At the recent CanSecWest PWN 2 OWN (yes, they really called it that) hacking contest, three laptops were put up as targets. The Mac fell first in two minutes, followed by Vista in two days. The Linux system never went down. PC World has a nice little summary of the action.

I somehow suspect we won't see any of those clever little Mac ads showing off the results of this contest anytime soon.

In other news, I suspect there is a party going on somewhere in Redmond.

The Professional Helicopter Simulator.

See-through laptops!

This is one of the reasons I love the Internet - it allows people with obscure hobbies or abilities to do really cool things.

Take this guy. He has a hobby, he likes to make maps of places on the Earth from satellite photos. One day he sees some imagery of Titan (a moon of Saturn), courtesy of JPL and the Cassini-Huygens mission. He spots something interesting: a methane sea with a complex shoreline.

So he whips up a really cool map of the Unnamed Methane Sea on Titan. Personally, I think they should name it after him.

You may not know it, but the sun has a regular solar "cycle" of activity. These cycles last anywhere from 9 to 14 years in length, and the sun tends to have a slightly different activity level per cycle. These variations can have a big impact for life on Earth.

Our curious and inquisitive nature has prompted us to loft a special satellite into space to monitor the sun: the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). For the first time in history, SOHO has monitored a solar cycle from start to (nearly) finish, and it's a pretty darned cool picture:

You can find more cool images here.

You can read more about the solar cycle at Wikipedia (warning, serious science content).

And in case you didn't know it, we are on the verge of moving from solar cycle 23 to cycle 24. It has all of the sun watchers on the edge of their seats in excitement.

The game Portal meets real life.

From Monty Oum, the same guy that brought us Haloid (Halo/Metroid), comes the Dead Fantasy collection (Dead or Alive/Final Fantasy): Dead Fantasy I and Dead Fantasy II.

The Flash game Line Rider started out simple enough. But that's never enough for some people: Too Detailed Line Rider.

Old school arcade games plus Doctor Who equals TARDIS MAME console.

Starcraft 2 gameplay clips!

What does a geek do once they've played Portal? Make an Aperture Science computer.

When you don't want to just play a game, but actually race, then you need a Virtual GT.