Apple’s interest and presence in the gaming world has been something of a dull roar (at best) for decades. The company has traditionally flirted with the gaming market but, ultimately, shied away from it. Even the outlandishly successful gaming culture of iOS has seen the creation of a ho-hum Game Center from Apple that is meant to be something of a social networking hub but does little to ignite the gamer’s play time. We shouldn’t kid ourselves and say that the appearance of GameStore is proof positive of anything more than Apple trying a few things out on their end, but while they might not be huge on straight-up gaming, they definitely like money. This is a good reason to believe a GameStore could be Apple’s attempt to bolster gaming activity and further skim the cream off the iOS gaming world.

Apple let a little bit of software called GameStore slip to the App Store, but seems to have yanked it outta there. We can rest assured that someone, somewhere is being beaten with a phone book in an Apple “Re-Education Center” at an undisclosed location.

The App was meant for internal testing of in-app iPhone purchases and wasn’t supposed to be on the App Electronic online Store (as you could probably tell by the fact that it was yanked). But for a brief, shining moment you could grab it for $0.99. Apparently this is a system by which you can buy apps from within apps (yo, dawg), and Apple Insider explained a bit further:

It also has a “Shopping Cart,” “Payment Q” and “Settings”, but there’s no content in there.

  
 If the old saying “Give and you shall receive” is true, then Carmelo Anthony and Will and Jada Smith have a karmic bounty headed their way soon. The stars were named numbers 22 and 20 respectively on The Giving Back Fund’s “Giving Back 30,” a list of the 30 celebrities who made the largest donations to charity in 2010 according to public records.

According to The Giving Back Fund (GBF), the ranking is based on media reports of charitable giving by sports and entertainment professionals and information provided by more than 250 celebrity publicists, attorneys, agents agencies, and managers about their clients. Requests were also sent to charities known for their celebrity affiliations and to major sports leagues and associations.

Through their charity the Will and Jada Smith Family Foundation, the couple made hefty donations totaling $900 thousand to the Lupus Foundation, the Baltimore School for the Arts and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

Carmelo Anthony gave $837,200 to his alma mater Syracuse University and to the non-profit The Living Classroom Foundation, according to GBF. But an ABC News interview with celebrity stylist Phillip Bloch last fall put Anthony’s donations closer to the $4 million mark.

WATCH:

Information on the “Giving Back 30″ was confirmed by at least one source other than an initial media source and donations made by a celebrity’s foundation were not included on the list since there is no way to track the source of that money, GBF says.

While Anthony and The Smiths ranked high on the list, which also includes writers, producers, musicians and comedians, the top giver was actress Jami Gertz and her husband Antony Ressler whose donations totaled more than $10.5 million given to their Ressler Gertz Foundation. Grants from the foundation were then distributed to to the LA County Museum of Art (for $1.7 million) and to Cedar Sinai Medical Center (for $400,000).

Forbes magazine notes that while Gertz isn’t exactly a mainstream actress, her deep-pocketed donation has much to do with the fact that Ressler is the co-founder of Ares Capital, a Los Angeles investment firm that controls more than $40 billion in assets, which has also recently expressed interest in buying the Dodgers.

Check out the full “Giving Back 30″ list here.

We are very familiar with the Philips has officially released their first Tablet PC product GoGear Connect 7. The 7-inch screen designed for Tablet PC cheap, using a wide viewing angle LCD screen, capacitive touch screen design of a resolution of 800 × 480 pixels.

Philips GoGear Connect 7 using a simple and stylish white design, the bottom shell with high gloss scratch-resistant treatment, strengthening the overall structural design. 7 in. multi-capacitive touch screen, easy to grip and mobility. In addition, the product is equipped with practical Android2.3 intelligent system to support dual-channel access, multimedia applications, multi-task processing and expanded programs on the transmission performance has held up quite well.

Configuration, the tablet using the ARM Cortex- A8 processor, clocked at 800MHz with 512MB of memory with the operation is very smooth. In addition to 16GB of storage space can basically meet the user’s storage needs.

Only the positive aspects of the camera body is equipped with a 1.3 megapixel front camera, rear camera, although no body but the back looks but more concise. Body of work is very solid, with the back side of the piano texture paint metal wire drawing process to take up the texture.

　　At the same time built a Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR technology, USB interface. Electronic online Compared with other Tablet PC is concerned, the Philips GoGear Connect 7 using FullSound2 patented surround sound technology and film, so that audio and video is very shocking.

It sure is a good thing that the Mayan calendar says the world is going to end this year -- because at least, after the apocalypse comes on Dec. 21, you won't have to read another word about it.

Or maybe you will. The beginning of 2012 has brought a new flurry of reassurances that the Maya never did predict anything would go wrong this year, and that even if they had, we're probably misreading their calendar anyhow.

"There's no real prophesy that says this is going to be the end of the world," said Christopher Powell, an archeologist who studies Mayan culture, "not from the Mayan ruins, anyway."

At  News, writer Lisa Hix quoted Bruce Love of the Archaeological Institute of America: "Whatever the significance of the date is, it is significance we are putting on it; it's not the significance the Maya are putting on it. It's not coming from anywhere in the literature or in the Mayan hieroglyphic writing."

Over at Discovery News, Ian O'Neill, a physicist by training, has written a piece that says, "there's no evidence to suggest the Mayans believed the end of their Long Count calendar would spell doomsday."

The Maya, who lived in Central America between A.D. 250 and 900, had a cyclical calendar that ran approximately one human lifetime, or 52 years (life was shorter back then). To account for events more than 52 years away, they devised another calendar, one that ran 5,126 years, and apparently began in the year 3114 B.C. Do a little math: 5,126 minus 3,114 equals 2,012.

"I believe the Mayan calendar was based on some incredibly good astronomy, said Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012." "They were really good at knowing when. They weren't so good at saying what's going to happen then." Joseph said he worries about an outbreak of solar flares in December, enough to fry the world's electric grid.

But does any Mayan calendar really predict anything will happen? Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History said, "Western messianic thought has twisted the cosmovision of ancient civilizations like the Maya." It said the Maya believed that time started and ended with regularity, with nothing apocalyptic occurring at the end.

O'Neill blames the viral marketing campaign in 2009 that promoted the Roland Emmerich disaster movie "2012." The film got mediocre reviews but sold a lot of DVDs. And social scientists say the mythology of a doomsday prophecy fits an old pattern: When times are tough, it's almost comforting for people to blame higher unseen powers.

"It's almost like you're out there looking for evidence of a looming apocalypse," said anthropologist Wade Davis, an explorer-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, "and I think it also ties into a lot of uncertainty that exists in our world today."

But 2012 does promise to be a heck of a year, with a still-shaky global economy, a stubbornly high unemployment rate and a presidential election. The scientists say we can take stock on Dec. 22.

"I can think of a lot of reasons to cash out and run away with your family these days to a desert island," said Davis, "but this Mayan prophesy isn't one of them."