Wow, making fun of Bill Gates! How counter-culture! How brave! This is almost as insightful as the comic strips like "Non-Sequiter" taking gratuitous shots at Bush! Wow - the wisdom they must possess!

Let me share my opinion with you - Steve Jobs is an arrogant fatuous prick, on a scale exceeded only by Al Gore. Bill Gates on the other hand is a one of the greatest philanthopists of all time. But hey, that's not nearly as cool as walking around with a smug smirk on your face like little Stevie-the-wonder.

Yeah, the Mac vs. PC ads are getting old. The "Our stolen version of Xerox PARC ideas are better than your stolen version" meme is idiotic.

Have you gone to YouTube and looked at the parody ads? They rock:

"PCs are the primary game platform."

"You can play games on a Mac!"

"Photoshop isn't a game."

ROFL!

Apple makes what, 50 or is it 75 percent of their profit from iPods and iTunes, not a stunning picture of a healthy, innovative computer manufacturer. Now, I have to admit, I have an iPod and use iTunes (on a PC of course), they are right now the 800 lb gorilla of the online music market, and when I get the need for tunes I've heard, I want it now now now, and iTunes obliges. And the player is a sexy piece, but I wish there were a better option, the Zune is a sexy player, but it needs more HD, and they need more content.

I think what's irritating about most Mac people is the elitist "I'm a complete computer moron but I'm better than you because I use a Mac" attitude. It's like being proud to be technically ignorant.

People call Gates greedy, Jobs is the one who let the opportunity for massive success slip away because he was greedy enough to want to monopolize both the OS and Hardware markets.

Hey Sherlock...get a clue. (just couldn't pass that up.
In case you don't know, Gates and Jobs have a rather rocky past. Having Jobs say that would be hilarious. He'd likely have an attack on stage if Jobs does do that.
Jobs is an ass...Gates is a rather large one himself, who happens to give to charity.
Big deal
I "Triple Dog Dare" Jobs...I want to see Bill go Puce and act like he thinks it is funny, without blowing a vein. Like when ME or 98 (I forget which) crashed, BSOD, and locked while he was demonstrating it on stage at the release.

Yeah, Jobs is a smug asshole, but at least he has something to be smug about. Mac OS X and Apple's hardware are simply superior and their growing sales are reflective of that.

Gates, OTOH, is a rich asshole, now trying to buy his way into heaven. He made his money by stiff-arming everyone into buying his mediocre products and he's not going to stop until the entire internet has a crappy Microsoft logo appended to it.

peter, I wouldn't say Apple hardware is better than Wintel; at least not on an apples-to-apples compare (pun intended).

Most Apple platforms use fairly high-end components, so comparing a $2,000 Mac to a $500 HP PC can get pretty silly. On the other hand, Apple seems to offer a pretty good bang for the buck on the laptop side, where pretty much all the tech is higher-end. Is the base laptop still at $999? That ain't bad, at all

Granted, sherlock, Jobs is a jerk. On the other hand he was actually selling machines to businesses while Bill was mucking around with BASIC. And, yes, Bill is a jerk too.

Then we have jejune Severian, who informs us the debate is soooo 20th century! ;-) In point of fact OS X is far more secure and stable than anything after NT 4.5. MS really screwed up when the opened the kernel up to stuff like ActiveX. Sure, they got the gaming market, but they also got the trojan, virus, and hacker markets as well. I'm not sure that was a profitable trade-off...

Hell, my first computer ran CP/M. My first reaction to PC-DOS 1.0 was an amused sneer. By 5.0 (the only decent .0 release by MicroSoft) MS-DOS was pretty good. I stayed with that and DesQview until all the new device drivers (mice, sound cards, CD-ROMs) ate up all the base memory, and even then I held out until Win95. First consumer Windows with interrupt-driven, pre-emptive multi-tasking. Before Apple I might add. Heh.

These things go back and forth. Right now I consider an Intel Mac the best buy. If you're on a budget, get a Mini; it's good enough for most folks.

Vista is a bad joke, and if I hear one more person oohhh about Aero I'm gonna kick 'em down the stairs! It's fracking eye-candy, people. The only truly innovative graphic element MS ever introduced was ClearType for XP.

No, really. Unless you're already planning to buy a new system, why get Vista? It demands a new system if you follow the sane hardware requirements, instead of the official "minimum" hardware requirements. MS still claims XP will run under 64Mb of RAM, although 128Mb is "recommended."

Have you ever tried to run XP under 128Mb? Don't. Same thing here, MS publishes the minimum and the "recommended" requirements, but it doesn't talk about the real requirements, AKA "the stuff you need if you want to get anything useful done." For example, true RAM requirements for XP are 512Mb minimum. For Vista it's a GIGABYTE. Yep. You need a GIGABYTE of memory to run Vista acceptably, and most of it's wasted on crap like Aero and other bloated junk.

Please note that OS X will still run decently on a G4 (or Intel Core) with 256Mb of RAM... True, 512Mb does help. But it's not vital.

Ok. Enough. I think Will's original idea is very, very funny, and I would be willing to pay cash to see it happen. Hmmm, maybe we can talk Jobs into some sort of fund-raiser? :)

Meanwhile the Linux community (all five of them) will smugly point out that OS X & Vista are both Linux based with the big guys' GUIs (and a bunch of other crap, in the case of Vista) bolted on...

Oh, and as for the stunt with the "Me Mac, you PC" thing, with Jobs & Gates would be amusing, especially if Bill were somehow quick on his feet with the retorts. "So, the Mac is an angry prima-donna, while the PC owns 95% market share and could afford to personally buy the entire US Navy wholesale?"

Jobs vs. Gates?

Sideshow Bob vs. Sideshow Mel prison slapfight...

Mac Hardware & OS superior to PC? Heh.

I have to fix the damn things, and that is a load of crap. In case you haven't noticed, Mac hardware becomes more like PC hardware every day. About the only difference left is macs are still harder to work on. And as for the OS, you need to do a little research and find out what is under the hood.

I could turn down a double-dog dare, a chili-dog dare, even a Chicago-dog dare. Now is you offered me a Maxwell Street Polish Sausage with grilled onions dare, I'd be stuck.

God, what a bunch of loser jerks in the comments above. Like talking like you actually know Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Almost sounds like you guys are compensating for something missing in your own lives outside your self-centered, tunnel-visioned lives.

The point is, clueless gentlemen, is that Jobs and Gates are major figures in the history of computing, whose fates have intertwined in a way that art could never duplicate. They have accomplished more in their little pinky fingers than any of you could even deign to accomplish in your wildest imaginations. They have HISTORY between them which is why I find it so amusing that all of you here seem to display so much self-satisfaction smug attitudes into painting stereotypes of people you don't even know.

So how about get a clue and at least read an account from someone who was there?

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/30/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-historic-discussion-live-from-d-2007/

"They're wrapping up... shall we recap? Steve, calculating, articulate, very guarded, playing his hand very close to the chest. Bill, very friendly, very open, surprisingly accessible. These two guys are one in a million, and it's totally clear they've never respected anyone quite like they respect each other."

God, what a bunch of loser jerks in the comments above. Like talking like you actually know Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Almost sounds like you guys are compensating for something missing in your self-centered, tunnel-visioned lives.

The point is, clueless gentlemen, is that Jobs and Gates are major figures in the history of computing, whose fates have intertwined in a way that art could never duplicate. They have accomplished more in their little pinky fingers than any of you could even deign to accomplish in your wildest imaginations. They have HISTORY between them which is why I find it so amusing that all of you here seem to display so much self-satisfaction smug attitudes into painting stereotypes of people you don't even know.

So how about get a clue and at least read an account from someone who was there?

http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/30/steve-jobs-and-bill-gates-historic-discussion-live-from-d-2007/

"They're wrapping up... shall we recap? Steve, calculating, articulate, very guarded, playing his hand very close to the chest. Bill, very friendly, very open, surprisingly accessible. These two guys are one in a million, and it's totally clear they've never respected anyone quite like they respect each other."

The big news wasn't the Bill and Steve pony show, it was Jobs saying that third-party apps would be able to run on the Phone later this year. That's gonna bring in more people, especially those like me who want a terminal app on it.

Oh my, oh my. Looks like the "big dogs" have come out...

GyorgLyquor (AKA no-balls/no-links) makes a fool of himself advising people to "do a little research." Gee, Gyorg, I thought a degree and 20 years of mucking around with microcomputers did count as "a little research." Or did you miss that I mentioned my first PC ran CP/M? One of my favorite professors (a Vax guru) used to sigh that "Microsoft really screwed up a nice operating system," and he was talking about Windows 2000. OS X, on the other hand -from those of us who do "research"- is freeBSD-based, and is one of the most stable, secure operating systems around. Just do some market research comparing *nix and Apache vs. Windows and IIS. Then follow-up on mission-critical servers.

Right after that we have vitaboy trying to lecture people on their own inadequacies. Twice. Classic newbie mistake. Why not dupe the post three of four times, and make yourself look really foolish? And get your lips off of Gates, Jobs, and company's buttocks, ok? {/snark}

On a more serious note, I really have to disagree with Cybrludite. No WAY could Bill even think of buying the US Navy. Great Britain's, maybe, but not ours. He'd be lucky to manage to pay for a single CVN... ;)

Still, it would be run to see Gates come up with a spunky retort. I think that was the whole point of Will's original post. Computing has gotten boring. We need to have more fun.

Let's get a death-match in a cage going! "Two go in; only one comes out..."

Or we could have Dirty Dozens, hacker-style: your mama's so dumb, she still uses PAPER TAPE STORAGE... Ha ha ha... Well, your sister is so fat, she uses a server case for a vibrator!!

Ok. So maybe that last idea wasn't so great. :)

Patrick: quit presenting thoughtful ideas. You'll ruin everything...