My 10-year-old beige Power Macintosh G3 will run OS X 10.2, fully supported by Apple. It can also run OS X 10.4 using a third-party utility called XPostFacto.

Of course, you'll need some upgrades (particularly RAM, and a CPU upgrade will help too) before it will work well, and some old technologies like the floppy drive and old serial ports are not supported. But OS X actually runs acceptably on this computer, if you don't mind waiting a few moments for things to happen. Obviously iMovie and GarageBand are out of the question on this old boy but Firefox and Mail run fine, which is enough for most people.

I have a 450 MHz G3 in there now, a 10K RPM UW SCSI hard drive, and I think 448MB of RAM but I'd need to check...haven't powered it up in a while.

Anyway, to get back to the original topic, I think one reason that some Mac users have more computers is because they tend to buy Macs again...but they tend to not want to get rid of their old machine. I have gotten rid of three Macs in my lifetime: my first, a PowerMac 6100, because it wouldn't post any more and wasn't worth fixing, a Power Mac 7600 I obtained secondhand that I had no further use for (and had faulty RAM), and someone else's Power Mac 6500 that they asked me to dispose of. I still have:

• an old Powerbook 180 (still works great but battery is shot, bright 640x400 16-greyscale active matrix screen!)
• the old G3 I mention above
• Mac Mini G4 1.5 GHz, for e-mail, Web browsing and throwing together a few videos...iMovie HD doesn't seem to work as well on Intel.
• iBook G4, which I use for Web browsing during evenings
• white MacBook (2nd gen) I use to develop software (running Windows XP)

And the odd thing that perhaps only other Mac users will understand is that I really enjoy using all of them, each in their own way.

So now I'm curious about this... counting my PC, my fiancee's PCs and our non-Mac laptops and netbooks... we have, in total, 6 of those. So that's 11 computers in total, 5 of which are Macs... wow, that's more than I thought.

This works both ways; there is a lot of freeware/shareware on Mac that has no PC equivalent.

I wish there was something on Windows comparable to GraphicConverter in ease of use and feature set. But there isn't.

No, most of the consoles that failed were repaired or replaced at Microsoft's expense. You're incorrect.

...or you could get it replaced under their three-year warranty program for free.

What I'd really like to see is the complete opposite.

I work in IT and also have private clients. Whether it's at work or at home, whenever I deploy an LCD monitor (and set it to the resolution it was designed for) the first request I get is to "make it bigger so I can read it." I try to explain that this will make things very blurry, but 90% of the time, they don't care. If it's a widescreen monitor and their requested resolution is 4:3, and the result is stretched, they still don't care. It's not just old people, it's middle-aged people too (very few young people work here).

All I ever see now are really high resolutions. Why aren't there any new 800x600 or 1024x768 17" or 19" LCD monitors?

"I'll get you next time, Gadget... next time..."

Does anyone know if the Horn Controller is wireless?

There's an explanation for this.

Video games generally sell for about the same price everywhere. If there's a price drop from $60 to $40, or to $20, or whatever, generally within a few days EVERY store is charging the new price (except the ones that don't know what to charge for video games). Price drops of this sort happen quite frequently; lots happen every week.

HOWEVER, if a store is going out of business, the store's prices all freeze. The items' prices no longer change, only the percentage off. So if a game's price drops during the sale, the drop won't occur in this store, and as a result, it could wind up cheaper everywhere else.

I am almost certain that this is what happened. It's not Circuit City's fault, just the way the video games market works.

The new digitally-distributed console games--available over services like Xbox LIVE Arcade, the PlayStation Store and WiiWare--can represent an amazing value, in some cases miles better than the $60 games at retail. Obviously you're looking at lower budgets, but that doesn't mean lower value. Some can be played for many, many hours.

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The newer Xbox LIVE Commmunity Games service has a whole lot of great games available very cheaply. I personally spent 11 months developing Snake360, which has 300 levels, several multiplayer modes, online scoreboards, and just about every feature you could ever ask for from a snake game. At $5, it's hard to find a better value. Not to say that it's the best; many of the Community Games are insanely addictive and are half that price.

Our top priority is recovering the CIP device!!

I own an original model 20GB PS3 (although I've upgraded the hard drive since). I usually keep it in an area that is open on all sides and far from where I sit, so I never really notice any heat output. Same with my 360.

I let my sister borrow my PS3 recently to play Disgaea 3. We'd originally put it into a piece of furniture with a glass front. Since I'd never had to worry about it before, I totally didn't think about heat output.

After an hour and a half or so of play, I heard a sound coming from around the TV that sounded like a jet engine taking off. I was shocked to find that the sound was actually a fan (or multiple fans) inside the PS3, which must have been spinning at about a bazillion RPM.

The air temperature in there must have been at least 80-90 degrees F. The top of the system was so hot that I couldn't leave my hand on it. We ejected the disc and that was pretty hot too. And yet...the system was still running without so much as a stutter. I'm pretty sure that the 360 will turn itself off and display a certain light pattern if it overheats, but the PS3 was determined to tough it out...I don't know whether I should feel impressed or scared by that.

So yeah...the PS3 definitely generates heat. But maybe they've reduced it in more recent models; I know that the guts have already been revised several times.

Singularity is basically this: Microsoft requires developers who ship 360 games to have their online features work in a single specific way. That is why you never see EULAs or create other accounts, why all menus look the same, why every game has leaderboards and achievements, etc...because it's mandated and has been since the beginning. You know that the experience is going to be seamless when you open the shrinkwrap.

360 patches take seconds. PS3's take at least 5-10 minutes to download and "install." I hate waiting for downloaded demos to "install" when on 360 I can play as soon as the download is finished. Plus, it can continue downloading after I've shut the system down (and turn itself completely off when finished).

Home is not a "pretty cool feature," it is a waste of time. It's a glorified chat room, with a house each user can personalize...if they want to pay real money for accessories. Chat rooms are old and tired already and the avatars are all ugly. I can't believe they actually released it.

PSN is not and never will be on a similar level as Live. Let me know when I can private chat across different games, try all downloadable games before I buy them, use a single user name and friends list in ALL of my games, and... here's a big one... have a guarantee that online multiplayer service will never end in the games that I play.

That's right folks...Microsoft runs the matching servers for all online Xbox and Xbox 360 games (except for EA's). PS3 leaves it up to the developers, so if they want to stop service, you're SOL. But for any non-EA game on Xbox or Xbox 360, you'll be able to play a match for as long as Xbox Live exists and you know one other person who has the game and wants to play it with you. This is one big thing that makes the service worth paying for, and one that will certainly come to the forefront in a few years.

But at least the updates usually take under 30 seconds to receive, and don't have an "install" process to sit through. In less than a minute, you're back to what you were doing before.

I can private chat with up to 4 (I think) other people over Xbox Live, no matter what game I/they am playing, or whether they're even playing a game or not. We can even quit games and start new ones without disrupting the chat at all.

I talk to a friend of mine like this all the time. It's great, and it's something that you'll probably never see on PSN. MS was thinking WAY forward when they designed the 360's OS and network structure.

Some of the features of Live's content are also far superior. There are literally several HUNDRED retail game demos, and *every* purchasable downloadable title--100% of them--can be tried before buying. Most of PSN's games and all of WiiWare cannot be sampled. Lame, lame, lame.

BTW, you don't even need to pay for Xbox Live to take advantage of private chat or game trials. But I'd expect that subscribers help pay for bandwidth. Makes no difference to me...I'm getting real value out of my $3/month, as far as I'm concerned.

That may be true, but if you lose a soldier "permanently" during a battle, you can simply load the game back from your last save, and try the battle again. Since FFT's battles are short, it's not a big penalty.

The similar game Fire Emblem (except for the recent Wii version) has a harsher penalty for death. You can still load back your previous save, but if you do, you have to begin the whole chapter over again, which usually means 1-2 hours of your time vanish. At times, you will just need to face the fact...your character died and they're not coming back.