Now a lot of people will be watching, Pirates of Silicon Valley which is showing on tv today. Pirates of Silicon Valley is basically about the rise and fall of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Everything in Pirates of Silicon Valley kind of starts in the 1970’s and works its way up.

All the PC tinkering of the 80’s is kind of fun to remember. I remember having an old school Apple and playing games on that high end heap of almost 100 pound machine. Those were the days. Now I started reading other blogs, and their reviews about the movie. One persons blog that I read from was talking about his company Mac is so genius. Thats when I thought about the fact that Mac people are like Volkswagen lovers. It can absolutely cost you out the anus to fix it and guess what, you still love it.

I have nothing against Macs, and this video is for amusement only. I am sure some of you will be reading this blog using a Mac and thats cool, but the one thing I don’t get sometimes is how people can be so loyal to something that they have to not only pay an arm and a leg for, but anything they want to run on it costs them almost the price you would pay for a car.

That kind loyalty will get you no where but broke. If you are rich and make a load of money, or you need it for graphic design or music, then I can see why you might use a Mac and live by it, but for me a regular PC with XP that runs about anything in the world will do.

I just got a Mac. I’ve been using it almost non-stop since I got it. However, from time to time, I have to use my wifes Windows XP machine to fix something, or to get a new program installed for her. I also have to use a Windows machine at work, and I’ve noticed a few things.

Mainly, my thumb rests on the ALT key. On a Windows machine, I normally use the mouse a lot. You kind of have to. However, I’ve gotten used to certain short keys. The Apple Key (Command, Apple, whatever you want to call it) is used in almost all shortcut keys. It rests between the ALT (Option on a Mac) key and the Space Bar.On a Windows machine, this is the ALT key. I’ve noticed my thumb is there, all the time.

I try to close tabs in Firefox with ALT+W, which doesn’t work. It’s CTRL+W. I try to exit a program using ALT+Q, when it should be CTRL+Q. I thought going to a Mac would be a difficult switch. It’s not really. It was more of a change going to Linux from Windows. They use a lot of the same shortcut keys, but I never really used them, even on a laptop.

With that being said, there are some programs on Mac that I wish had a Windows equivalent. Quicksilver being the main one. Quicksilver is kind of like doing Start -> Run -> and typing in the path to the program you want to launch. However, all you need to do is type the NAME of the program you want to launch.

If I want to run Camino (My browser of choice on a Mac), I just do SHIFT+COMMAND+Space Bar and I get a dialog window. I type in part of the name (Cam) and it will know I want to launch Camino. I can use it for Audium (Messenger program of choice), iTunes, or anything, and it just works. When I ran Linux, I used the GNOME desktop, or more recently, OpenBox. GNOME has the gnome-application-launcher (I think that is what it’s called) which defaults on ALT+F2. Windows, to my knowledge, doesn’t have this built in. Sure, you can do WINDOWS Key + R to bring up the run dialog, but it’s not the same by any means. Quicksilver has auto completion of application names. So did the GNOME program.

I honestly don’t know how I survived for so long without Quicksilver or any of type of application launcher. I know that I don’t plan on going back to Windows any time soon, but Linux is still an option for me. Not sure how the PowerPC ports of my distro of choice (Arch Linux) is, but that is another story to be told at a later time. Got to find my restore disks before I try messing around with Linux on PPC.

While browsing around on youtube I came across another neat video. Looks like a cool little program to make beats with an Iphone. Enjoy!