p2pnet.net News:- If you think Apple ceo Steve Jobs is an anal orifice, he’d probably agree with you. And he’s proud of it.

Apparently.

We say ‘apparently’ because we’re getting this second hand from Robert X. Cringely via Australia. And actually, now we think about it, it’s third hand, really, because Cringely made the statement when he was being interviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Sam Varghese for Sam’s tech column Off the Beaten Track here.

If you’re the kind of person who snorts beer through his or her nose if you happen to have a brew in hand while you’re reading something funny, give Varghese’s a pass. And don’t read any further here either.

But if you laugh normally, you’ll be OK and below are the relevant excerpts.

To set the scene, Varghese has just asked Cringely to describe the little Cringely – say from five to 18 (All I know is that he wore J.C. Penney briefs) and Cringely replies he’s just a typical nerd.

RXC: I grew up on a farm, did a little amateur radio, built a 40 megavolt X-ray machine and got busted by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, stuff like that. I lived through it. Later I studied physics at a small college in Ohio only to find that the world didn’t want bad physicists. So I was reborn as a war correspondent in the 1970s because the money was good, and eventually landed at Stanford University teaching journalism, where I stumbled into the beginnings of the PC revolution.

Varghese: You’ve called Bill Gates a bright but poorly socialised kid under the age of nine. You’ve called Steve Jobs a sociopath. Did either of these gentlemen give you something less than a kindly look the next time you met them?

RXC: Jobs is proud of being an a***hole. Gates doesn’t mind his actions being described but he doesn’t like people to characterise him (say why he does what he does). As such, Microsoft once used one of its classic threats (defy us and we will destroy you) against a book publisher of mine. I told the publisher they were wankers and cowards and wouldn’t follow through on their threat. I was right.

[NOTE: Cringely was one of Apple's first employees way back in 1977, says Varghese's piece. But he has no illusions about his own programming prowess; in Accidental Empires, he describes himself as being able to program poorly in four languages. Oh - and Robert X. Cringely isn't Cringely's real name. And he isn't really him.]

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