I've read somewhere that, not unlike in politics, the idea in advertising is to lie without getting caught. "Take the most unfortunate truth, turn it upside down ('lie'), and drill that lie home." I was thinking about this when I was reading that Apple has added "over 200 features" into the OS that is being sent to people now (though it's not due for its public unveiling until Friday). If you read closely, there's a lot of repeating and double-counting in this list. For example, not only is the "Dashboard" listed as a feature, each individual preinstalled Dashboard element (widget) is counted as individual features, separate from Dashboard itself. Another example: not only is the Spotlight search feature is counted as a feature, but each individual action Spotlight does gets listed as its own feature, and each application that supports Spotlight gets thrown one of the over 200 bullet points. In some cases, Apple comes close to begging for a cookie for doing stuff they're supposed to do. For example, they've listed the "Spotlight Menu" as a feature. Yes America, they've provided access to the search capability through the user interface. "What do you want, a cookie?! This ain't Linux!"

But still, stuff like that won't show up in Windows for two more Christmases.