A rather interesting new feature of the upcoming Windows 7 OS has been brought to light by Microsoft this week which will allow games and other DirectX 10/10.1 dependant software to fully function on very old graphics cards, or in some cases even when the GPU has no graphics acceleration whatsoever.

Microsoft calls it WARP which is short for "Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform", a new graphics layer capable of fully harnessing available power from a CPU to take on the role of graphics processing. The only requirement of the CPU is that it has at least SSE2 extensions, but expect slide shows in most cases. Obviously a Core i7 based CPU will fair best here.

The folks at Digitimes report that Pioneer has something very impressive to show at the IT Month fair currently taking place in Taipei, a new super multi-layer optical disc that's capable of holding a hell of a lot more 25GB layers than Blu-ray's two; no less than 16 of them. If all 16x25GB layers were to be filled, that's 400GB of data.

Although the technology behind this super multi-layer read-only disc is based on Blu-ray, the material of reflective layers is dielectric (as opposed to BD's metallic layers) which is where the biggest advancement lies.

Let's face it censorship is a bad thing. When you censor something you remove free choice, remove the need to educate people on things and you make the thing you are hiding much more enticing.

There have been quite a few new pieces recently on the Australian Government's plans to put up a national firewall. This is intended to block all inappropriate content and to help stem the flow of piracy. The funny thing is that most people in Australia do not think it is a good thing even the child protection agencies are calling the move flawed.

Yup you heard right, Save The Children one of the world's largest Child rights groups feels that content blocking is not going to fix the problem. They would like to see the money that will be spent on this project go to education for safe internet use by children and law enforcement.

Ok, today must be Bash Apple Bay, be on the lookout for Halmark to jump on this and demand its inclusion in future calendars while marketing new cards for it.

This time in the anti-mac press it is a couple of stories on Greenpeace going after Apple. Apple has been flogging its misleading and borderline false ads all over the airwaves about how their newest toys are the greenest laptops out yet it seems that Greenpeace rates the company a sad 4.3 out of 10 for being green.

Read more here and here.

Gasp! Someone has had the temerity to state that Macs are PCs too and are vulnerable just like them! Despite the horrible ads from Apple it is being brought to light that Macs are increasingly vulnerable to viruses are (unless packaged with SSDs) are in need of a good defragging from time to time.

Theo Valich, has a nice little piece in his blog where he braves the scorn and potential flaming from the Apple Zealots by making these ugly little secrets known.

Read more here.

I am sure you all remember the fiasco around the Dell and HP notebook failures. These notebooks had nVidia GPUs stuffed under the hood and seemed to be dropping like flies due to cracks in the solder bumps after a number of heat cycles.

Now it seems the new MacBooks with nVidian chipsets are having heat related failures too. Charlie Demerjian, the person who first started talking about the nVidia heat issues, has a very nice (and scathing) read over at the Inquirer about the latest in the mobile GPU heat drama.

Read more here.

President Elect Obama does not want to give up his cherished Blackberry phone. Despite the security (personal and data) that surround the device.

He is fighting with the laws that prevent the president from having such a device and the ones that exist to preserve all presidential communications for posterity.

The Blackberry (and indeed almost all Cellular devices have means to be tracked remotely. This (to me at least) would seem to be reason enough to do away with the device as it puts the President at risk to long range remote attacks. But not for Obama, I guess he is hoping that big red "s" he is going to have tattooed on his chest will protect him.

As they say, all good things must come to an end and in this case it's Intel's much beloved Q6600 processor which brought fun and frills to many enthusiasts and overclockers for nearly two years running.

Come the first quarter of next year, the beginnings of a phase-out will take place as Intel shifts it toward an end-of-lifecycle during the second quarter where we'll see the wonder chip dissapear off the market for good.

Though AMD's upcoming Phenom II (Deneb) series of 45nm processors aren't set to be launched until the opening day of CES next year (January 9), a few e-tailers seem assured of the launch pricing on the two models that will hit the market initially and they haven't kept it under wraps either!

What we know is that the first two models will comprise a Phenom II 920 at 2.8GHz and a 940 Black Edition which comes out of the box at 3.0GHz. An aussie website has revealed that the 940 Black will hit the market at just AU$532 (€264 / US$342) whilst an italian e-tailer listed prices on both models, with the 920 coming in at 251 Euro and the 940 at 299 Euro.

With streaming rental services becoming more popular than ever these days, Blockbuster has decided to team with 2Wire for the purpose of offering an On-Demand streaming MediaPoint player which allows for powerful streamlined access to a massive range of movies from the rental giant.

The MediaPoint digital player features Blockbuster's new "BLOCKBUSTER ONDEMAND" service and both DVD and HD video content is supported. The box carries a full range of connectivity options including component, HDMI, composite as well as Toslink, 802.11b/g WiFi and of course Ethernet. The unit is also quite compact with dimensions of just 8-inches x 8-inches x 1-inch (around the same size as Apple TV) and it comes with a user friendly remote.