Lordy. It's hard to spend but a week surfing the Internet without seeing a group of people getting caught up in a situation that they've volunteered themselves into. And it would be remiss of me to go a single sentence further without mentioning the latest elephant in the room--Facebook.

I can't log into Facebook without seeing a growing number of my friends joining those silly little, "Facebook is opening up my entire life and I wish it was like it was back in 2005" groups/fan pages/whatever we're calling them now. But Dave's Comrades aren't the only ones joining in on the fun--tech pundits Jason Calacanis and Peter Rojas, amongst others, are nuking their accounts in protest as well!  It's a Facebook meltdown!

Unlike the open-source world, where the concept of "something for nothing" is pretty widely understood and accepted--even by those that just download away and never contribute a single iota of code or absent thought to an application's development--the general Internet populace seems pretty peeved at an otherwise free service's attempts to branch out its offerings. This, in turn, leads to a stronger advertising platform and/or additional service expansions, but mainly the former. Facebook ain't charity, after all--the company has human overhead and server costs, to name a few, and it's not as if every status update magically conjures up a shiny nickel for Mark Zuckerberg.

If you use any operating system that doesn't start with a "Microsoft" and end with a "Windows" (and some kind of short letter or number designation), then you have utterly failed in your attempt to keep heathen software elements from besmirching the good name and reputation of your precious PC. And woe unto any who utter the forbidden name of a common Silicon Valley manufacturer of said "different" operating systems around these parts--you can trust me on this one. I learned the hard way.

But let it not be said that I wouldn't rise up to the challenge, see the error of my ways, and accept my restatement into PC-only territory with a bit of grace and/or slice of humble pie. I have even made a great sacrifice to prove my noble intentions:

I have come back to you now, as the great Gandalf would say, and I am ready to repeal anything positive I had ever erroneously suggested about non-Windows operating systems. Let this column be the Smoke Monster that forever keeps unwanted products off of my island PC.

As far as I'm concerned, Steve Jobs is the Man in Black; Apple and OSX are lost causes. Based on the platform alone, I can think of five excellent reasons why you should never, ever, ever consider letting any bit of the Apple experience ruin the software sanctity of your Windows system.

Put on the boxing gloves!

It could be said that the ongoing battle between Adobe and Apple--the classic "friends turned enemies" grudge match--is like a giant digital version of an MMA fight. Or perhaps it's more appropriate to dub it a "boss battle." 

Steve Jobs, Apple Overlord, has been tossing up jabs against the apparent disaster that is Adobe Flash for some time now, scattered across various quotes and interviews with the tech press. Various Adobe executive have stepped into the squared circle in an attempt to prove the sincerity (and usefulness) of Flash's existence, and it's been a relatively amusing, "you suck / no I don't / you suck / no I don't" back-and-forth.

That's nice and all, but whatever happened to... you know. Tested facts?