Hamilton is the youngest world champion in Formula One history at the age of 23 years 301 days, beating the previous mark set by old adversary Fernando Alonso by 124 days.

Hamilton is also only the second driver in the 59 years of the F1 championship to win the title in his second year, equalling a feat initially set by Jacques Villeneuve in 1997.

He is Britain's ninth world champion, joining an illustrious list of names in Mike Hawthorn, Graham Hill, Jim Clark, John Surtees, Sir Jackie Stewart, James Hunt, Nigel Mansell and Damon Hill - the last 12 years ago.

And finally, he is McLaren's first champion since Mika Hakkinen in 1999, and their seventh overall as he succeeds the Finn, Senna, Alain Prost, James Hunt, Niki Lauda and Emerson Fittipaldi.

Skaife, 41, said the decision had been difficult, but that it was the right time to move on. “I've always admired sportspeople who know when it's time to retire, rather than waiting to be told,” he said.

“Motor racing has been my life for the past 21 years and, as any professional sportsperson will attest, if you have a love and passion for what you are doing, for the competition and being on top of your game, then retirement is not something you ever easily consider.

“But the reality is that you do come to point in your career when you have a decision to make. I’m looking to the future for both myself and the Toll Holden Racing Team, and while this decision ends one phase of my career, I’m confident it will also open doors and exciting new opportunities.”

Skaife’s list of achievements is unsurpassed in Australian motor sport, with a record-equalling five Australian Touring Car/V8 Supercar Championships (tied with Ian Geoghegan and Dick Johnson), five Bathurst 1000 titles and a record 40 Australian Touring Car/V8 Supercar Championship round victories. He also has three consecutive Australian Drivers’ Championships (1991-93).

Having begun racing in karts before moving to cars, Skaife made his professional debut at the wheel of a factory-backed Nissan Gazelle at Winton Motor Raceway in 1987, finishing third, and later showed his versatility by winning three consecutive Australian Drivers’ Championships in the Formula Holden open-wheelers.

As a works Nissan driver in 1992 he clinched the Australian Touring Car Championship, Australian Drivers’ Championship and Bathurst 1000 in the same season before moving to Holden with Gibson Motorsport at the beginning of the V8 Supercar era the following year.

Jumping to the Holden Racing Team in 1997 upon the retirement of the legendary Peter Brock, Skaife won a hat-trick of championships in 2000, 2001 and 2002 in addition to back-to-back successes at Bathurst in 2001 and 2002.

He assumed ownership of HRT in 2003 and mounted a championship challenge that was alive until the final round of the series. In 2005 he collected his fifth Bathurst 1000 victory, with Todd Kelly.

Last year Skaife chalked up 20 years as a professional racing driver at Winton, and the following round again rewrote the record books, his victory at Eastern Creek notching the 38th victory of his career to eclipse the all-time record of racing legend Brock.

His tally increased to 39 wins earlier this year when Skaife was retrospectively awarded the 2000 Clipsal 500 title after series organisers corrected a rules anomaly, and he added win number 40 with his and Garth Tander’s victory in last month’s LandH 500 at Phillip Island.

Mr Paul Little, Managing Director of Toll HRT naming rights sponsor, Toll Holdings Ltd said Mark Skaife was a true champion in every sense of the word.

"Mark has become a figurehead for motor racing in this country. He has not only achieved everything there is to achieve in the sport, and in the most professional manner, he has also set tremendous benchmarks for those who aspire to follow in his footsteps.

"We congratulate Mark on his outstanding career and wish him every success in the future."

Greg Smith from Mobil also paid tribute to the retiring champion.

“Mark has been a fantastic ambassador for Mobil over the last 10 years, consistently adding value to our company,” Greg Smith said.

“His skill as a driver and dedication to V8 Supercars is legendary.”

"He is understandably ranked as one of the most successful touring car drivers in Australian motor racing history and we congratulate him on his many achievements throughout his esteemed career," he said.

"From all of us at Mobil, we wish Mark all the best for his future endeavours and thank him for his support and contribution to our business."

Skaife said three performances stood out from the others during the past 21 years. “The first was in ’92 when I won my first Touring Car Championship in the Nissan, and then being the youngest ever to do so,” Skaife said.

“That same day we also won the Australian Drivers Championship in a Formula Holden open wheeler, so it was a great day.

“The second was winning the V8 Championship in 1994 with a Fred Gibson Commodore as it was Holden’s first title for 14 years since Brock and HDT in 1980.

“The 2002 HRT Bathurst win with Jim Richards was also one of my favourite moments, as it sealed the championship at the same time and came 10 years after we last won Bathurst together in 1992.”

Skaife said he was looking forward to ending his career on a high note over the season’s remaining rounds, including the NRMA Grand Finale at Sydney’s Oran Park Raceway – ironically that circuit’s last ever V8 Supercar event.

Skaife holds the track qualifying record, set in 1999, and has won at Oran Park six times previously – including four in a row from 1999-2002 – while HRT won at the track for seven consecutive years from 1996-2002.

The Triple Eight Racing duo equalled the all-time record for successive triumphs, joining motorsport legends Peter Brock, Jim Richards and Larry Perkins on three.

"This is amazing," Whincup said.

"How good was Lowndesy in that last stint. He just nails it every time. He's unbelievable.

"I'm not a greedy person but I'll take it every time."

New Zealand pairing Greg Murphy and Jason Richards pulled off an incredible second spot with Murphy passing the Ford of Steven Richards with just a handful of laps remaining.

Richards and Mark Winterbottom slipped another spot to fourth moments later as the Ford of James Courtney and David Besnard snuck through for a place on the podium.

Murphy and Richards, who had struggled in the V8 Supercar championship all year, formed the best Holden team for the second year in a row following their fourth place a year ago.

There was an element of controversy about the victory with Murphy claiming Lowndes should have been penalised for bumping him on the opening lap.

Lowndes appeared to veer into the side of Murphy and the four-time Bathurst champion battled steering problems as a result.

"He's got away with knocking us up," said Murphy.

Aside from that and a heap of safety car interventions late on, it was plain sailing for the champions, taking the lead from early pacesetters Stone Brothers Racing after the first pit stop on lap 34 and never looking back in their bid to enter the history books.

Lowndes, 34, also moved to equal fifth on the all-time list with four Bathurst wins, behind Brock (9), Richards (7), Perkins (6) and modern rival Mark Skaife (5).

Five-time winner Skaife and his V8 Supercar champion teammate Garth Tander had a horror day for the Holden Racing Team.

Tander got off to a disastrous start when the clutch slipped, leaving him stranded on the starting line as he dropped from pole position to last by the first corner.

To make matters worse, Tander was given a 10 second penalty for jumping the start as the car propped forward in the chaos.

"I got a penalty for apparently getting too good a start - I was last into the first corner!" Tander said.

The day would not get any better for Holden's flagship outfit as on lap 102 of 161 Skaife hit the wall trying to fend off Lowndes, who was attempting to lap him.

Skaife hit the wall again a few laps later as he battled steering problems and the pair finished 12th in the end.

Brock achieved the Bathurst hat-trick twice, first with Jim Richards from 1978-80 and then again from 1982-84 with Perkins.

Mono 2.0 is both a runtime for application and a kit for developers for writing applications with C# and other ECMA CLI languages for a wide spectrum of uses.

Big thanks go to the fantastic Mono team at Novell that has kept the excitement and the pace over all these years (we started in 2001), the large contributions from Mainsoft, Unity3D and our users that pushed us to fix bugs, implement new features and tune Mono. Also, we very much appreciate the work of the ECMA 334 and 335 committee members that worked on the CLI and C# specifications and everyone at Microsoft that answered our questions over the years and specially those that licensed code under open source licenses.

We originally started to work on Mono, because we wanted to make developers happier and more productive on Linux. We liked C#, we liked the CIL and we wanted to have those technologies available on our platform.

Since we have been active in the Linux Desktop world, it is not a surprise that the early use of Mono was mostly on Linux desktop applications, and Mono continues to shine there. Server-side use of Mono was a natural evolution and we soon were powering ASP.NET sites on Linux.

There is one area where we under-delivered in the past, and it has been a constant source of pain. Up until now, we did not have a working debugger. This has finally changed, and Mono 2.0 includes for the first time a debugger, the time for WriteLine() debugging is now behind us.

As the project matured, developers started taking advantage of Mono's open source nature: essentially .NET on their own terms. A platform that could be adapted, morphed, ported and modified to suit many different uses. Today Mono is embedded in portable mp3 players and powers Unity3D's game engine on the Apple iPhone, the Nintendo Wii, MacOS X and Windows (And Unity3D is soon coming to Linux!).

It has also been deployed to run code on large clusters of servers for SecondLife, powers our open source Silverlight implementation (Moonlight) and powers the popular DekiWiki: a Social Collaboration Tool.

Mono is a large project and it is hard to pick one feature to talk about as there are so many, so instead I put together a quick table of the major features that are part of this release:

Compiler Support	.NET APIs	Mono APIs
Mono's Open Source Compilers: C# 3.0 compiler. LINQ to Objects. LINQ to XML. Visual Basic 8 compiler. Open Source Compilers: Boo. Cobra. GNU's GCC with the CIL backend. Microsoft's IronPython. Jeroen's IKVM (Java on .NET). Microsoft's IronRuby. Phalanger (PHP on CLI). Commercial Compilers: ISE's Eiffel. Microsoft's C#. Microsoft's F#. Microsoft's VB.NET. RemObject's Oxygene (Object Pascal). And many more.	Core API: 2.0 core APIs. System, System.Xml. 3.5 System.Core. System.Drawing. System.DirectoryServices. System.Web.Services. Windows.Forms 2.0: Win32 driver. Quartz/OSX driver. Cairo/X11 Unix driver. ASP.NET 2.0: Core ASP.NET. ASP.NET AJAX. Apache and FastCGI integration. ADO.NET 2.0 plus providers for: Managed drivers: Postgresql, MS SQL Server, Sybase. Semi-managed drivers: Firebird, IBM DB2, Oracle, Sqlite. MySQL provides their own drivers.	GUI APIs: Gtk# (Unix, Windows, MacOS X). Cocoa# (MacOS X). Mono Core: Mono.Addins - Extensibility Framework. Mono.Cairo - Cairo Graphics Binding. Mono.Cecil - ECMA CIL Manipulation. Xml.Relaxng. Novell.Directory.Ldap C5 - Generics Library. Linux Specific: Mono.Posix/Mono.Unix. NDesk.DBus Other Ecosystem Libraries: Bit# - Bittorrent client/server library. Mono.Fuse - User-space file systems. Mono.ZeroConf - Bonjour stack. Mono.Nat - Network Address Translation. Mono.Upnp - Universal Plug and Play. Tao Framework - OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL and Cg bindings.

We have ported Mono to a wide variety of platforms and operating systems on this 1.0 to 2.0 cycle. These platforms include:

• Linux (x86, x86-64, PowerPC32, Itanium, SPARC, ARM, s390, s390x.
• Solaris (x86-64, SPARC).
• MacOS X (x86, PowerPC32).
• Windows (x86, support for x86-64 will come in Mono 2.2).
• Nintendo's Wii.
• iPhone/iPod Touch (ARM, limited functionality due to licensing requirements; I will blog later this week about this).
• *BSD (x86, x86-64).

Developing with Mono

Long time Linux developers will probably continue to use Emacs and VI, but some new Linux developers might want to use an IDE. New developers can use our open source MonoDevelop IDE on Linux, or alternatively the commercial X-Develop IDE or SlickEdit.

If you are a Windows developer, you can continue using Visual Studio or your IDE of choice to write the code and compile it. Your binaries will run just fine on Linux.

To assist Windows developers in porting their applications to Unix, we have provided the Mono Migration Analysis tool.

Runtime Changes

The Mono Virtual Machine gained plenty of features since Mono 1.2 was released. We have added:

• Generic Code Sharing and VTable Compression have been implemented: this significantly reduces the use consumed by generic type instantiations, while still getting the speed benefits of using generics.
• AOT support: in addition to x86, we now also support ARM and x86-64.
• COM interop is now complete (works on Windows with "real COM" and can be used on Unix with Mainsoft's COM or Mozilla's XPCOM).
• AOT code can now AOT parts of 2.0 assemblies (assemblies that contain generics).
• Full AOT support (allows code to run JIT-less, this is limited to 1.0 code).
• CIL Verifier: Now Mono has a CIL verifier.
• CoreCLR Security: the security system used by Moonlight.
• Many optimizations that improve execution performance: New intrinsics operations (Math.Min/Max for example); various operations are now inlined by the JIT; managed allocations (no transition to unmanaged code for allocating memory); multi-array access is now tuned by the JIT; constant and block initializations are now handled by the JIT; Faster initialization and access to multi-dimensional arrays (4x faster).
• The runtime went on a diet, many runtime data structures are smaller making Mono lighter.
•  

Tools

In addition the the Mono Debugger making its debut appearance on this release, we are very proud of our code analyzer Gendarme.

Gendarme is a extensible rule-based tool to find problems in .NET applications and libraries. Gendarme inspects programs and libraries that contain code in ECMA CIL format (Mono and .NET) and looks for common problems with the code, problems that compiler do not typically check or have not historically checked.

Feedback

Mono is not perfect, but we want to improve it. Like many other open source projects, we need your bug reports to improve Mono. If you have problems with Mono, help us by filing a bug report.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to Hacker Extraordinaire Aaron Bockover who not only brings us the best media player in the world, but created the new web site design and implemented and tuned it over very long extra hours up until 7am in the morning on his weekend.

And to our packaging and QA team that spend extra hours to get all the bits and pieces in place for the release.

The duo claimed pole position yesterday and were 10 laps short of the perfect finish, having led for the majority of the 113-lap rain and safety car impacted race.

In a well strategized performance the Team and its engineers were always on the right side of the changing weather conditions and safety car stoppages. Lowndes led the race for the duration of his first and only 43-lap stint setting up for teammate Whincup who faced challenging conditions including a heavy downpour  mid race.

Whincup double stinted when a safety car allowed re-fuelling and tyres but fading concentration with only 10 laps to go allowed a pressuring Garth Tander to claim the lead.

Starting from 25th on the grid, Car 88 driver Fabrizio Giovanardi drove well in the early stages of the race, gaining a number of positions but an unforced error incurred  a drive through penalty which put them out of top ten contention.

Teammate Marc Hynes mirrored Jamie Whincup’s double stint due to the weather and safety car periods and circulated consistently and out of trouble finishing a credible 17th.

What they had to say......Car 888

Craig Lowndes Quotes

“The car was 99% right this weekend and we had a number of strategies to cope with the varying circumstances,” said Lowndes. “I congratulate the HRT team on doing a good job but I would really like to make special mention of our team who did an exceptional job given the variables they faced.

“We can now sit back, reflect and look forward to the mountain as we are off to a great start.

Jamie Whincup Quotes

“It was a faultless performance by the guys,” said Whincup. “I am just disappointed that I dropped the bundle with 10 laps to go.

“We all knew the rain would come we just didn’t know when it would be or how it would play out in terms of who would be in the car.

“Craig also did an amazing job but unfortunately the team didn’t get the result they deserve.” he added.

What they had to say .....Car 88

Fabrizio Giovanardi Quotes

“It was very unfortunate I locked up and there was nothing I could do, I became a spectator in my own race," Giovanardi explained of his incident with Dean Canto which resulted in a drive through.

“I have plenty of time now to think about how we tackle Bathurst and that daunting mountain.

“I would like to think we are a top ten possibility in the longer race," he added.

Marc Hynes Quotes

“It was certainly an induction to V8 Supercars. I didn’t expect to double stint or to get bashed about quite so much.

“The rain came and it was just a case of surviving until I could get into the pits for wets. I survived and got through to the dry again but I made a few mistakes in the final laps

“I spent over two hours in the car so some good lessons were learnt ahead of Bathurst,” Hynes added.

L & H 500 Top Ten Finishes

1.  Mark Skaife/Garth Tander, 252pts
2.  Jamie Whincup/Craig Lowndes, 258pts
3.  Will Davison/Steven Johnson, 235pts
4.  Steven Richards/Mark Winterbottom  211pts
5.  Lee Holdsworth/Michael Caruso, 199pts
6.  James Courtney/David Besnard, 201pts
7.  Rick Kelly/Paul Radisich, 196pts
8.  Jack Perkins/Nathan Pretty, 158pts
9.  Russell Ingall/Paul Morris 173pts
10. Shane Van Gisbergen/Jonothan Webb, 160pts
17. Fabrizio Giovanardi/Marc Hynes, 102pts

Users of xVM VirtualBox 2.0 software will now benefit from new support for 64-bit versions of operating systems like Windows Vista and RedHat Enterprise Linux, in addition to all other major host operating systems. The software also offers a new user interface for the Mac platform, improved networking for the Mac OS X and Solaris OS, as well as improved performance, especially on AMD chips. Additionally, customers who purchase an enterprise subscription will also receive a Right-to-Use License, allowing them to deploy the xVM VirtualBox platform using their own software deployment tools. Subscriptions start at $30 (USD) per user per year, which includes 24/7 support, and discounts are available based on volume.

"Sun xVM VirtualBox software continues to dominate the desktop virtualization space with over 6.5 million downloads to date and rave reviews from press and customers. Now with xVM VirtualBox 2.0 software and the new enterprise subscription, customers can confidently roll out xVM VirtualBox software across their business," said Steve Wilson, vice president, xVM, Sun Microsystems. "Virtual desktops, such as those provided by the xVM VirtualBox software, are the future of business desktops because they are more flexible, manageable and secure than traditional PC architectures. Enterprises will be thrilled with the xVM VirtualBox platform because it provides them an easier way to deliver a standard operating environment across their enterprises."

xVM VirtualBox software lets users create "virtual machines" into which they can install their operating system of choice, so developers can easily build, test and run cross-platform, multi-tier applications on a single laptop or desktop computer. A mere 20 megabyte download, xVM VirtualBox software is incredibly compact and efficient and installs in less than five minutes.

To download the latest version of VirtualBox click here.

Happy Fathers Day..

I know I had a great day.. (Thanks to Leanne/Jordan and Maddison).

Browse Check - This transparent bridge provides content filtering for internet connections.

Rogue Access - Is a Network Access Control solution which monitors network traffic, reporting and disabling rogue machines.

Stay tuned for more information.. Coming soon..