William

I love his vacuum cleaner and its a very good design presumably he is a pretty bright guy with a lot of money and a pretty good R&D team to back him up i cant see why he wouldn't have as much or a chance at cracking the efficient electric engine as any other guy. You guys are way harsh on this guy. if he can do to cars what his Vacuums did to everyday cleaning he has a shot at becoming an international sensation and maybe weaning us off petrol like he did for vacuum cleaner bags

I am of the view that a computer's practical life span is roughly 3-5 years. This of course depends on the use that you make of a computer and what you need a computer for. If you are only using it for surfing the net and writing emails and word processing then the life span can be considerably longer. On the other hand if you are a power user playing games or doing graphic design then your life cycle would be shorter. Chances are that if you are a power user you will want the best and latest OS but with that you will probably be upgrading the hardware on your mac on a regular basis.
Take my family for example.
My mum purely uses her computer to word process and browse the web she has had the same 12" Al PB i think the 1.33ghz for 4 years now and i suspect will keep using it for another 4 years short of it breaking down and repairs being too expensive. Does she care if she is running OS 10.4 10.5 or 10.6? absolutely not. All she cares is that it doesn't crash too often or break down.

My Dad he is a much more intense user he heavily uses word processing apps and browsing but he also does lots of other things like working with movies and pictures. He likes his computer to be fast he however does not feel the need to change computer all that often he is currently using a MBP 17'' 2.16. I expect him to use his computer for about 5-6 years total or until it completely dies. His view of the OS is change when its certain that its stable and if he cant upgrade he wont be too phased out about it.

As for me im much more a power user i use my computer a lot and i do indulge in gaming quite frequently. I usually run a minimum of 7-9 apps many processor intensive. I like it to be fast and i push it to the limit. Currently i am running the 2.4ghz 17'' MBP previously i was running the 17'' 1.5ghz PB which was a hand me down from my dad. My ideal life span for a computer is 3 years but will probably stretch to 4 depending on finances and how well the computer is holding up. I absolutely care if i am running the latest OS and i would be very annoyed if i could not run the latest and the greatest.

I think my family pretty much is a decent cross section of the different computer users. If you are running a really old computer chances are that you are not a hard core user and that you don't really care that much what OS you are running as long as it works and does its job. If you are a power user then chances are that you do care what OS you are running but you will be pretty much unaffected because your hardware cycle is much shorter.
So this is a very long winded explanation as to why i don't think dropping support for older hardware is such a big issue. It will be a pain though for all those people who upgraded at the very end of the G5 cycle i.e. late 2005 as they will still have a year or so left in their systems. and for those wondering according to MacTracker the last G5 IMacs and Power Macs came out October 2005

Absolutely agree with with most of the posts so far EA has only itself to blame for making so little money on the PS3. I am sure that the PS3 is hard to develop for etc as many producers are saying however that is still no excuse especially when looking at games that have come out recently Rachet, Drake's Fortune and Assassin's Creed. Sure the last one has an annoying bug but none the less all of these games have great performance. I personally hate sports games irrespective of platform and therefore even if i had an xbox i would probably still not buy games from EA. EA seems only to make remakes of tiered and old franchises there are few if any games that are new its main money comes from yearly remakes or sports games most of which only appeal to a specific American demographic which no matter how good or bad the game is will still buy it.
Personally the only game I was going to buy was the Orange Box as it seems like a fun game but i hear really bad previews of its frame rates etc for the PS3 so im going to wait it out and see what reviewers etc say of it before i make the plunge right now i have plenty of GOOD games to play and plenty of probably good games to throw my money on in the coming months (Haze comes to mind) without having to stoop to giving money to companies that do a third rate job at porting games. Especially when it has been proven time and time again that it can be done on the PS3.

I personally am loving the game the frame rate i have never noticed it to drop in any substantial way the graphics look great.... HOWEVER! it has frozen on my at least 3-4 times and im at less than half of the game it is quite frustrating.. Not really a deal breaker fir me but still very annoying..

I was rather concerned when i first read the reviews in places such as IGN that suggested that the game was pretty average. I have been looking forward to the game very much and i watched all the trailers that came out and read every bit of info that i could find leading up to the release. When i saw the review though i started contemplating not buying the game.
I have been reading Penny Arcade and for many many years and i find them very funny and i really respect their view and seeing them give it praise made me want to buy it again. Now the next step is wait until it appears for sale on sites like Renchi.com or play-asia. I am a PS3 owner living in Australia and am not ready to pay $100+ for a game when i can get it for about 70$ including import costs. So my order will comprise Heavenly Sword, Rachet and Clank and Assassins Creed which should keep give me my story driven action adventure fix that i need.
Over all my view though is reviews are a great guideline but i dont take them as the golden truth there are many instances that i picked up a game that got an average review and enjoyed it immensely and other times that i picked up a game because it had great reviews to find it not really to my liking. As with movies games are very subjective and as such reviews are something you should make for yourself.

yay my prayers have been answered.. well not prayers to god but to the black shiny box under my TV. Finally it makes sense to have Eye Connect on my Mac as soon as this feature is released i will buy the full version. Its not just pirated stuff that comes in DivX i have plenty of legit stuff in that format..

Xvid/Divx codec dont care for anything else really. That would make my life whole.

The main point is the value for money. There is an immense amount of entertainment of great value on the internet and its free, there is TV and radio which are both free. With all this free entertainment and people getting more and more busy its pretty surprising that they do make 15mil off their content which they showed for free in the first place. I understand its not free cos of advertising etc but it is free for the consumer. It is ridiculous to claim that apple is making its profit on the back of their content if they are only making 15mil and they probably get more than 50% of the revenue then what this means is that only a tiny fraction of the millions of people buying Ipods/Iphones are paying for their shows, this completely destroys their argument. Thats without mentioning greed.
The reason why piracy is such a great problem is because of people like him who through greed alienate their consumers and expect excessive payment for content that is worth very little compared to other free content that is available. It is stupid to calculate every pirated show as a loss of revenue because 95% of people who pirate would not watch or buy the show if piracy were not available.
The ITunes model of marketing content is not the best in my opinion the ideal way would be a subscription model where you can consume what you want for a fixed price if that were the case i would probably actually buy something off ITunes, until that happens my credit card stays in my pocket while i watch free stuff on the web.

My case i am running a 1.5ghz G4 PB upgraded from 10.4 and it runs fantastically its MUCH MUCH snappier and faster than 10.4 even my Firefox browser is more responsive. I did the time machine backup during the night so i did not feel any slowness when i woke up this morning. Time machine runs very well and as advertised. Not experiencing any issues at all have yet to find something that doesnt work. I am also installing it on my Girlfriend's Ibook G4 1.33ghz we will have to see how that goes most of the update is done now and looks to take less than 2 hours.

Yeah i just backed up all my data so as far as data is concerned i should be ok the main prob would be if the comp gets screwed up so badly that i lose heaps of productivity.