebook for being ahead of the curve on this one.  More importantly, you have to appreciate that Facebook is actively protecting users from the very people who can scare them into voluntarily giving up their privacy:  potential bosses.  In this economy, people will do a lot of things to keep their job, even things that are violations of their right to privacy.

Would you go visit an Angry Birds theme park?  Rovio certainly hopes so, as they’ve got plans to take their video game and plush toy phenomenon Angry Birds and turn it into the sort of thing you wait hours in line for.  The first Angry Birds theme park will be opening at Särkänniemi Adventure Park in Tampere, Finland.  And that won’t be the last, if Rovio CEO Peter Vesterbacka has his way.

“Zynga is a game company.  We stopped looking at ourselves as a game company.  We sold 25 million plush toys last year. For us, it’s about making Angry Birds available everywhere,” said Vesterbacka.

Angry Birds Lands won’t be a stand-alone thing, but a featured attraction inside a preexisting theme park.  In that way, Angry Birds attractions could be coming to any theme park in your area… or possibly EVERY theme park EVER!  The Angry Birds zone at Särkänniemi will contain slides, sand pits, and video games, all of which will center around Angry Birds.  There is also an Angry Birds movie AND an Angry Birds television show in the works for the Bird-based empire.

So you’re sitting around, waiting for your holiday festivities to start, and you’ve got nothing better to do than to take care of those last-minute surprise gifts.  Well, fortunately for you, Walmart has your back, and they also have a pretty rare discount.  If you’ve ever bought an iTunes card, you know they’re never on sale.  Well, not only does Walmart have an iTunes card for 20 percent off retail price, they also have free electronic delivery and you can buy two of them, rather than buying a limit of one.  For the information on how to redeem your card (or email it to a loved one, as I did this morning), see The Cheapskate for more info.

The whole process could not have been easier, and despite ominous warnings about the cards not being shipped until December 27, I had the receipt and the redemption emails within my inbox in less than an hour.  So don’t be afraid you’ll be stuck waiting around for this thing all morning; my redemption process was prompt and surprisingly easy, and that $50 iTunes card is being cashed in as we speak.

What would you do if you discovered a 70-minute Steve Jobs interview that only a few people on earth have ever seen in its entirety?  You’d try to make a few bucks off of it, right?  Well, a lost Steve Jobs interview has been discovered by a documentary filmmaker; it goes without saying that the documentary will be coming to a theater near you in the middle of this month.  It’s called “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview,” and in it, the long-haired computer salesman reveals his feelings on Microsoft, his firing from Apple Computers, and everything in between while letting down some of his carefully-cultivated public persona (probably because this is before he discovered his persona).

The interview was conducted with Jobs in 1996, shortly after his 1995 firing from Apple Computers.  Pre-iPad and iPhone, Jobs here is described as “a cranky guy” by writer/producer Robert Cringley, who interviewed Jobs for the documentary “Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires” for PBS.  The interview was lost until Robert Sen, the film’s director, found a VHS dub of the 70-minute interview in his garage.  That’s when Landmark Theaters stepped in, optioning the documentary interview and splashing it up on the big screen!

Landmark will be screening “Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview” in their theaters in 19 cities on November 16 and 17.  For more information, or to find your closest Landmark Theater, click here.

I currently subscribe to hundreds of blogs, and daily I sift through thousands of articles via my feed reader, Google News, or various other trips down the rabbit hole.  As a somewhat professional blogger and writer, I depend on Google Reader’s ability to sort RSS feeds and show me the newest, the hottest, and the best in news on technology, weirdness, or just whatever happens to strike my fancy.  It’s very important to me.  Google Reader has been incredible for me and my various businesses, and I couldn’t do this without it.

More importantly, as I scour the web from multiple locations, I depended heavily on Google Reader’s ability to make notes.  I added the Note In Reader bookmarklet to every toolbar on every browser I use regularly, and yet now, with the Google Reader redesign for Google Plus and Google removing the social features from their product, the Note In Reader bookmarklet is disabled and all my notes are just plain gone.

It goes without saying that I’m not terribly pleased by this development, and I’m now looking for a Google Reader replacement.  I’ve been using Google Bookmark, but I know that may go away too, so it’s time to find something else.  Do you have a good feed reader/online note-taking app you can recommend?  I could use it.

Image via Lizzie B

The year was 1993, and the arcade was still hanging on.  While the glory days of the video game arcade were dwindling, there were still some standout titles, and most of those came from Midway.  Midway had the hottest consoles in the arcade, including Terminator 2, Super High Impact Football, and of course, NBA Jam.  It was, and is, an epic game the likes of which cannot be duplicated.

Now, here’s an incredibly rare, behind-the-scenes look at just how Williams Electronics pitched NBA Jam to the National Basketball Association and NBA head David Stern.  Even now, this is an aspect of the business most people don’t get to see.  It’s amazing to see just how A) much work Midway put into developing the player movements and digitizing the various moves, B) how their whole idea of a realistic game got thrown out the window for whatever reason, and C) how much cooler the game could have been if they had included that first-person POV dunking control.

It’s just a shame Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley never were able to get included into a home version of NBA Jam, though Kevin Johnson and Thunder Dan Majerle were borderline unstoppable in spite of the lack of the Round Mound of Rebound.

Not pictured: Windows 98.

One of the things you’d hope is that the United States military, the most powerful and technologically advanced military in the world, would be immune to simple things.  For example, computer viruses may be loading down every network of computers in the world, but you’d like to think that the United States Air Force would have good enough antivirus protection to keep that from getting out of hand on their network.  You’d be wrong in that assumption.

The computer systems that run the US military’s Predator and Reaper drone aircraft is infested with computer viruses.  Specifically, they have a recurring issue with a keylogger that, when removed, keeps reinfecting their computers.  The USAF blames the infection of Windows-powered drone computer systems at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada on flash drives used to transfer sensitive material.  Apparently, those flash drives are also transferring viruses from one computer to another.

That said, the USAF says there’s nothing to fear from the virus.  It’s annoying, but it’s not a threat to national security and it’s not a threat to combat operations of the drones themselves.  “The planes were never in any jeopardy of ‘going stupid’” and the virus “is not affecting operations in any way … it showed up on a Microsoft-based Windows system.  We have a closed-loop system and heavily protected cockpits — the planes were never in jeopardy.”

One of the main draws for Google+, and one of the reasons why I killed my Facebook account after many years, is due to the games.  Google+ doesn’t have games, and Facebook has them.  They’re loud, and obnoxious as possible, and that’s one of the reasons why games have been so successful on the Facebook platform.  They get attention, they draw fans, you’re encouraged to draw in your buddies to also play, and that’s all well and good if you don’t hate games, but what if you’re like me and you hate the spam?

Well, the fact that Google+ is adding games isn’t shocking, but they’re adding games with a promise.  The games on Google+ will be added in without a ton of fanfare or annoying, stream-killing spam.  Instead, the games will be opt-in only.  Meaning, you only get spammed by the games once you choose to be spammed by the games, and not by everyone else’s games!

So long as they keep all that mess hidden and out of my stream unless I choose to follow, that’s all you can ask for.  After all, it’s all about eyeballs and games bring eyeballs, but the hope is they won’t bother people like me who want to be left alone.

You know hipsters, even if you don’t know any hipsters.  Skinny jeans, ironic mustaches, plugged ears… if you’ve been to any rock and roll concert, you’ve seen one of these guys in his black-frame glasses and skinny, faded Motley Crue tee-shirt, doodling away happily on his iPhone while blissfully ignoring whatever band might be on stage (because enthusiasm isn’t cool).  Hipsters love anything old-fashioned and everything ironic, so it goes without saying that this cassette-shaped iPhone case is probably the best present you could ever give a hipster.

Even if you know someone who isn’t a hipster, any kid of the 80′s would appreciate the novelty value of talking into a giant cassette tape.  It’s about as close to having your own transformer as most people will ever get, so it’s pretty cool just based on that angle alone!  I don’t think it has any value as a theft-deterrent (which is what the original poster claims to have designed this thing for) since if I saw a giant cassette laying around, I’d probably pick it up.  Still, it’s a fun iPhone case, so give it points for that if nothing else.