I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC. We’ve all seen the ads. Well PC just got a nice upgrade. For those of us who are sick of IE, fed up with FireFox, and not quite getting used to Google Chrome there is now another option on the table. Safari, by Apple.

Safari 4 was just released and it’s available for both PC and Mac. Check it out here:

http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

If you’re like me and missed the Windows 7 beta download period, you’ll be happy to know that starting tomorrow you can get your hands on the Windows 7 Release Candidate straight from Microsoft’s Windows 7 website. The download will be available through July of this year, and will run until sometime in 2010.

I’m looking forward to giving this a spin. I haven’t tried it yet but from what I’ve heard it’s definitely a lot better than Vista AND XP. That’s exactly what I hope turns out to be the case.

Windows 7 Website

I’m sick of all of the antitrust laws surrounding Microsoft. So they have a corner in a market or two. That’s an understatement, but, even so. They also created the operating system used by most of the world. If they don’t want to make their OS compatible or convenient to use with certain Google applications, that should be their perogative.

In a recent court ruling, Microsoft will not be forced to allow users to disable the default built in Windows Desktop Search in the new Windows Vista to allow users to use Google Desktop Search instead. Boo hoo Google. Maybe if you guys go and make your own OS you can build your own software into it. Microsoft is doing nothing more than smart business. Microsoft is anti-Google so why would they make their software Google friendly? It’s annoying, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that Google has no right to demand that Microsoft make accomodations for them. That’s like crashing somebody’s party unwanted and expecting them to serve you drinks.

Nonetheless, the courts have ruled in Google’s favor due to the antitrust laws and agreements that Microsoft has apparently agreed to.

Source: Yahoo

I just read an amazing article over at this site. They took an old Mac and pitted it against a new PC in a number of tests. Guess who won? It shouldn’t be a surprise to know that the OLD Mac won. Mac’s have always been more efficient with their power and resource usage. The article speaks for itself so there’s no point in me summarizing it. Just check it out!

Speaking of Macs though, I’ve always wanted one. They make computing look like it should be. Sure PC’s can look really nice too but Macs have always been more stable than any PC I’ve ever used, in my experience. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a Mac fan by any means, but, I definitely do not have anything against them. I do a lot of graphic and media design so Mac’s have always been in the back of my mind. I’m running a nice new Intel Core 2 Duo processor right now (as of last week) so right now I’m a big fan of PC’s. There’s just something about being able to have about 100 different programs open at once that just does it for me. Sure a Mac might be able to do that too, but, a Mac is going to cost roughly 3 times as much for the equivalent setup. In my book PC’s are still more practical. Mac’s might be good for creating a MySpace page but at least my PC can run Battlefield 2142 in full resolution.

This is over a year old but I was searching for “Greasy PC” in Google just to see what came up. Obviously this blog came up but even more interesting was another result. A real, working, totally submerged in grease PC. The boys over at Tom’s Hardware Guide definitely had some fun with this one.

This would actually be an awesome computer to make. Upgrading would be a nasty and annoying process, not to mention greasy, but, it would definitely be a PC to start conversations around. The hard part would be getting the back of the PCI cards to work, while the inside of the computer was completely filled with vegetable oil. Aside from your power supply the PC would be completely silent. I wonder what the long term effects would be on the hardware though. My guess would be that after a while it might not work as well as it did originally. Even so I still want to try this. Maybe I’ll bust out my 700MhZ computer from 1999 and see if it knows how to breath under water.. er oil.

Check out their experiment HERE.

Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (arch rivals of course) recently shared a stage. Oddly enough they both seem to be saying several good things about eachother. The two companies definitely have both grown as a result of their constant competition. Of course competition leads to innovation and innovation leads to more competition. It’s an endless cycle. Apple of course owes a lot to Microsoft for helping it stay afloat 10 years ago. Microsoft invested $100 million dollars in Apple. The commentators on this video have some good comments.

Anyway check out the video. It’s a cool piece of nerd history. If anybody finds the full video of the session please let me know. I’d love to see it.

Video: Rivals Jobs, Gates share stage 

I was just checking out Google Maps today and they now have a feature where on some streets you can actually view street level images just like you were driving. BuzzFeed had a funny list of odd things caught on camera as the Google van drove by. Google drove a van with a 360 degree camera on top to capture millions of images in California.

Check out their list of funny finds here.

To go straight to Google Maps and take the Google Van for a test drive click here. You can rotate the camera to any angle too so have fun following the roads and see if you can find anything interesting!

I just read a very interesting article over on Yahoo about air powered cars. Apparently ex-Formula One engineer Guy Nègre has developed a working and efficient “Air Car“. The car will be put into production in India by Tata Motors, the largest automaker in India.

If you click the link above you can check out images of the car, how it works, and several news items related to the car’s development. The server hosting this site must be getting a lot of hits lately because it was really slow when I was trying to sift through it just now.

Apparently there will be 6,000 of these roaming the streets in India by 2008, according to projections. The car is not likely to pass crash tests in the US however. We have some pretty big cars and just from looking at the Air-Car I would guess that it wouldn’t fair well in a crash with an SUV. The Air-Car is cool, but is going to be a lot slower than a normal car. It looks like the car will max out with a top speed of around 70MPH. Not slow by any means, but, I bet it doesn’t get up to 70MPH nearly as fast as gas powered vehicles. Either way the Air-Car only costs around $2 to “re-pressurize”… Compared to the $50 or so that a normal car costs to refill right now, the speed sacrifice could easily be well worth it.

All in all this is some exciting news for anyone who is concerned about A, gas prices, B, the environment, or C, all of the above. With gas prices expected to hit $4 and $5 a gallon over the summer it’s nice to see that some companies are taking the steps to build more fuel efficient vehicles. Hybrid cars are definitely going to become more popular in the coming years, but, hopefully even better technology is on the way to becoming mainstream.

Check out http://digg.com/

Digg has been cracking down on people digging and posting the recently leaked HD-DVD encryption key. As you can see if you go to the homepage right now, there are 10+ highly dugg posts with that key on them. It seems the users have taken over.

Many people are already predicting the quick and rough demise of Digg.com now that the admins are unable to keep up with the users who are posting these things.

My prediction is that Digg will finally be sold to a bigger company now. Perhaps then whoever buys it will have the necessary manpower to keep up with the mutiny of late…

And for those of you who missed the fun, click HERE for a screenshot I took just before making this blog post.

Ok, I added the “4evR” part but today a guy rushed the stage of a Bill Gates speech in China. He held a sign that read (In English) “Free Software Open Source”. Of course punks and nerds everywhere thought this was awesome. These same people are the people who hate Microsoft and think that they are a monopoly. Well this is just my opinion, but I personally do not have any problems with how Microsoft does business. Sure some of their software is overpriced, but who’s to say what the price should be?

As far as I’m concerned, if you can sell it for a high price more power to you. Sure Microsoft buys out smaller open source projects only to encrypt the code and sell it later for a profit. So? That’s called business. Open source has its’ place but if somebody has the money to buy it and sell it then why should that be a reason to hate them? It’s our own fault if Microsoft has become so rich and powerful. 99% of the world uses Windows operating systems.

At this point I think Microsoft is unstoppable. They make buggy software sometimes but in the long run the problems are fixed and realistically you end up with a very stable and secure product. You can point fingers and hate all you want but if you started Microsoft you would do the same things. It’s called business. And if you think Microsoft products are inferior then I welcome you to make something better. Good luck getting your share of the market though. I think the only company with a decent chance of gaining on Microsoft is Apple. If it weren’t for the fact that most games don’t work on Mac computers I’d probably already have one.

Source: engadget