Over the past week, we've gotten a lot of mail from viewers who are wondering why we never saw fit to mention Bill Gates's recent admission, as reported in The Register, that he's "really annoyed by the incredible pain [Microsoft has] put everyone through in computing." Well, frankly, the reason is pretty simple: what more could we possibly say about that? When the joke's already been made, we're basically out of a job. We need something we can work with, people.

Look, in order to wring a decent amount of drama out of a story, we need stuff like the fact that even as Chairman Bill shuts down his software development sweatshops for a whole month in hopes of fixing all those bugs and security holes (you know, so he can stop feeling so gosh-darned "annoyed"), his company has been forced to admit the existence of yet another vulnerability in one of its products. Even better would be something along the lines of that new vulnerability being in a Mac product, thus compromising a platform that's traditionally been largely immune to the oft-gaping holes in Microsoft products. Something like that would be AtAT gold, baby.

See, now, here's a perfect example: faithful viewer T.S. McBride wrote in to inform us of a CNET article about a new Microsoft security warning, which details a bug in Office v.X for the Mac. It seems that Microsoft didn't have time to build its much-loved Product Activation anti-piracy scheme into that particular chunk of software, so instead Office v.X checks for other instances of the product running on the local network; if it finds a copy running with the same serial number, it shuts down. Unfortunately, it turns out that a "flaw" in the checker "doesn't correctly handle a particular type of malformed announcement"; the upshot is that some meanie with nothing better to do could build a malformed packet, chuck it at your machine while you're happily typing your letter to mom, and blammo-- Office takes a header, so you'd better hope you were saving your work.

Actually, you know what? We take it back-- we can't make anything out of this, either. Man, Microsoft really has to stop lobbing us the easy ones... it's throwing us off our game. In the meantime, Office v.X users might want to consider downloading and applying this patch, just in case. Because as we all know, there's nothing worse than having a malformed packet maker in your midst.