I had forgotten how annoying Vista's User Account Controls (UACs) are, until I was reminded by the latest installment in Apple's series of uber-cool Get A Mac television ads.The new ad, entitled "Security" according to Apple's Web site, but more popularly known as "Vista Versus Mac," features hipper-than-thou Justin Long as "Hello, I'm a Mac," and Bill Gates surrogate John Hodgman as the hapless "PC."

Here's the ad:

The commercial pokes fun at Vista's persistent pop-up dialog boxes, which appear pretty much every time you want to install an app, attach a thumb drive, or do anything new. In theory, this is good. In practice, as I've noted previously, Vista's UACs are the software equivalent of the boy who cried wolf.

That's what Apple's ad highlights, deflating the UACs by mimicking how they actually work. In the ad, a bodyguard behind Hodgman repeatedly asks: "Cancel or Allow."

"He's part of Vista, my new operating system," explains Hodgman "He asks me to authorize pretty much anything I do. I could turn him off, but then he wouldn't give me an warnings at all…that would defeat the purpose."

Well, QED!

True, the Apple ads are unfair in that they present a false dichotomy between supposedly dumb PC users and with-it folks who've opted for Apple. (For more in this vein, with some well-done skewering of the Justin Long character, see Slate's piece from last year, "Apple's mean-spirited ad campaign.")

However, the ads do raise anew a serious issue, one which Microsoft had promised to address, but doesn't seem to really have taken to heart. There are actually two issues here, which needs to be considered separately.

The bottom line is, from a self-interest standpoint, it seems Microsoft would want to get the UAC issue out of the way so it can sell the true security improvements in Vista. And make the Justin Long character the doofus for a change.