I came across an article on Extreme Tech's website which discusses their attempt at building the ultimate gaming PC. I've taken a look at the specs of this machine and trust me, this rig is so ULTIMATE that you'll wet your pants.

Consisting of an AMD Athlon64 FX-57 CPU, 2GB RAM,2 x BFG GeForce 7800 GTX OC 256MB Water Cooled video cards (SLI) amongst many other jaw dropping pieces of hardware. I've seen a lot of people build 'the ultimate gaming machine' before, but this really takes the cake for me.

All the specs are listed in Extreme Tech's article found here along with each hardware component's retail price. You could go out and buy yourself everything they used, but will set you back at just under USD$7,000 for this beast. Well we can all dream can't we?

Hey guys, I know what your thinking. Your thinking what the hell is happening on my blog with this stupid MySQL error. Usually in the place of that error is where it display's the current user that is logged in, but my host tblog is having some problem and are working on it, don't worry.

It's really bad becuase my entire blog layout is all screwed up becuase of this, but hopefully tblog get themselves into gear and figure out what the hell is going on. I know some other people who have their blogs hosted on tblog.com that are having the same problem, so the problem isn't just with me, its more widespread I think.

Hopefully the problem will be solved soon and all will be back to normal soon. Just stick through it with me guys! lol.

"Windows is broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates." - Smart Office News Australia.

When I read this article, I just couldn't belive it. Well I knew (and most windows users) that windows has its problems and all the problems that Longhorn has been having throughout its development, but Microsoft actually admitting to this was I think a major step for the software company. Microsoft doesn't usually fess up to its problems with its products, usually keeping quite on the subject whilst attempting to fix the problem.

One such problem Microsoft has been having with Longhorn is the new WinFS filesystem which would allow users to search and organise their files in a way much different to today's NTFS. WinFS has had so many problems that quote:"engineers began talking about whether they could make the 'pig fly'".

Im my opinon, Microsoft at the moment is just one big jumbled up mess. CEO Steve Ballmer last week reshuffled the company into three major business units in an attempt to give the company a better ability at producing software with greater efficiency and effectiveness.

With all these problems that Longhorn (aka Vista) has been having, and the feeling of complete disfunction within the company leaves me weary about the company's future.
Their competition has never been greater apon a new Windows release with MacOSX more popular than ever and with numerous linux distros gaining ground, Microsoft will surely be feeling the pressure to produce the goods. If they don't, I think that it could be the end of an era for the company. 

Pure Pwnage is an online series which tells the story of a 'pro' gamer by the name of Jeremy and all the 'noobs' that he owns! I have been a big fan of the series since the very first episode back in May and have seen all episodes up to the most recent which is episode #8 which has finally released yesterday.

Episode 8 tells the story of Jeremy & his now good friend Doug(aka.fps_doug) hanging out playing Nintendo, and entering a LAN tournament by the name of 'LANAGEDDON' in which Jeremy & Doug play Counter Strike Source tournament style facing many 'noob' opponents in the process, before they both encounter another 'pro' gamer by the name of DeadStryker6666.

Pure Pwnage is a very funny series, I have talked about the series before here on my blog, but you really need to check it out for yourselves at www.purepwnage.com & download episode 8 (or why not all of them while your at it lol).

The team at iPod Linux have been working on a video capability for the iPod for quite some time and actually got video to work on an iPod a few months ago, but with no sound. These guys now have cracked the problem and sound is now possible with video playback on an iPod running the iPod linux OS.

I found a blog by the name of DansFloyd which is a technology and iPod linux featured blog and he goes over some of this new capability, but this is the only source I have come across that this new video & audio support on an iPod actually exists, I'll have to keep looking around for a more solid source.


    & nbsp;   &n bsp;      iPod Video Menu    & nbsp;   &n bsp;   &nb sp;   &nbs p;     ;         & nbsp;    iPod shuffle advertisement

Sure, Google has become one of the most popular and widely used search engine to date. Millions and millions of people use it everyday to find what they are looking for, but Im sure everybody has experienced entering a search string and getting results completely off course.

I found a great link at a site called googleguide.com which lists some really great ways to get more out of your search on google. One thing I really like about the site is that they list all the operators you can use on google such as the filetype: and define: operators which will return results only of filetypes of definitions. There are hundreds of these which make your google searching a whole lot easier.

Granted the fact that many people have been aware of google's operators for quite some time, I still get asked by newbie googler's "I can't find it, what did you type in?"

Even though there are probably billions of sites on google these days, this site will really get you to were your looking quickly and easily. Check out tips and a list of operators at googleguide.com

Wow, this is cool. A new Final Fantasy movie entitled Final Fantasy:Advent Children' is coming out. News of its pending release has been all over the internet the last month or so, but recent news has told us that a DVD quality 'leak' has been floating around on bittorrent for download. I haven't downloaded it, but sources tell me that the video is encoded in Xvid and the quality is 'excellent' if not DVD quality with a relatively small download size of 709MB.

Check out the details of Final Fantasy Advent Children leak here.

A few months ago I finished quite possibly one of the greatest games to ever grace the PS2, God of War. As I was playing through the game, the story was one of many things that really hit me as being truely amazing and got thinking why not make this game into a feature film?

well, my question was answered when Universal picked up the rights to produce the film. Alex Gartner will be the producer of God of War who also produced such films as Indecent Proposal, Out of Time and The Upside of Anger.

When I found out about this I was absolutely thrilled, but also weary that usually movie adaptations of games don't do so well, unfortunately sometimes permenantly tarnishing the gaming franchise for good. I really hope this movie doesn't suck becuase it has the potential to be something really great.

No Director or Cast members have been named yet, but fans of God of War might agree with me when I say Vin Diesel could be a great Kratos. If this game were to ever be made into a movie, I'm glad a big name studio such as Universal have it.

Check out more information about the God of War movie here.

Well, it looks like one of our favourite gaming sites has just been bought my media giant News Corporation. The whole idea behind Rupert Murdoch's take over is "IGN acquisition brings the company a long way toward its objective of becoming a leading and profitable Internet presence.”

Other than more possible vists to IGN's site now that NewsCorp own it I don't really see any other plausible reason as to why the company would want to purchase a gaming site. Hopefully this will be benificial for both parties (especially for IGN) but i really hope that it doesnt all turn sour as do most take overs of this kind usually do.

For the complete article, read it here.

I am a 2nd year Computer Science student so it's quite obvious that i would be interested to write this sort of stuff (after all, my entire blog is computer technlogy related lol). I used to be a regular writer on my friends programming blog writing an article each week on news, guides or just a few quick tips using a particular language.

In between asessments i have written many things related to computing, one of which a paper below was originally going to be a term paper ended up a full fledged research and review paper entitled "Open Source Databases - A peek into the open source community".

1. Linux Migration Gude: Loosing your windows instability problems for good.  


2. Open Source Databases - A peek into the open source community

I wrote these earlier this year and just came across them on my PC, so though id share them with everyone else in case other people were interested. Feel free to take a look.

Remember the good old days of playing goldeneye on the nintendo 64, well now u can relive those days with the new Goldeneye 007 Source mod for half life 2. If you remember anything from the original game, the mod will surely have it in there.

You really need to see these screenshots for yourself. No character models have been created yet, but judging by the looks of a few classic maps such as facility, bunker and temple...the mod will be absolutely amazing!

John C Dvorak of PCMag has written another great article about his views and opinions on the future of podcasting and how it came to be.

For all you guys who don't know what podcasting is,  "Podcasting is making audio files (most commonly in MP3 format) available online in a way that allows software to automatically download the files for listening at the user's convenience" - wikipedia.org.

I am a big fan of podcasting myself and m a subscriber to many podcasts including my beloved TWiT podcast with Leo Laporte, Security Now! with Steve Gibson, diggnation, CommandN and many others. Podcasting has taken off so fast, it hasnt even been around for a whole year yet.

It would be so cool in a few years time to see people walking down the street wih their iPod's in hand, not listening to music, but the excitement that are podcasts. To read John's article, head on over here.

A very interesting article on BBC world website detail how VERY easy it is for a hacker to attack an unprotected PC within not minutes, but seconds.
Spencer Kelly of BBC world met up with a former hacker and they set up an experiment too see how long it would actually take for somebody to attack an unprotected PC and they track what the attack is exactly doing. This is very interesting stuff. The article also is accompanied by a video clip of this amazing experiment.

This is something any security concious PC user needs to check out (especially windows users).

This is really cool, i absolutely love this show. For all you guys who have no idea what im talking about, the show Pure Pwnage details the life of a pro gamer by the name of Jeremy.

For all us PurePwnage fans, episode 8 will be released September 18th and I absolutely cannot wait. We'll finally find out what will happen with Jeremy's mental condition lol.

Goto www.purepwnage.com for more information. This is REALLY funny and is a must see!

The Creating Online website contains many free images for personal use without having to pay royalties to use them. There are many different images all neatly categorized from computer technology, holidays, business to art.

I've had friends who maintain their own websites, blogs etc and are always looking for great graphics which are free to use. This site is definately worth checking out for any blogger or web developer.

I am a computer science student and about a week ago, my friends and classmates and I were having our regular tech chat before class, where the topic of MacOSX running on the PC came to the table.

My friends had heard about being able to do it, and thought it could be cool to try out. So I thought "yeah, u know I might check into that actually!" I'm sure my friends arent the only one's around who don't really know where to start looking for images of MacOSX x86, so I thought i'd help them out.

I was looking around the web and stumbled across this very interesting (and easy to understand for all u newbs out there) article outlining the very thing I was concerned with which was "Where can someone find an image, and how can it be used to install MacOSX natively?"

So anyone interested in giving MacOSX a try on their PC's should check this article out.

Ever wanted to know how the world's most popular image editing application looked like when it was just an infant? GUIdebook.org take a step back in time for a look at our favourite Image Editor.

From 1990 with the release of Adobe Photoshop 1.0 on the Mac right up to Adobe Photoshop CS2 on Windows XP / MacOSX Tiger in 2005. This application has been around for quite some time (15yrs to be exact) and I'm sure this grandfather has a few more tricks up its sleeve with future releases.

Its just interesting take a look back at where it all began. Mmm, maybe that should be a new weekly segment "Where it all began". We'll see!

It is a well known fact that many people don't own a legitimate copy of any version of Windows and Microsoft know this all too well.

To combat piracy, Microsoft expect that by reducing the price of their new OS, pirating will become less 'attractive' because of the OS's such low price. It will be expected to retail for around USD$99 (around AUD$150) if Microsoft keep this plan. Microsoft really want to get their users to switch to Vista when it ships, and if they keep the pricing quite high (like WindowsXP $$) many windows users will surely just keep their existing PC's with XP until the end of their life.

By reducing the price, not only is Microsoft quite possibly reducing software piracy (which is a great move) but they also hope that if people will buy Vista at $99, they will be more inclined to upgrade their machines now, instead of in another few years.

I think this is a great idea on Microsoft's part because not only are they going to be wanting to reduce piracy, but remember they have quite the competition these days with linux (which is free, or a small fee).

For more information, be sure to check out the article at Vistaknowledge.com

I recently got my wireless network all set up at home, and have my PC's and my laptop all connected to the network wirelessly (i dont know how i lived without wireless lol).

So it came to me, I have a 802.11g router (backwards compatible with 802.11b), why not I go experimenting with my Nintendo DS WiFi and my new network. With my router sitting there awaiting my DS, i turned my DS on and figured "if i start a wireless task and am running a wifi scanner on 1 of my pc's, then it should find my DS right?" I was right.

I started up Pictochat, entered a room and within seconds, NetStumbler had found my Nintendo DS. It was cool to know that ur DS broadcasts its MAC Address when in pictochat, as well as what channel its on and u can even view traffic to and from the DS.

I know that some people have probably already tried this and I knew it could work, just didn't realise how much information you could find out about the DS wifi thats all, still really cool stuff.

Microsoft have release a document on their website which is technical documentation aimed at IT professionals who are in their planning phases of building new machines for their companies for use with Windows Vista when its released next year.

It outlines the major differences between XP and Vista and differences in how security is implemented in the OS so that IT profs can better set up their networks for best possible security with Vista.

Steve Gibson of grc.com and co-host of Security Now! has written a truely ingenious paper on NAT Routers, and how best to use them to maximise your security on your lan, WLAN or even just your single PC connected to the internet.

Steve takes you through the very basics first like what a NAT router is ,what it's used for, and the general security a NAT router provides. As it progresses, he gets into more depth and is really a must have resource for any security consious person connected to the outside world. Steve really has a gift when it comes to taking a topic which is quite complex, and dumbing it down for us all to properly understand and grasp.

Well done Steve, keep it up!

You can see Steve Gibson's NAT Router Security Paper here.

Anything that anybody would like to know about the XBox 360 can easily be answered here at GamesIndustry.biz new summary article for the XBox 360. With Microsoft's impending release of its next gen console the XBox 360 just around the corner, i found myself (as well as many others) wondering "well, what next gen console am I gonna get, maybe XBox 360, but what the hell will be so good about it?"

After reading this article, there were a few points to the console that I found interesting:

- The console can be switched off wirelessly using the media remote
- When playing on XBox live, each game gives add ranking stats to ur gamer tag online.
- U can now play DVD's on the console if u don't have the remote (unlike XBox 1)

I am thinking about getting a PS3 myself, but i think Microsoft will have better luck this time around with the 360 than they did the XBOX (i am assuming everyone know's microsoft never made a profit off the XBOX).

The Sony Erisson W800i Walkman phone is simply amazing. This phone has got to be one of the most powerful phones i've seen. This is the first walkman phone sony have released and will definately not be the last.

A review from PCMag.com  noted that the sound quality was "Excellent", and with a 2megapixel camera, you can't go wrong. This phone has it all.

Security Now! with Steve Gibson is up online and ready for download now.

Security Now! is an internet and network security podcast hosted by Steve Gibson of grc.com (author of spinrite) and Leo Laporte, host of TWiT and Call for Help. A very interesting podcast that any security consious person will find interesting im sure.

Last week, Creative Labs shipped approx 4,000 units of its popular Creative Zen Neon mp3 players to Japan without any knowledge of the Wullik.b worm infection. The infected units were definately not nasty acts of electronic terrorism on Creative's part, it was simply accidental but the worm poses no immediate threat to end users.

A file system file was infected, but since it can only be spread by direct execution, the only way for it to become a problem would be if the user browses the device's file list and clicks on the infected file.

Creative have temporarily suspended shippment of the Zen until the problem can be fixed.

Source: TechWeb|News - Creative ships worm-ridden music players