Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I'm a PC person, mainly because it's what I'm used to. I don't get particularly worked up when Windows crashes -- which isn't nearly as often, in my case, as it is apparently for others -- and I've never had a significant hardware problem. I've never had to crack open the CPU box and mess around with cards and whatnot. I'm on my second computer in five years, and that's because the first one just got too old. It didn't have enough memory, and the Web has finally reached a point where a 28K modem is not only slow but simply insufficient. (I'm on a 56K modem right now, which is sufficient for my needs. I don't do a lot of downloading of movies and video files, nor do I engage in music trading.)

However, it's hard not to feel occasionally inferior after listening to Mac users -- especially given the current Mac advertising campaign, which is basically this: "Dump your PC, ya dope!" The prevailing meme is that Macs are clearly the better machine, and it's only through a mass delusion on the part of the public and a conspiratorial manipulation of the marketplace by Microsoft that PCs are dominant. (Come to think of it, that's not unlike the recent Democratic Party campaign strategy.) So, as a PC user who is currently happy as a clam with his machine, I'm generally glad to read Steven Den Beste's regular shots across the Macintosh bow. Much of it goes straight over my head, but I found the recent post of his -- on Mac virus security -- especially fascinating. He argues, in short, that virus-writers devote their energies to probing Windows for security holes, because Windows and PC systems are so prevalent. The resulting lack of viruses attacking Macs is mistaken for superior Mac virus security. What we have here, Steven argues, is an example of the old fallacy: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."