HPQ shares jumped more than they have any day since 2002, after CEO Mark Hurd announced a fourth quarter profit of $1.03 per share, three cents above Bloomberg's compiled estimate. H-P nonetheless will extend its holiday vacation for employees from one week to two to cut costs. The best analyst quote is the simplest: "Despite worries about an economic slowdown, the company can still grow earnings." So what's your excuse?

Click to viewBenchmark-backed Glassdoor.com popped out of stealth mode as a site that lets users find out what employees think of their employers. As a part of the ratings, company CEO's get a grade. Some, such as Cisco's John T. Chambers and Apple's Steve Jobs fared very well — coming away with 93 percent and 95 percent approval ratings. Others, including Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, did not. The ten worst-rated CEO's and what employees told Glassdoor they think about them, below.

Hewlett-Packard has software to automate datacenters; EDS has datacenters which need automating. That's part of the logic behind HP's $13.9 billion acquisition of the tech-services business. The deal proves that Marc Andreessen is prescient. After he sold Netscape to AOL, Andreessen launched LoudCloud, a website-hosting business powered by advanced software. In the wake of the bust, Andreessen sold the hosting part of the business to EDS, and relaunched the company as Opsware, the name of its automation software. HP bought Opsware last year. While reuniting LoudCloud's constituent parts isn't the reason why Mark Hurd is doing the deal, he is proving that Andreessen's early vision of combining software and services was on the money. Timing is everything.

BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante has another interview outtake with former Hewlett-Packard board member and Kleiner Perkins cofounder Tom Perkins. In it, Perkins explains how he helped turn around HP. Here's the 100-word version of the harrowing tale of board committees, patent policies and microprocessors oh my!

"Good news is we're a $100 billion company. Bad news is we're a $100 billion company." - HP CEO Mark Hurd at Fortune's iMeme

As we mentioned this morning, Mark Hurd didn't give much of an answer to questions from the chairman of a Congressional panel investigating his company's spying scandal. Here's a more thorough compilation of highlights from Hurd's answers, taken from the Wall Street Journal's copy of the document.

By Theo DP

A reader called "Elite Office Services" asks Valleywag:

Mass e-mailer Theo DP, who's too poor to afford a blog, sent us one of his mass messages updating the Hewlett-Packard investigation scandal:

Q. How do you get tough on privacy breaches?
A. Appoint a watchdog who isn't sure they should be penalized!

• Hewlett-Packard's chief in-house lawyer, Ann Baskins, resigned and won't appear in today's Congressional hearing. Her lawyer says Baskins always thought the investigation of HP board members and outside reporters was legal. [NY Times]

When Hewlett-Packard admitted that the company tried to spy on and misinform journalists at CNET, the New York Times, and other papers, the media was, well, not amused. The upshot is that we all get to see the opposition writing guest editorials in major papers. The lawyer for ex-HP board member Tom Perkins (who resigned when he discovered HP's investigators spied on him) tells the Wall Street Journal:

Because the story that Hewlett-Packard's CEO was too "focused on getting the company fixed" to make sure the chairwoman didn't break it again is ludicrous, and because making comics is fun, here are more situations Mark Hurd can't handle because he's busy with his job.

Friends of Mark Hurd pulled off a beautiful spin job explaining to the New York Times why the Hewlett-Packard CEO didn't stop chairwoman Patricia Dunn and a whole team of investigators from digging up reporters' phone records and planning to plant spies at media outlets.

HP's chairwoman resigned from the board — at least she'll always be a Hall-of-Famer — and CEO Mark Hurd will immediately replace her. Here's what comes next:

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, now under suspicion for cooperating with chairwoman Patricia Dunn's investigations of board members and reporters, is now the chairman of HP, he announced today. Dunn has resigned from the board — a move that was inevitable eventually, but few thought would happen while the scandal was still fresh in the media.

As the media gears up for HP CEO Mark Hurd (right)'s press conference today, armed with the news that Hurd was involved with the company's sketchy espionage, the San Francisco Chronicle quotes an analyst waxing metaphorical.

• When Hewlett-Packard hunted for the board member who leaked info to CNET, they created a fake HP executive, "Jacob," to tip CNET writer Dawn Kawamoto.

Washington Post:

• Daddy, why did you make iPod ugly again? [Pictured, from Gizmodo]