Mac fanboys

As a noted expert on computers and operating systems, I'm often asked what I think about the latest news, controversy, rumor, what-have-you. A recent example is the uproar amongst the yammering Mac OS X "experts" (as if such a person could even exist!) about what Bill Gates had to say the other day. Here's one distorted view:

In his interview with Bill Gates in Newsweek, Steven Levy pointed out that many of the new features in Windows Vista are similar to features already in Mac OS X. Gates’s response:

I mean, it’s fascinating, maybe we shouldn't have showed so publicly the stuff we were doing, because we knew how long the new security base was going to take us to get done. Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine. So, yes, it took us longer, and they had what we were doing, user interface-wise.

This is fascinating. In Gates’s view, Microsoft came up with these features, Apple copied them, and Apple got them into their shipping product first because Microsoft was spending so much time improving Vista’s security. Uh-huh.

Where do I start?

First, this bozo's web site is called "Daring Fireball." Who calls their own site that? If I'd known about this, I'd have called this site something like "Professor Neat-o McKnowItAll, Ph. D." or something cool like that.

Secondly, who are you going to believe, the world's richest man, or some random guy with a blog? I did a little digging, and guess what this Daring Fireball guy does for a living? He's a panhandler!

When you're trying to decide who's right, just ask yourself -- which of these guys is a bazillionaire, and which is a beggar?