Bill Gates – Blatant Liar

Here’s page two of some excerpts of an interview that Steven Levy of NEWSWEEK did with Bill Gates of Microsoft. Clearly Bill is a bit annoyed by the I’m a Mac commercials. I find it particularly interesting that Bill responds to criticism about upgrading a PC being equivalent to surgery with:

And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.

And then goes on to blatantly lie about vulnerabilities in Mac OS X in response to a question about why the features of Vista seem suspiciously similar to those in Mac OS X Tiger, which has been out nearly two years now:

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.

Perhaps he was referring to the Month of Apple Bugs which as far as I can tell was much more of a publicity stunt than a serious list of vulnerabilities against the OS. It appears from a quick perusal of their site that many of the bugs aren’t even in the OS, but in applications, some of them not even Apple’s. As far as I’ve heard there hasn’t even been one exploit where your machine can be taken over, totally or otherwise. But there certainly are not such exploits released daily. I expect the MoAB people took quite a long time to compile their list in order to know they would have a month’s worth of bugs.

Unfortunately, and I’m sure Bill knows this, all it takes to start a myth is a well publicized lie. I don’t know if Steven Levy pressed him on this because MSNBC only saw fit to publish excerpts of the interview. What a shock.

UPDATE: Michael has a similar view of this interview in his blog entry Is Bill Gates on Crack?

Wii Score

We have a Wii now! I cheated and bought one on eBay. Impatient I know, but I didn’t end up paying much over retail and we’ve got it now instead of maybe having one in a couple weeks. Unfortunately all the Wii remotes are sold out so we only have a single controller and nunchuk at the moment. The first night we did little more than create Miis and check out the other channels, including the web browser. Since then I’ve logged a few hours in Wii Sports and Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Read on for my first impressions.

Orange Hipster Shuffle

This must be a sign. On the same day I read about the Hipster Shuffle the folks at Apple released iPod shuffles in new colors (pink, blue, green, and orange in addition to the original silver)! So not only can your Hipster PDA gain multimedia capabilities but it is also now available in snazzy colors. As orange is my favorite color I am very tempted

Wii-quest

I came late to the Nintendo party not having used the NES or SNES really at all and never having owned one. I was really all over the place with my console purchases: Sega Genesis, Atari Jaguar (yes really), Sony Playstation, Sega Dreamcast, Nintendo 64 and lastly the Nintendo GameCube (the Atari 2600 I grew up with was my parent’s purchase and I’m not counting any handhelds). But since the Nintendo 64 I’ve been a Nintendo fan. Neither the Playstation II nor the Xbox had any appeal for me. When the Wii was announced I checked it out and thought it seemed neat but I was deeply enthralled with World of Warcraft and saw no reason for any other game to be in my life

Recently some friends of ours began their quest for a Wii and my wife learned a bit about the system through them and seemed more interested than I’d ever known her to be in video games. She was anxious for them to find one so we could try it out. I was excited too, but I knew I’d like it, I wasn’t convinced she would. We’ve had the chance to play Wii Sports for about 3 hours now and to my surprise Sara has contracted Wii fever. She began to read about some of the games available and got more excited. So we’re on our own Wii-quest now and are planning on getting Wii Play, Trauma Center: Second Opinion, and Rayman Raving Rabbids to start with. Wish us luck!

Leopard Tech Talk Review

I’m a bit late posting about the Boston area Leopard Tech Talk that I attended on January 22nd. Both Michael and Daniel were much more prompt in their coverage.

Overall I thought the event was worthwhile if, like me, you weren’t able to attend WWDC. I suspect that if you did attend WWDC this was better as a meet and greet than an educational experience. I will echo what others have said with regard to the exciting APIs coming in Leopard. Much of what was shown really makes you contemplate a Leopard specific version of your applications. My suggestion to people is branch your development to work on Leopard features and put your Tiger code base into maintenance. That doesn’t necessarily mean do it now, but definitely look to take advantage of what Leopard offers as soon as possible.

I think that for the most part Apple did a wonderful job on the Tech Talks, especially considering it was free to attend. Still I think there is room for improvement and I’ll be sure to send these suggestions to Apple.

• Make sure the hotel hosting the event isn’t connected to the internet via a 56k modem.
• Consider tables in addition to chairs.
• Please, please, please consider providing power to us. You ask us to bring laptops knowing well that no laptop (Apple or otherwise) will run for 9 hours yet provide us no way to power them.
• Ditch the box lunches in favor of a buffet. If something runs out at a buffet it is replaced, not true with the box lunches. I wasn’t the only vegetarian there that didn’t score a box. Alternatively poll us for our preference when we sign up so you at least have a semi-accurate count to base your boxing on.

But as I said overall it was great and if you didn’t make it to WWDC and are near one the cities where the tour is going (and it is worldwide now) definitely try to secure a slot.