Can you say why you all are not participating in the “Intel Inside” program of putting the stickers on your new or previous Macs?

--Bob Keefe, as recorded by Macworld

Okay, let’s admit it, that wasn’t exactly the best question to ask at the time. I mean, Steve Jobs is in your midst; I’m sure there are better questions to ask--or at least better ways to frame it. Then again, somehow I don’t think I would have been able to think of a better question. Actually, I take it back: I would ask Jobs why Apple has yet to enter the fast-growing ultraportable laptop market segment, especially considering the excellent industrial design that Apple has shown in the past (and yet they can’t get a laptop under five pounds?). It’s not an amazingly tough question; it may not land me a job on 60 Minutes, but it sure is one question that I would sure like an answer to, and I am sure I am not alone. But I digress.

So here’s the question I would like to pose to you, our readers:

If you had the opportunity to ask Steve Jobs one question--any question--what would it be? Would you ask about something in his personal life? About Apple’s product mix? Apple’s inner workings?

You have one question. No follow-up questions allowed. If you have one, post it in the comments. Let’s see what the Mac community can come up with.

I’ve been having a rather interesting discussion with someone going by the name of Penguin Pete. He wrote a rather interesting blog post last month talking about how Ubuntu is making ground because it is similar to Windows and that makes it appealing to people who are leaving Windows. This does make sense, I certainly think that Ubuntu is one of the most promising Linux distros. Pete then makes a rather true comment about how users leaving Windows are going somewhere and that that somewhere is going to be the next desktop revolution.

Now many Linux users believe that Linux is that somewhere. While I agree that Linux is making quite a lot of ground in the desktop market, and rightly so, I don’t feel that Linux is where the next desktop revolution is currently taking place. As I have previously showed, both Linux and the Mac are gaining market share in the desktop space, at the expense of Windows. In the past 2 years Linux and OS X have almost doubled in market share. The only thing that is putting the Mac ahead is that it had over 10 times the market share of Linux on the desktop 2 years ago, so doubling that is a far bigger gain that doubling Linux’s market share.

Obviously, this makes me believe that the Mac is the next desktop revolution. But why is Linux not making more ground than it is? Well the first obvious reason is one that many Linux users know…
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Résumés. To anyone with a job, just the word can conjure up all kinds of emotions: flashbacks from your first crappy McJorb, anticipation before an interview at MultiMillions Incorporated, and pride in all one’s accomplishments. As everyone knows, a good résumé can be the key to landing a successful career, but designing such a knock-em-dead document can be quite a dilemma. It is a battle I have struggled with on numerous occasions.

Unfortunately, my earlier résumé designs are either in absentis or are too embarrassingly bad to show publicly. Our adventure therefore begins approximately 6 months ago in September of last year, after I lost my job with the California Relay Service and started looking again. I started by downloading one of the (few) résumé templates Microsoft offers for Word (for Mac) and modifying it to my liking.

Version the first

This is what I came up with for my first version, at least my first in some time. It took me a couple days to polish, and it was pretty close to the original template. It looked pretty good, presenting relevant information in a straightforward and readable manner in beautiful Cochin 13pt. Unfortunately, it was a bit cluttered, with multiple levels of indentation and some extraneous graphics that I thought added a little flare at the time. I would soon learn the folly of my ways.

Version secondary

In November, I read an article called Give your résumé a face lift and decided to amend my sinful ways. I started…
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Editors note:  Pilky originally published this on his personal blog on April 8th.  We have republished it here with his permission.  We have edited it to a minimal degree for formatting and minor changes like capitalization and punctuation.

Paul Graham has written a good article on the “death” of Microsoft. He argues that Microsoft, while going nowhere soon, is a shell of its former self and just doesn’t scare people any more, partly because of the new kid on the block who also has lots of money: Google (for football fans out there, this is akin to Manchester United and Chelsea).

However, this isn’t the point of this post. There is one small thing that he mentions, almost in passing, in his article and it is something I strongly disagree with:

“Everyone can see the desktop is over. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to Photoshop.”

He links to a site called Snipshot, which is a very cool site, allowing you to edit pictures online. However, it is about as close to an online Photoshop as Blogger is to an online Word. There seems to be a slightly delusional section of web developers who seem to believe that in a few years time all of our applications and data will be online, while our computers run little more than a browser. Of course this is complete bull.

The most obvious reason for this not happening is network speed and latency.…
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Donald Rumsfeld took a lot a flak in his term as Secretary of Defense. Perhaps one of his best quotes was also his most amusing:

“As we know, there are known knowns are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say,we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Rumsfeld’s quote aptly describes the world of computer security.

Known knowns

As it stands today, Windows has been, by far, the biggest malware target, partially due to its large market share and partially due to legitimate security problems, especially before Windows XP Service Pack 2. Apple’s Mac OS X has yet to see anything more than a couple sporadic minor malware threats (mostly proof-of-concepts). OS X’s lack of malware is believed to be due to Apple’s relatively small market share and OS X’s inherently better security. Security experts are apparently puzzled as to why Mac OS X hasn’t seen more hacks. Also, it’s debatable whether Mac OS X itself is really any more secure than Windows or if Mac OS X’s good malware record so far is due to its relative obscurity (i.e. nothing has been proven either way), so for the time being, we only really know one thing for certain: Microsoft Windows has been the victim of many more malware threats than Mac OS X.

Known unknowns

About a week and a half ago, Symantec released…
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