Switching To Mac is a Waste of Time: My Response Part 2

So, Rob May at businesspunit.com won't allow my comments to his blog entry titled "Switching to Mac is a Waste of Time" to appear on that page. And, he's, oh so cleverly, reposted the exact same article under the changed the title of "Switcing to Mac is Great". So, he hasn't actually changed the titled, he's just duplicated his blog entry and now has it posted on two separate pages under two different titles.

Despite not allowing me to have my rebuttal to his dimwitted observations appear on his blog, he took the time to email me the following:

Russell, Thanks for the kind words. The Mac community is so friendly, and Macusers are all so incredibly smart, I can't wait to join you.

I didn't lie about my Windows machine being virus free. I'm just anextremely advanced technical user and I have all the properprecautions.

Rob

Since he took the time to email me and reassure me that he's an honest fella. I felt it only appropriate to email him back:

Hey, you wrote a really, really dumb blog post. That's not my fault. If you're gonna write such stupid stuff and publish it then you should be prepared for some less than friendly rebuttals. I like how your only defense is to point out how rude my comments were- duh, I think I was being over the top with the rudeness on purpose- for, uh, comic effect. Oh, and to say you weren't lying. Gee. Do you promise. Cross your heart and hope to die?

A couple of things:

A) There's no such thing as 'the mac community'

B) Just because I showed you how stupid your writing was doesn't mean that I'm saying all Mac users are 'so incredibly smart'

C) Let's assume you're not lying. Does it then follow that you didn't have a virus? No. You could very well have had a virus and not known it. All you can truthfully claim is that as far as you know, trusting your antivirus software, you didn't have a virus. Because viruses for Windows exist and because not all viruses are detectable by all antivirus software, you can't conclusively prove or know that you didn't have one.

Now, none of that really matters that much. What does matter, and maybe what I should have addressed in my comments is the logical fallacy that you're promoting. You're implying that because you think you didn't have a virus that you didn't gain any additional security in buying and using a Mac. Basically, it's like you walked through a mine field, managed to not step on a mine (or at least, if you did you somehow weren't aware of it) and now you think that walking through a mine field is just as safe as walking through a field with no mines planted in it. The problem here, is that you were just lucky. You could have very well stepped on a mine (i.e. gotten a Windows virus). Plenty of people do, all the time. Even 'extremely advanced technical users'. However, in the last 5 years, no user of OS X has gotten a virus in the wild. None. Not a single one. Because they were walking through the field with no mines planted in it. So, you did actually gain something when you were using OS X. You gained the peace of mind that comes with not having to worry about stepping on a mine because it was no longer possible at that point.

Now, there's one other problem with your claim. And, that is that even though you may not have, to your knowledge, gotten a 'virus' per se. There's no way that in the last 5 years you didn't get some form of malware (to use a more generalized) term. It's just not possible that you didn't get some form of virus, worm, trojan, tracking cookie, etc. They were/are too ubiquitous now and during the period of time that you are referring to and the detection and removal tools to rid a Windows machine of these pests were a reaction to them not a pre-emptive measure put in place to prevent them from getting there in the first place. I've run Spybot and AdAware on machines where each program found several hundred instances of such malware, and then continued to find new instances as their definitions files were updated.

So, while it is possible that your narrowly defined claim might be true, the larger insinuation that you're making is patently false. For, what your narrowly defined claim aims to do is give people the impression that with the right regimen of security software they too can keep a Windows machine free of malware and therefore there is nothing to be gained security wise by switching to a Mac. You have to know that you're being deceptive on this point. If you don't, then my rude, yet deserved and amusing claims that you are an idiot are true.