With a very small budget and four Firewall OS's to choose from I set out to implement a hardware firewall solution for my home network.

I'll give you a run down on the parts that I selected and the OS I finally went with.

The project only took a couple of hours to complete with a day or two of research but I'm pretty happy with the end result. Click here to have a read of my write up.

No joke according to Microsoft's Steve Ballmer "Vista sells on almost 100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs around the world," the Microsoft CEO proclaimed. He added that the operating system was also selling on, "45 percent of all of new business PCs".

Maybe so on new boxes that are pre-installed with Vista, but what about of the shelf sales?
I'm still wary of moving to Vista for my main rig seeing I had Vista Home Premium installed on my Media Box before I blew it away and moved back to XP due incompatibility issues constantly driving me insane.

On the other hand I have a friend who got a new laptop with Vista installed and everything has been all sweet.
So for the new typical user buying an off the shelf PC/Laptop Vista may be the way to go...but for the enthusiast I certainly wouldn't be going to it, specially if you play online-games where you need all the hardware resources available for optimal performance.

I wont rant on any further, have a read of the article on the PC Authority web site.

I was a fairly late comer to Call of Duty 4, but I have no doubt that this is the new benchmark in FPS's.

I'll take a moment to comment about the Single player side of things first. The single player mode of this game follows two soldiers across the Middle East and Eastern Europe on a mission to stop terrorists from setting nukes off.

The single player mission story lines are expertly woven together to suck the player in and keep playing, which it does very well. The cut scenes are also brilliantly done as they play while your next mission loads up, there's no just head of for a drink or anything as your thrown into the next mission straight away.
Graphics are awesome, the environments have an attention to detail that I haven't seen since Half Life 2 days. The sound effects are also of high quality even the ingame voice acting is spot on. The only downside to the single player is the length...if you put the effort in you easily finish the game in a day.

The multi-player game mode offers the real goods with this game. When you first hit the ground you will be absolutely smashed, I still get smashed now after playing the game for the last 3 or so weeks. When you get over the being smashed part you will find that this is the first game where they have gotten things right. You rank-up regularly instead of the old BF2 style of things where you don't rank-up for like acouple of months of playing. With ranking up you get unlocks aswell and there are plenty of unlocks ranging from new weapons to skill upgrades called Perks.

Now this is the best part of the multi-player, you get to combine these weapons and perks into your custom classes. You can make up to five custom classes and call them whatever you like...it's such a simple but brilliant idea that I'm really surprised that no other big FPS game has thought of it before.

With the good there has to be some bad points, yes getting absolutely hammered the first couple of times you play is a bad point but the main bad point is the ingame server selection. It astounds me that somebody can make such an awsome game but stuff up the server selection screen. To rectify this just download QTracker and connect to the server you wish play on by this.

Overall this is an outstanding game with plenty to offer and likely to keep you playing for the time to come...which is pretty unusual for a FPS in my opinion. This deservers two big thumbsup from me.

Security firm Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) -- the same company that discovered the first iPhone bug last year -- has successfully compromised a fully patched Apple MacBook Air at the CanSecWest competition, winning them US$10,000.

Although the competition recorded the hack taking eight minutes, Charlie Miller, a principal analyst with ISE, told ZDNet.com.au that it took just 30 seconds and was achieved using a previously unknown flaw in Apple's Web browser Safari.

A Fujitsu laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate was finally hacked 3 days later, when comp rules were reduced, by a previously undiscovered flaw in Adobe's Flash.
Finally a Sony Vaio laptop running Ubuntu survived the conference to come out unscathed.

I reckon it's about time the Mac Guy came of his perch and realise that a Mac is now no safer than a PC if it can be hacked within 30sec's....

Shane Warne has announced his retirement from first-class cricket while ending his eight-year association with the county side Hampshire. Warne, 38, had been a regular with Hampshire since 2000 and led them from 2004. Dimitri Mascarenhas will succeed Warne as captain.

This will bring to a close the often turbulent but magical career of the greatest spinner of all time, he will still be appearing in the IPL 20Twenty league in April for the Jaipur team as capitan and coach. Read more here.

The stated objective of FTTN is to provide 98% of Australians with internet speeds of 12 Mbps. The hard question most ask when the subject of FTTN is raised, is - "OK, but how much am I going to have to pay for it?".
This news article on the Internode website raises some interesting views on FTTN technology. Personally I'm hanging off going to ADSL2, as I'm waiting for the FTTN to be rolled out, as the cost to churn to ADSL2 doesn't appear to be worth it at this stage. But when FTTN is roled out, who is to say that you'll be charged at a premium price anyways.

The article can be found here.