The begining or the end?

I’ve always been a computer guy. Ever since my father brought home a Pony PC that could run Windows 3.1 I’ve never been too far away from the computer world.

I was on the internet before most other people I know. I was using the PC to put together reports and whatnot before most other people I know. In essence, I was an early adopter, a tech kid, so to speak. Fortunately, this tech savvy followed me into just about every other facet of the tech world, and I can still trace it all back to that first PC.

Then I got to SCAD and found the Mac. Sure, it was strange, and a little different, but it seemed to have all this other stuff that was soooooo cool to use. Programs I could never find on the PC, programs I would never find for the PC, programs that opened up my creativity to a whole new dimension. I was never a Mac person so to speak, but always had a deep respect for Macs and their users, even if they were a bit weird.

I’ve owned my first PC for almost 5 years now. We’ve been through a lot together and remarkably it’s held up quite well. Fortunately for me, I don’t do much PC gaming, which is one of the first things to show you when your PC is aging. I mostly do, well, PC stuff, and leave the games for the video game consoles. My PC is my browsers, my e-mail utility, word processing, screenplay writing, messaging utility, and otherwise multipurpose technical utility that I fart around on just about every day for an hour or too. I’ve always wondered though, what if I got a Mac, would those creative juices I once had come back?

The answer to that question is probably no. I don’t realistically see myself doing anything else on the Mac that I wouldn’t do on the PC. Still, that feeling lingers, and I don’t see it ever going away. With OSX now out, and my purchase of an iPod, I do feel like the Mac world has a bit more to offer me now, on a personal level, than it did as little as 5 years ago.

Sure, there are limits as to what programs I can run, and so many of the programs I used at SCAD on the Mac are now available for the PC, but still, the OC itself is just so much nicer to use. It’s friendly, colorful, elegant, and dare I say, pleasant to use. With the shift from PowerPC to Intel based chips the same thought that popped into my head popped into everyone else’s at the same time, could the Mac now run Windows?

In theory, it was totally possible to run Windows on an x86 based Mac, but not possible to run, at least currently, OSX on an x86 based PC. Here’s why. The OSX operating system boots from hardware elements in the MAC itself. It doesn’t use BIOS, it uses something else, something not currently available on PCs. With the upcoming Vista that will change, which is why I mentioned that it’s not possible to run OSX currently on a PC, since Vista is being changed to run on the same updated non Bios technology OSX already runs on. If you want more info look it up on Wikipedia.

Here’s what I’m getting at, Apple has made it so you can run Windows XP on a Mac. This isn’t some half bit hack either, it’s legit software from Apple itself that allows you to do it. Read the cNet article here:

http://news.com.com/Apple+Windows+on+a+Mac+is+here/2100-1012_3-6057856.html?tag=nefd.top

So what does this mean...it means I can now look at getting a Mac a lot more seriously. Sure, they’re more expensive, but they just run better and last longer. With Vista coming out next year, things will get very interesting. It’s one thing to run XP, it’s been around for 5 years now and is basically the same Windows as has been around forever. It’s something completely else to run Vista which will be on a newly revised kernel. It will be interesting to see if this new software allows for Vista to run as well.

-Steve