Why does everyone insist on comparing Apple to Microsoft?  In my opinion, there is no comparison.  It’s apples and oranges… er, apples and flags.

I am neither an Apple fanboy nor a Microsoft fanboy.  In fact, I think both companies have done wonderful things for us personal users of technology.  But to say that one is better than the other connotes a competition, a head-to-head, mano-a-mano situation that simply does not exist.  Let’s look at what I’m talking about.

First of all, the competition just isn’t there.  Apple creates products for Windows.  Microsoft creates products for Mac.  In fact, Microsoft is one …

For those of you who saw my post on TV On The Go and then followed or participated in the comments, here’s the latest.

For years, I have been pulling recorded TV manually (because of a bug in DVArchive that doesn’t allow it to run reliably forever, at least on my PC) from my ReplayTV to a PC and then running a semi-complex series of scripts to convert the quasi-proprietary MPEG-2 streams to divx so that I can take the shows on the road on my Archos 504.

I decided to try a piece of software called iPodifier.  This is a nifty …

Who wants an AppleTV?  I sure don’t.  It just doesn’t do what I want it to.

All in all, the AppleTV is a good step in the direction of what we really need for true television nirvana.  I have always been of the mindset that personal computers are the perfect platforms to do what we want, how we want, where we want.  I’m speaking of recording TV, viewing movies and DVDs, listening to music, viewing photos, and playing games.  But unfortunately, there is one big thing standing in the way of this: ourselves.

What I mean by that is the idea that …

Have you seen Microsoft Surface (http://www.surface.com)?  It’s really cool, but probably not for the reasons you might think.

The basis of Microsoft’s new Surface technology seems to be multitouch.  But that’s nothing new.  Not at all.  Heck, the Apple iPhone is supposed to have multitouch and that’s due out any day now.  As well, some other peeps (http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/) have been working on this technology for some time too.

So what is it?

Well, Microsoft, in a bold move outside of their usual realm (this is hardware and Microsoft is a software company), has seemingly developed a table-top interactive display.  There’s nothing …