If you saw the TV movie “Pirates of Silicon Valley,” you probably have a negative view of how Bill Gates and Steve jobs get along. Certainly if you look at the ongoing rivalry between Apple and Microsoft, you’d get the distinct impression that these aging veterans of the technology wars are dire enemies.

However, if you happened to witness the on-stage bantering between Gates and Jobs at Wednesday night’s event sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, you might come away with a totally different conclusion, that these worthy corporate leaders actually like and respect each other.

So is there some underlying truth between these two extremes? Is there any way to even know the truth?

I don’t want to disappoint those of you expected some secret information, but you can get some really obvious surface impressions that might give you a good idea of the things that the corporate spin-makers will never reveal.

Take the comment from Gates that, when Jobs left Apple in 1985, he felt he no longer had anyone at that company he could communicate with. Now notice what happened when Jobs returned. First, Microsoft makes a $150 million investment in Apple and pledges to continue to develop the Mac version of Office. This is regarded as a watershed event that signaled Apple’s resurgence, and the presence of Gates on a satellite feed at a Macworld Expo keynote made it clear this was something you had to take seriously.

But there is more. Sure, the two companies rag on each other in public, since they are, after all, in competition in a number of areas. That, however, shouldn’t necessarily reflect on the private relationships among their executives.

Then there was a subsequent Macworld keynote where Jobs casually mentioned having a dinner with Gates and talking of both as “graybeards.” Indeed, the two men have an awful lot of shared experiences to reflect on, having worked together at the beginning of the personal compute revolution, but it also made it quite clear that they continue to speak to each other.

Now of course, the compliments each heaped upon the other during that joint event might have been carefully rehearsed, an act with which to entertain the audience. You can easily imagine Gates and Jobs spending several weeks working on the material, with their corporate communications operatives in tow to provide input and feedback.

Indeed, it came across as a great performance, but you got the strong feeling there was genuine feelings of affection involved as well. Sure, Gates bristled during the discussion of the Mac versus PC spots, as you might expect he would. But any other reaction would strain credibility.

I also recall that statement when the deal between Apple and Microsoft was announced in 1997, when Jobs said the operating system wars were over, and Microsoft won.

Now other than the obvious competitive products, are there areas where Apple and Microsoft are more cooperative now than before Jobs returned to Apple? Well, in addition to the ongoing development of Office, you’ll notice that every single release of Mac OS X contains enhanced tools to make Macs more at home with a Windows-based office.

The move to Intel processors was no doubt made for the very reasons Jobs presented, and that was to provide power efficiency and great performance. The products that resulted clearly demonstrate that he was telling the truth. But it also eased the task of running Windows on a Mac. With Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop, for example, you can turn your Mac into a fully-enabled Windows Vista PC with surprisingly good performance. Boot Camp makes your Mac virtually indistinguishable from the PC, and the forthcoming version 3.0 of Parallels will add accelerated graphics, the better to reduce its performance gap.

That brings us to the iPod, and you probably realize that more Windows users buy them than Mac users. iTunes and QuickTime seem to run pretty well on a Windows PC, although there are occasional hiccups, and there’s even a version of Software Update that will update your PC to the newest versions when they’re available.

As it stands, Apple makes plenty of money from the Windows market, and Microsoft earns its share from Mac users, both from sales of Office for the Mac and from those of you buying full-priced Windows installers to run on their MacIntels.

So even if Apple does grab a little market share from Microsoft, the latter will still earn plenty of money. Both Gates and Jobs have reason to be happy, and I truly believe that they are, in private, long-time friends. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be.

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As the dust settles on the newest version of iTunes, and iTunes Plus music, DRM-free and of higher quality, you wonder about the implications of this new way of distributing online music.

Let me start by asking you a question: What’s better than selling you something? How about selling you the same thing, or a slight variation thereof, a second time, or even a third? It just gets better and better, if you can get away with it at any rate. And right now I’m certain the music industry, in the throes of rapidly declining CD sales, must be feeling a little desperate and hoping for such miracles to turn things around.

Now of course this doesn’t mean that the likes of Madonna and Paul McCartney will necessarily suffer. We all know they are comfortable, cozy and very, very rich. The music executives aren’t starving either, although there are countless numbers of lesser acts that have yet to see the big money that’s supposedly part and parcel of show business success.

That takes us to the fundamental question of acquiring music. How do you buy your music? Does it come on CD, or have you succumbed to the digital world? Or is a combination of both? For the time being, I’m going to sidestep matters of illegal downloads. Instead, let’s talk about doing everything on the up and up, and buying from legitimate music vendors.

Say you have spent a few hundred or a few thousand dollars buying songs from iTunes. Perhaps you’re satisfied with your purchase, but maybe you’re one of the small number of people who find that the audio quality leaves a little bit to be desired. At one time, Apple boasted that its standard 128K AAC files were close to CD quality. More recently, they have adjusted the claim to “high quality” without that direct comparison.

With the new DRM-free, 256K versions, the claim has been tempered slightly from being as good as the master recordings to “virtually indistinguishable from the original recordings.”

Well, that sounds realistic enough for me. The higher resolution tracks will probably sound just great to the vast majority of you, but I rather suspect that, unless you have the right equipment at hand, even the 128K versions will sound pretty good on most musical content.

In the coming days, you will even read some casual, anecdotal listening tests that reach various conclusions, mostly, I suspect, that the enhanced content sounds noticeably better than the original 99 cents versions. However, they will be rated as somewhat inferior to the CD.

Unfortunately, few will use the proper listening methodology — double-blind with matched levels — to determine if a difference is even audible. That needs to be done before assessing quality differences.

Right now, as you know, iTunes Plus songs come strictly from EMI, including some of Paul McCartney’s solo albums. But The Beatles are still missing in action. Over the next few weeks, there will be lots of independent music as well, and we all hope the other major music labels will get in on the act.

If anything, they ought to appreciate how the situation has turned out. In exchange for no DRM and higher quality, they get another 30 cents a track. If you want to upgrade your existing tracks, it’s 30 cents per song. A full album upgrade will cost you 30% of the original purchase price. No, it’s not $3.00 as originally claimed in some tech news sources.

That’s not so bad, except that Apple wants you to pay for the upgrade all at once. There’s no option to just purchase some singles and albums and not others. One hopes this all or nothing posture will change over time, when Apple realizes that folks with huge iTunes collections may not be prepared to pay a bundle up-front to experience iTunes Plus.

Regardless, the music companies ought to love it. Maybe they’re not getting you to buy the entire track all over again, but those 30% upgrade fees are just fine. Before long, of course, remastered versions of the entire library from The Beatles will be available, and then EMI will have the pleasure of selling them all to you one more time, assuming the new versions are significantly better than the original CDs released over 20 years ago.

On the long haul, though, the music industry’s greed may, I hope, do them in. You see, they still don’t understand that we don’t buy albums because they have the Warners or EMI label, for example, on them. We buy music because of the artist, and if those artists sold their work directly to us, they might actually sell just as many copies, only they’ll make a whole lot more money. The music companies give even the most lucrative acts a mere pittance of the revenue they receive from selling product.

Will the new era of DRM-free digital music hasten that needed overhaul of the music industry, and rid us of such financial terrorists as the RIAA? I surely hope so, but it may be a long time coming.

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Among all the crazy occupations anyone could dream of, I never thought I’d be running a tech commentary site on the Internet, not to mention those radio shows, of course. I actually got started in this crazy business in the 1990s, when I was writing books about — believe it or not — how to use America Online.

Writing books like that must have seemed outrageous, especially considering the fact that a lot of folks regarded AOL is the kindergarten of the Internet. Why would anyone need an instruction manual for that?

Up till then, my primary writing experience was confined to the broadcast and print mediums. I had written lots of books that few heard about, and hundreds of magazine articles for various tech magazines. During one of the book projects, I had to explain how to create a personal Web site on AOL, and thus The Mac Night Owl was born.

After a while, I got the silly idea to actually put content on the site rather than just placeholders, and here I am.

Over the years, lots of other people got the very same idea, to set up sites to post personal commentaries about one thing or another. You might chatter on about the weather, the horrible state of the planet, technology, UFO abductions — the skies the limit and then some.

Blogging was once the province of amateurs, although some experienced print writers like me quickly embraced the new medium. Eventually, it all blossomed into a sort of alternative journalism, and, based on a certain legal action involving Apple in California, it’s clear the courts do regard us as real journalists.

If you’ve ever had aspirations about writing, no doubt you’ve wondered just how to get started. Do you need a degree in Web programming, or can you get by with some simple tools that normal people can master?

In my case, I do use a professional tool for some of my modest online efforts — Adobe Dreamweaver, but that’s an industrial-strength Web authoring application that probably much too complicated, although there are simple templates to help you get started. However, I use a different set of tools for this site.

At the other end of the spectrum you might consider Apple’s iWeb, which is part of the iLife application suite.

But there are other ways to set up a blog, such as WordPress, an extremely popular open-source bogging application that can be set up in minutes, but is powerful enough to manage content from such sources as The New York Times.

I first discovered WordPress a little over a year ago, at the suggestion of my friend Brent Lee. During the time he served as our Webmaster, he easily migrated a fair amount of our recent content over to the new application.

Starting from scratch is pretty simple. You can host your blog over at the WordPress site, at one of the hosting companies they list or thousands of others to be found all across the planet. If you’re looking for a place to host your blog, you’ll also want to read this article from our latest newsletter.

In addition, there is also a rich selection of themes to help you customize your blog’s look and feel.

After the basic setup process, content management is super-simple. You don’t need to install any software on your Mac, and you can access WordPress from any computer with Internet access, regardless of operating system. Just go online to the application’s Dashboard, and bring up its posting editor. In most browsers, you’ll see a simple formatting toolbar. Unfortunately, the toolbar’s visual editing element won’t work in Safari and OmniWeb until the next major release of both, which is expected when Leopard arrives.

There is also a huge selection of add-ons or plugins that allow you to add all sorts of custom features, such as our stock ticker, archives page, online polls and lots lots more.

Here are some of my favorites:

• SRG Clean Archives: This terrific peace of work puts an index of your commentaries on a single page, sorted by month. By the way, the author of this plugin, Sean, known affectionately as the “Geek with Laptop,” is a long-time Web hosting consultant who is going to be a guest on this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE.
• WP AJAX Edit Comments: Here’s the reason that you can click and edit your own comments on The Mac Night Owl for up to 60 minutes after they’re posted.
• WP-Print: A clever plugin that lets you print a fully-formatted copy of our commentaries, complete with the comments, on any printer that I know about.
• Star Rating for Reviews: Exactly what the name implies, although I’m working on changing the stars back to owls.

There’s even a plugin to block comment spam. All in all, the WordPress universe is a wonderful place to enter if you crave a simple set of tools to develop your own professional blog. Oh, and WordPress also includes a spell checker, to help the spelling challenged.

Of course, after you have the tools at hand, you still need something to say. In fact, that’s the most important thing of all, and I do hope you’ll value content above all if you decide to join the blogging world.

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