Super Glue is one thing every dad needs to have in his junk drawer.

Every toy that breaks is instantly the favorite. Despite being literally ignored up until the moment before it broke, it is now something that life can not go on without.

Some people think that you need a freakish radiation experiment gone bad, a seemingly endless supply of money, and a cool exotic ride (unless you can fly of course) to be a super hero. All you really need is some fresh batteries, a screwdriver, and a tube of superglue.

The moral of this story: Don’t trust public networks. This isn’t just computer networks, we are talking about voice too. Most of us follow the “security by obscurity” principle. Picking the straws of our communications out of the haystacks outweights the value of the information. But when you play in the big game like the board of directors of HP, you have to think big security.

The confrontation at Hewlett-Packard started innocently enough. Last January, the online technology site CNET published an article about the long-term strategy at HP, the company ranked No. 11 in the Fortune 500. While the piece was upbeat, it quoted an anonymous HP source and contained information that only could have come from a director.

HP’s chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, told another director she wanted to know who it was; she was fed up with ongoing leaks to the media going back to CEO Carly Fiorina’s tumultuous tenure that ended in early 2005.

According to an internal HP e-mail, Dunn then took the extraordinary step of authorizing a team of independent electronic-security experts to spy on the January 2006 communications of the other 10 directors-not the records of calls (or e-mails) from HP itself, but the records of phone calls made from personal accounts. That meant calls from the directors’ home and their private cell phones.

It was classic data-mining: Dunn’s consultants weren’t actually listening in on the calls-all they had to do was look for a pattern of contacts. Dunn acted without informing the rest of the board. Her actions were now about to unleash a round of boardroom fury at one of America’s largest companies and a Silicon Valley icon.

Article at MSNBC

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In contrast, IBM embraces and encourages its employees to blog and podcast. Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang points out the benefits to corporations that take that approach.

Corporate Benefits:

* Though[t] leadership: Folks will publish information that they are domain experts at.

* Knowledge Sharing: Employees are sharing tips, tricks, and other helpful information using a variety of mediums.

* SEO Domination: Search Engine Marketing power for topics they discuss.

* Brand Lift: Even non-technology podcasts and blogs help to show the ‘human’ side of a mass company

* It’s fun, encourages collaboration, and inexpensive.

Did you see Minority Report? This touch screen is the first step to realizing the interfaces that they used in the movie. Also worth noting in light of my previous post about both the tech in the movie and the tech demonstrated in this video - where is the OS? Nowhere to be found. Did they write an OS for this demo? No. They wrote a framework on top of an existing OS that supports the applications that are demonstrated.

Let’s play a game. I will list a quote and you guess who said it.

Quote: RSS has the potential to be the “UNIX pipe of the internet”

If you don’t know what a unix pipe is, its a techie term. Part of the real power behind unix and one of the things that gave it the lift that propelled it to be the underpinnings of most modern operating systems is the concept of redirection. The output (result) of any unix command can also be used as the input of almost any other unix command. The pipe enhances this and allows you to chain together multiple commands processing the same information.

So from the title of the article you have a clue on who made that statement, but if it surprises you that such a quote comes from a Microsoft guy then you really need to start paying attention to what’s been going on at Microsoft lately. Not just any Microsoft guy, but Ray Ozzie, heir to the Microsoft Kingdom.

Its been a while since I’ve made a seemingly bold tech predicition, but I have one for you. What Microsoft is currently calling Windows Vista is the last operating system that they will release.

“Is this man crazy?!”

Let me lend some definition to my statement. The real catch is the word operating system. With flash storage becoming more advanced and more capable I believe you will see a trend again to do as much solid state as possible. What this means to computers is that the line that you think of now between BIOS and OS is going to blur greatly. Companies like Microsoft will release frameworks that support workflow and applications. The specific hardware that you are running on will be increasingly less relevant to the framework and application layer. You will be able to run multiple frameworks simultaneously to take advantage of different applications, and the applications will interoprate cross-framework via evolved standards like the current RSS.

Sounds far off? Look at how long its taken Microsoft to come out with Vista. You are looking at 2013 before they would come out with another one. Frameworks aren’t a new concept. Microsoft, Apple, Sun - they all have been putting out frameworks already. Interoperability isn’t 50% there yet but people know what they have to do and good standards are out there and starting to evolve.