You know the feeling. You find some tiny crawling and airborne critters in your home, so you call the exterminator to get rid of them pronto. However, a few weeks later, and they’re back again, sometimes in greater numbers than before.

In our corner of the universe, the Mac clone insect population was first seeded when Apple switched to Intel processors. Soon they would be delivering Macs build with essentially the same components as a Windows PC. Well, not quite, since Apple bypassed the BIOS of the typical PC in favor of Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI for short), a more modern method of configuring low-level functions during a computer’s boot-up process.

As you might expect, power users quickly devised methods to induce Mac OS X to install on generic PC hardware anyway, and a small but widespread community has grown up to support the practice. Indeed, Macworld published an article about just such a project, in which they built a “Hackentosh” that ran quite well, thank you, on Mac OS X before it was reformatted as a Windows PC and returned to conventional duty.

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When Bill Gates, bless his crooked soul, said years ago that we’d never need more than 640K of RAM, he kind of had the right idea in mind, but he was perhaps a few decades early in expressing this thought.

When Steve Jobs said, with the introduction of the original Power Macintosh G4, that we now had a supercomputer on our desktops, he was closer to the mark, but not quite there.

Today, the speediest personal computers have quad-core processors. The heftier Mac Pros sport two of them, and by next year at this time, six- and eight-core CPUs will be the norm. It wasn’t so long ago that you’d fill a room with hot-running hardware to come even close.

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It seems all too common. Rather than compete with Apple by building a better product, Microsoft continues to use focus groups and PowerPoint presentations to devise the features that its rival products do not possess. Worse, this is done without regard to whether those features are even desired or useful.

Take this fall’s contribution to the world of iPod poseurs, known as the Zune HD. Now we all know that HD is supposed to stand for high definition television nowadays, although it once stood for hard drive. But, in addition to supporting HD video, Microsoft has decided we also need support for HD radio. Sure, it’ll have Multi-Touch capability, but that’s normal these days.

HD radio? Never heard of it? Do you even care?

Well, if you must know, HD radio is actually meant as an enhancement and perhaps an eventual replacement for standard or terrestrial broadcasting. This technology, which has been around for several years, adds a digital component to the analog AM and FM signals. As a result, AM suddenly sounds near as good as FM, and FM delivers audio quality that’s said to rival that of a CD.

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We all know that Palm made the handheld concept successful, even though Apple’s Newton was there first. Sure, the Palm Pilot was cheaper and not as feature-laden, but it carved a decent niche for itself for several years. That is, until the smartphone took over and smacked it in the rear with a resounding kick.

Now a beleaguered company, Palm has tried to regain the lost luster with its latest contender, the Palm Pre, which is, as with recent Blackberry products from RIM, considered by some to be an iPhone killer.

True past contenders haven’t done so well in times of product-to-product competition, although RIM, as a whole, with a wider range of carrier partners, is still ahead of Apple in total sales. But they’ve had extra years to get there.

So the question is whether the Palm Pre is going to be capable of hitting the iPhone head on. I suppose one reason why the company is being taken seriously nowadays is because one of its key executives, Jon Rubinstein, was also a key player at Apple during the years that Steve Jobs rescued the company with fancy new Macs and the iPod.

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