Nintendo, at this point, does not have any console that can play a DVD movie, which just about every other current-generation console can do. Nintendo did plan to add a DVD player to the Wii earlier, however, they wanted to make sure they would have enough stock for the holiday rush. Nintendo also discovered that DVD software licensing fees were a lot higher than expected. Nintendo fans everywhere should be able to enjoy a Nintendo Wii with DVD playback sometime next year.

AM3, the official socket successor to AM2(+), will give AMD users access to DDR3 RAM, 45nm AM3 processors, and all sorts of other goodies. It should come around sometime in 2008, with true AM3 processors coming in the second half of next year. This chart should explain a lot of questions you may have about the AMD platform. And without further ado, enjoy.

When a manufacturer wants to make an LCD television or monitor, they take glass, pour fancy chemicals on in, heat it to 300 degrees centigrade, and remove all alkaline. However, this glass is none too cheap: ¥6122 ($53/£26/€37) per square meter. Samsung recently found a possible alternative. By using a new process that they won't go into great details about, Samsung has managed to make LCD television glass out of the same stuff that beer bottles and windows are made of: soda-lime glass. The main scientific advance that allows Samsung to do this is a temperature reduction in the production of glass, preventing the discoloring of glass that would ordinarily occur with soda-lime glass. If Samsung puts this in production, their LCD products would be approximately 6% cheaper according to analysts: a huge advantage when compared to the competition.

Memory manufacturer Qimonda claims to have started producing the worlds first 512MB GDDR5 chips. Like past GDDR revisions, GDDR5 increases the maximum bandwidth between a graphics processor and the graphics memory. GDDR5 boasts a whopping 20GB/s bandwidth, up from the GDDR4 bandwidth of 16GB/s. Qimonda claims that GDDR5 improves power consumption by downclocking unused VRAM. Qimonda will release their GDDR5 RAM "sometime in 2008". You can read the full Qimonda GDDR5 briefing here.

The administrators of BitTorrent are always working on side projects, however a certain project may just change the future of file-sharing: a new BitTorrent protocol. In an effort to curb the massive amount of spammers and anti-piracy agents hijacking torrents, Pirate Bay founder Bram Cohen recently announced the closed-source creation of a new BitTorrent protocol, which is currently nicknamed ".p2p", after the file extension the protocol will likely have. The protocol will be backwards compatible with the current .torrent protocol, which should make transitioning to the new protocol very easy. Other torrent sites, such as Mininova, already are backing and announcing support for the new protocol, which should come out in early 2008.

As predicted by analysts earlier, AMD will indeed be releasing the RV670 graphics chips on November 19th. However, even now, the market branding of the card remains unknown. While some say it will be the HD 2950 series, others say it will be the HD 3800. Regardless of what it will be called, AMD will be releasing two versions. The first, codenamed "Gladiator" will run at a core clock of 825MHz, and have an undetermined quantity of 2.4GHz GDDR4 memory. "Revival" will run at a core clock of 750MHz, have the same GDDR4 memory, but will be clocked at 1.8GHz.

While the NVIDIA 8800GT may be getting a lot of press, AMD refuses to let itself be forgotten about. Leaked documents show that the RV670 (HD 3800 series) will be well worth the wait for it. While people hear that the RV670 will be PCI Express 2 and DX10.1 compatible, have Unified Video Decoder (UVD), and be 55nm, this doesn't really amount to much if people have no idea what the benefits are from any of that. And so, this leaked document shows one of the many goodies waiting for potential RV670 customers, via a "global illumination" demo. The image on the left is rendered with DX10.1, and the one on the right is rendered with DX10.0. Vista SP1 will be built on the DirectX10.1 architecture.

Microsoft recently aspired to steal some of the Nintendo Wii's thunder by creating a low cost counterpart of their console with the Xbox 360 Arcade, and Sony quickly followed suit with the 40GB PS3. However, Microsoft may be working on another version of the Xbox360: one with an HD-DVD player built in. If this is true, and Microsoft does release an HD-DVD Xbox360, then Toshiba will officially be getting paid by two console manufacturers: Sony will pay Toshiba for the Cell, and Microsoft will pay for the HD-DVD player. This rumored HD-DVD Xbox360 may also bring new features to the table, such as a larger hard drive, an HDTV tuner, and a "port for MP3 players".

While some current Linux users got Linux to escape from their perceived problems with Vista, other Linux users are attracted to Linux because of Vista-like features. The developers behind Vixta are banking on the latter. While the SourceForge project is hardly ready to compete with Vista on a competitive scale, it certainly is gaining momentum. Vixta is based on the Fedora core of Linux, and has five goals in mind. Vixta must...

• Be Absolutely free, in every sense.
• Spread Linux to the "masses".
• Not require any advanced configuration.
• Be User-Friendly.
• Be Eye-catching, and have a familiar look and feel.

While NVIDIA may be quite successful in the upper graphics market, and AMD is doing well in the necessary middle niche, Intel is the king of graphics. The reason is simple: most people are fine with the integrated graphics that come with their OEM-built computer, which are almost always made by Intel. NVIDIA is hoping to take some of this budget market share from Intel, and do a good job at it, as well. They had sure better, after boldly proclaiming that 37% of video games will not work on an Intel graphics chipset, and 27% of games that do work will have problems on said Intel graphics chipsets. If NVIDIA does take the market share of budget graphics solutions from Intel, we may see a lot of low-cost computers that can play computer games.

In contrast to the previous testing program, Microsoft recently released the most up-to-date code of its operating system to a small, hand-picked selection of people. SP1 is designed to enhance current features found in Vista, rather than add new ones. Among the most noticeable improvements to Vista in SP1:

• Overall performance has increased markedly.
• Several stability issues have been fixed
• Network compatibility/speed has been tweaked

There is no word as to whether or not there will be a public version of this update. Anyone who has been chosen as a beta tester will most likely get the update through Windows Update.

In the classic Disney movie Pinocchio, when the puppet master Geppetto got bored and lonely, he made himself a little boy out of wood to call his son. After a great adventure, Pinocchio became a real boy thanks to the wonders of magic. In this great day and age, scientists and robot creators wanted to replicate the same event. Unfortunately, they have to do so without fairies and magic. And so, they approached project Zeno from a scientific standpoint. Zeno's goals are lofty. When complete, Zeno will be able to walk, engage in human conversation, and convey human emotion. At the moment, Zeno cannot walk or talk, but he can blink and track human movement. Zeno has a particular advantage over previous robot companions such as Asimo: a patented chemical nicknamed "frubber". Frubber has the remarkable ability to replicate skin, and with the help of some robotics, human emotion. In other words, when complete, Zeno's skin will be able to change color with temperature and mood.

Back in January, Toshiba brought their 51GB triple-layer HD-DVD to the DVD forum. Six months later, the DVD forum has officially green-lighted the new disk. The new disk should play fine on most HD-DVD players, and even if it doesn't, the majority of people that bought an HD-DVD player probably wouldn't mind an upgrade anyways. There is no word as to when production will start, or when we'll start seeing this disk. The DVD forum is also working on a new format. By placing a double-layer HD DVD disk on the back of a standard DVD, they hope to create a future proof DVD disk.

While Intel is preparing to move on to a 45nm micro-architecture, AMD is preparing true quad-core processors, and working on a quad-graphics card solution. The technology that will allow for four graphics cards to be stuck in one system will be called "QuadFire", and there are no major details out at this time, other than the name and pictures of supporting motherboards. The chipset supporting "QuadFire" is AMD's own RD790, which is pictured below in MSI's K9A2 motherboard. The RD790 is designed to work with a Phenom processor, has six SATA ports, and two E-SATA ports.

Pictures courtesy of OCWorkbench.

Fortunately for the environment, it seems as though hybrid cars are starting to catch on. In anticipation of the Frankfurt Motor Show next week, Volvo recently posted some information on their new concept car, the ReCharge. Based on the C30 Hatchback, the ReCharge concept boasts a Lithium Polymer battery that can drive the car for 62 miles without help from the motor, and an all-wheel-drive system. A flex-fuel four cylinder engine can drive what the electric system can't. However, Volvo added something that most hybrid owners have been expecting since the first retail models went to market: a charge cord. If the battery is low in the ReCharge, a customer can plug it in, saving the gasoline otherwise required to recharge the battery. As of yet, there is no word on when we can see a non-concept version.

It's no big secret in the gaming world that Vivendi studios and Monolith Productions, the two companies behind F.E.A.R., aren't working together anymore. And so, this means that there was a large battle over the F.E.A.R. franchise. Vivendi got the rights to F.E.A.R., but Monolith got all the characters. While the rest of us scratch our heads in confusion, Warner Brothers Interactive announced that Vivendi was developing a F.E.A.R. sequel. Vivendi is proudly naming it 'Project Origin', a title that gamers chose. There is no word as of yet what Vivendi plans to do with none of the rights to the original characters. We'll keep you posted.

Anyone with an ATI X8x0 series card is pretty angry at the fact that their card cannot handle a game that an X1300 can. Fortunately for gamers that still have a Shader Model 2 card, hackers are working day and night to bring BioShock to said cards. Instead of buying a SM3 or SM4 card that would cost at least $60, old-school gamers can now apply a hack. You can download and read into this hack here. However, while this is all well and good for people with hearty graphics cards, such as the previously mentioned X8x0 series, people still running the Radeon 9x00 series and the NVIDIA GeForce FX series will probably suffer quite low framerates.

Keep in mind that this is still a beta.

While Gutsy Gibbon remains in Alpha testing, the ambitious developers of the Ubuntu distribution of Linux have already laid out plans for the next version. Dubbed 'Hardy Heron', developers hope to have the entire distribution released by April 2008. Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager, is asking fans of one of the easiest Linux distributions around to help the developers by sending in ideas of what they want to see in Hardy Heron.

If anyone has any ideas for Hardy Heron, please send them to the Ubuntu development team.

Microsoft and Mitsubishi are taking handheld PC's to the next level. LucidTouch, as the technology is called, allows users to control the touch screen PC with both hands, while previous touch-screens required some form of support (usually a hand) to hold the touch-screen up. LucidTouch technology poses a rather interesting question: Where is the PC part of the touch-screen PC going? Any manufacturer using LucidTouch will have to take low-profile to a new level, and somehow cram all the important hardware to the sides of the screen.

While the final version of 'Gutsy Gibbon' is not expected until late October at the earliest, the latest alpha shows some very nice new features. The most notable is a polished interface with which users can choose graphics drivers, install dual monitors, and set the default resolution. Gibbon will also have a special version of Firefox, which boasts a "plug-in finder wizard compatible with the software download mechanism apt, as well as with an integrated extensions manager." The printer management system also is getting an upgrade, as is the Gnome window management system. The beta Gnome 2.20 features a nicer desktop search, fast user switching, and a new security framework.

If you feel like testing the latest version of Ubuntu, get the latest version (Tribe 5) here.

Here's some good news for everyone who's been waiting for one of the most anticipated first person shooters of the year: Crysis. The demo of Crysis is expected to be released by September 25th, 2007. The demo throws gamers into the first level of the single player campaign, named "contact", and allows said gamers to marvel at the technological advances and eye candy Crysis has to offer.

In the meantime, check out the latest Crysis Gameplay trailer.

SSD (Solid State Disk) technology is one of the most powerful advances in storage technology in some time. Unfortunately, at this point, it's hideously expensive, and only available to the major OEM companies. Fortunately, Seagate aims to change all that. Starting next year, Seagate will be releasing cost-effective desktop and laptop SSDs. By 2010, Seagate aims to eliminate current problems with SSD technology, such as high cost, low storage yields, and low availability.

Things are looking good for Mozilla's Firefox, which is the most popular competitor to Microsoft Internet Explorer. The latest version of the in-development Firefox 3 is Alpha 7, codenamed "Gran Paradiso". While it is still far from an official release, Firefox 3 already shows much promise, and boasts a long list of very powerful features. Highlights from the Alpha 7:

• A new bookmarking interface, which adds the ability to tag your favorites.
• Malware detection, with the help of Google
• Detection of micro-formats.
• Private Browsing mode, which allows users to surf the web with anonymity.
• Support for running internet applications in off-line mode.

Feel free to read the entire sneak peak at PC Mechanic.

Intel's next big thing is 45 nanometer architecture, which it has applied to their new Penryn micro-architecture. On November 11, Intel will release seven Xeon processors containing the new micro architecture. Among the seven processors are the 2.00GHz E5405, the 2.33GHz E5410, the 2.50GHz E5420, the 2.66GHz E5430, the 2.83GHz E5440, the 3.00GHz E5450 and the 3.16GHz X5460. All seven chips operate on a 1333MHz frontside bus. No official prices are available at this time, and we will see more Penryn processors in Q1 2008.

While recent recalls suggest that the current type of laptop batteries are dangerous, an alternative power source seems to be screaming "you ain't seen nothing yet": The Direct Methanol Fuel Cell. Samsung recently showed off a prototype of their Q35 laptop powered solely by a fuel cell. Samsung claims that the laptop can run eight hours a day for a month (about 240 hours) without needing a recharge. The most recent prototype of the Q35 even solved some noise problems previously associated with fuel cell powered laptops. Samsung is currently putting the Q35 through some strict safety testing, and it might even be available by the end of this year. A retail price is yet to be confirmed.