As 2011 draws to a close we wanted to take a look at computer and information security in the twelve months that have passed.

What will probably stick in most people’s minds is the Sony PlayStation Network and Qriocity hack, which resulted in an outage lasting 23 days. In other developments, hacktivist groups like Anonymous and LulzSec took to social media to further their causes, and mobile malware got more attention than ever before.

All in all, there’s no doubt that 2011 was a very busy year for IT security professionals.

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Although there’s been much talk about the demise of Flash lately – including right here on this blog – no one can deny that it’s brought us a wide assortment of strange and wonderful web animations through the years.

So today we’re kicking off a series of articles called Friday Fun, where we’ll try to bring you some of the more fun, weird, quirky and wacky corners of the web, and we start with Flash animations.

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In April 2010 the late Steve Jobs wrote an open letter addressing Apple’s insistence on not supporting Adobe Flash on its mobile platforms. He concluded: “New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”

Shortly thereafter, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said: “The technology problems that Mr. Jobs mentions in his essay are ‘really a smokescreen.’”

Hindsight is of course 20-20 but even though Jobs’ open letter was written just under two years ago, wasn’t the writing already then on the wall for Flash and Adobe?

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Apple earned a massive profit of $419,528 per employee in the past 12 months. That beats Google, Microsoft, Intel and a bunch of other big tech companies by quite some margin.

One reason (of several) that profit per employee is such an interesting metric is because it gives you a number that doesn’t depend so much on the size of the company. In other words, it becomes easy to compare companies of different sizes.

We have calculated the yearly profit per employee for a selection of big tech companies that are publicly traded on NYSE and NASDAQ: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Yahoo, Oracle, IBM, Amazon, HP, Dell.

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We all know Google has awesome office spaces, they’re well known for it and we’ve all seen the colorful pics, but the truth is that quite a few tech and web companies have taken the extra step and made their office environments pretty amazing places to work.

Here are a few examples…

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Remember the recent discussion around Facebook’s “Face” trademark?

That whole discussion made us remember some rather funny or just plain strange examples of trademarks we’d seen from big players like IBM, Microsoft, Apple and Google in the past. Companies do love their trademarks…

Here are a few of the stranger ones.

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Code names have been around for a long time. Remember the Manhattan project in the 1940s? That turned out to be the atomic bomb. Thankfully, not all code names hide such sinister projects.

Code names can be about secrecy, but when it comes to software development, it’s usually not so much about secrecy as it is about the convenience of having a name for a specific version of a software. It can be very practical to have a unique identifier for a project to get everyone on the same page and avoid confusion.

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Have you ever wondered how much money Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon and other tech giants have in the bank? What kind of assets do they have, how much spending money do they have? The vague answer is, “a lot.” But if you want to find out exactly how much, read on.

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What do Android, Visio, Flash, Hotmail, Google Analytics and Powerpoint all have in common? Can you guess?

The answer is: None of them were created by the companies who now own them. They were acquisitions.

These products have continued to develop at their new homes, but the seed of innovation that sparked an actual, new product came from the outside. The key word here is innovation.

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After Apple’s iPad announcemet, Adobe Flash was inadvertently thrust into the spotlight. Apple’s tablet device was pitched as the future of web browsing, but just like the iPhone, support for Flash was conspicuously absent. This led to a discussion that ultimately split many commenters into two camps; those that believe the iPad’s lack of Flash makes it an inferior web browsing device (despite what Steve Jobs wants us to believe), and others who feel Flash is so detrimental to the web that the iPad would likely be better off without it.

Even before the iPad’s announcement, it’s generally been in vogue to criticize Flash for its masterful ability to hog your resources, or its overall instability. While I can’t deny that Flash is far from a perfect solution, it’s worth remembering Flash’s positive contributions to the internet, along with the bad.

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