The two most popular and pervasive home computer operating systems' manufacturers are "led" by two men who, in my opinion (when the issue is Internet-to-home-user security), could lately best be described as Playground Monitors whose playgrounds are at rival schools. There's the one whose school is public in the American sense and the other which is day-prep in the general sense. Guess whose is which and you'll probably guess wrong. In the first instance, Apple's Steve Jobs might, so says the conventional wisdom, make a better PM at the day-prep, but take a closer look at his company's product and you'll see that while he may price things ridiculously high, his heart is in the right place: emphasés at Apple are on ease-of-use and an elegant look in equal parts and with impressive outcomes. Compare how often you've seen Mac OS 9 or X 'ripped off' in movies, and when was the last time you saw a Compaq laptop on a TV comedy? Apple, except where the extravagant pricing schemes are concerned, has worked like the Hound of Ulster to make things more industry-standard. OS X is based on BSD and other flavours of (l)U(nix) -- the mistake is Mach and even that's debatable -- and you'll likely find the one and only quirk left with regard to the hardware is in the "crippled" USB bus. So Mr Jobs can be said, instead of having a contempt for the customer (which if he does has been brewing a long while and it's curious that some can only see it now), has a fetish for FireWire that will probably last as long as DOS did on the Dark Side.

But back to the Playground Monitor analogy.

Jobs supervises the kids from the municipally-supported public school. It's Bill Gates, with his boasts that Vista outstrips Jobs' pet product for security, who's actually been given the rein over a most unruly crowd of rich kids and latchkey scholarship brats. Consider those who send viruses by all the routes chosen to do so on the Windows platform. First of all, it's understood that these fools want to get back at Microsoft by making every last user with whose systems their germ-impregnated executables come in contact, suffer. And did you know that the greater number of keycode generators ("keygens" in the common parlance) available on nets such as Gnutella (LimeWire), carry viruses which, among other things, destroy registry entries and commandeer Web browsers to download more of their kind?! Keygens are illegal in the first place, and it would be enough to leave them alone to work -- and have the users get spanked by means more litigious than this -- except these poltroons have got it into their heads to virus them.

These actions are all analogous to smashing windows and breaking the swings and roundabouts not only in their playground but in the back gardens across the street as well. And they do it. Which is not to say that, in the space of time, Job's "kids" are all that much better behaved. But at least the neighbours will still be inclined to invite them for milk and cookies after school.

Given that comparison, I'm very glad I'm a Mac "kid".

S.