Following up on IBM and Google’s better-than-expected Q2 results last week, Apple and Yahoo also have declared unexpected quarterly profits that sent shares soaring on Tuesday. Apple’s revenue jumped 15% on sales of both iPhones and laptops, while Yahoo beat the street by 9%. This is an interesting trend. Is it the result of the vaunted economic stimulus package, or merely normal boom-and-bust cyclical business trends in action?

I don’t know, but I like it.

There are several interesting aspects to Apple’s results. First, sales of laptops are up. The company “sold 4 percent more Mac computers than a year ago, with a 13 percent rise in laptop unit sales more than making up for a 10 percent drop in desktops.” This indicates that (a) the Mac is making at least some headway against PC dominance of the market, and (b) the swing away from desktop machines in favor of laptops is continuing.

Second, the Mac is seen as an “elite” or “luxury” machine in comparison with the PC. But sales are up even during an economic decline. Sure, some of this trend was fueled by price drops. But it indicates people are still spending money, and not just on low-priced “it just needs to get me through the downturn” systems. That’s a good sign that the economy might be perking up, as some analysts have expected.

Despite the lower prices, profits were still good. The act of “lowering prices didn’t eat into Apple’s gross margin, which improved from a year ago and beat his expectations.” This was largely due to cheaper components, indicating everyone is cutting costs to the bone in order to keep products flowing. It’s better to ship more items at a lower per-item margin than to hold out and lose business to the next guy.

So the tech industry is showing signs of a rebound. The markets have been steadily up for the last week or so. IBM is now back to $117 a share — close to its mid $120s high of just over a year ago. Is this just a blip on the radar, or is the downturn (okay, the recession) finally ending? The last two quarters of 2009 may tell the story.

Amazingly enough, if you look deeply enough on the Internet you can actually find worthwhile, educational material. I know that’s shocking, what with all the porn and financial scams one could peruse first. However, here’s the link (iTunes required) that will take you to the lectures. They’re a set of 8 public events commemorating Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, and they aren’t bad. Apple iTunes maintains these for free, so you can just download them charge free

This is the type of information sharing for which, startlingly enough, the Web was actually created all those years ago. The first uses of hyperlinking and embedded data were related to scientific study, and were designed to get users from text matter in a document body to footnotes or even a link to another document with related data. Now we’ve evolved (sorry, had to) into a more sophisticated model in which we’re not just linking flat ascii text, but whole multimedia productions.

The cool thing about this case is that access and storage for this purely academic, non-profit lecture series is being provided by an application usually used to download music for which there’s a cost basis. However, the people at Apple are also providing free access to certain, well deserving works. The Darwin lectures certainly apply. Here’s hoping we see more such lectures made publicly available from other institutes or universities.

There’s also PLoS, the Public Library of Science. This is a web site where academic research papers are freely available, rather than encapsulated in journals that cost $10,000 a year to subscribe to (many are read by no more than a dozen researchers). So if you really want to learn about Darwin and his theories — and I will note that most people who claim to understand them are totally wrong — here’s a good place to get started. The lectures are interesting, they’re not dry or boring, and they actually show what it’s all about.

Maybe you’ll learn something. High technology being used to provide free academic access. It can’t get any better than this.

I’ve been an iTunes user practically since the software appeared on the market, and generally like it quite a lot (especially since they’re going DRM-free). I’ve never had a problem with a download or with licensing, and have carried my iPod everywhere from the streets of London to the back woods of New Hampshire.

That said, the software is by no means perfect — as I found out recently. A few weeks ago I was prompted to download version 8.0.2. After grabbing the installer, I exited from iTunes and ran the upgrade…only to be greeted with an interesting error: “A program required for this install to complete could not be run. Contact your support personnel or package vendor.”

I’d seen this once before, and was told to simply remove and re-install the software. I did this once, but find it annoying since this means you have to re-enter settings and link back to your old library. So this time I ran through a bit of sleuthing, and finally found a solution on Apple’s own discussion boards. Apparently the problem is well known, and involves the Apple Updater application itself.

Happily, the first option I tried actually resolved the problem. As the discussion board reply noted, “Go to Add remove programs and find Apple Software update. Try repairing it. Select Change>>repair.” As soon as I completed this step, the package installed cleanly.

The biggest question is: what caused the problem in the first place? Did an Updater component get smashed somehow? Was a file removed by accident? Did some other component change a Windows Registry value that the 8.0.2 update expected to find?

I’ll probably never know, but the repair option is another tool in the diagnostic arsenal. Not all applications include this functionality, but if you’re having problems with an installed program it might be worth checking out. You might save yourself a lot of trouble and time.

For years Macintosh users have laughed at Windows’ popularity from a virus point of view. It seemed like every attack was Windows-specific, while Apple’s MacOS was considered safer due to its significantly smaller user base. In other words, there were too few Mac users to bother with. Apple users have always seen themselves as a breed apart, a counterculture group that’s far more hip than boring old PC users - and immune to virus attacks. It’s an image that Apple has been careful to cultivate.

The amusing thing about this is that, as a software QA engineer in the late 1980s (when malicious viruses were nearly unheard of), I decided on a whim to check a new release of a product I was testing to see if it had been infected. Amazingly enough, it had been, and it caused a huge scandal for my employer. The virus was known as “Vult,” and it was found on a Macintosh.

The new Mac-targeted attack is thought to have been created due to an increased focus on the Apple brand over the last few years, as the resurgent company’s share of desktop and laptop users has risen. It uses a fairly typical vector: “porn-hunters are the intended victim of the latest ploy, in which visitors to certain explicit Web sites are led to believe they’re downloading a free video player when in fact they’re installing malicious code onto their Macs.” It doesn’t target an exploit in the OS, and the action must be approved by the user. The end result is that “the fraudsters can redirect [the user's] future browsing to fraudulent Web sites and possibly to steal his information or passwords.”

This news makes it an especially bad week for Apple, since several researchers gave their new OS release (code named “Leopard”) a bad review this week. The testers found “half baked” features that, while great ideas that show a lot of promise, aren’t sufficiently implemented and, in some cases, documented to be of significant use.

In better news, the reviews show this release of the OS is significantly better in some security related areas than prior versions. And if the new security features, including a “sandbox” methodology that “let the company’s developers restrict applications’ actions, such as what network access they’re allowed or what other programs they can communicate with,” are developed and refined further, they could provide a serious challenge to Microsoft’s much hyped Vista security improvements. However the same researchers called Leopard’s new firewall “a mess,” noting that “[b]y default, Leopard installs with the firewall disabled, a practice that leaves users unprotected. It’s also a step back from Tiger’s firewall, he said, because it’s both less flexible and more confusing.”

Apple has a great system and a very loyal user base, but increased media focus and popularity translate into a more attractive target for virus authors. The security vulnerabilities already identified should be on the company’s hot list for correction and improvement, otherwise Mac users may be in for a bumpy ride.