OK, well said. In the video he's bashing the new "fad term," but Oracle's not above embracing it. Fair enough.

Anybody remember this?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOEFXaWHppE

Guess he's changed his tune...

I keep avoiding reading Isaacson's book because of all the negative criticism I've read about it... I'm familiar with Jobs' Macintosh (from Andy Hertzfeld's book) Pixar (from another book, "The Pixar Touch") and NeXT days from the various sources online and various videos and homages online to NeXT, so I think I'll skip Isaacson's book. Just out of curiousity and because I was too young to ever have owned a NeXT, I was able to get an OPENSTEP 4.2 VM running in VirtualBox the other day... what an amazing OS for its day

If I wanted to read more specifically about the Macintosh era of Apple I suppose I'd just pick up "The Little Kingdom."

I like how you slipped that nice little '1984' reference in there (the two minutes hate)... classy

The Trinity project is a fork that maintains KDE3... Google "kde3 trinity" and click the first link

More intellect than he knows what to do with, and he chooses to leave MS and start a patent troll company... ugh.

"Myhrvold was born in Seattle, Washington. He attended Mirman School,[4] and began college at age 14.[5] He studied mathematics, geophysics, and space physics at UCLA (BSc, Masters). He was awarded a Hertz Foundation Fellowship for graduate study and he chose to study at Princeton University, where he earned a master's degree in mathematical economics and completed a PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics by age 23."

The DoD employs something called "HBSS" - Host Based Security System - which is in reality McAfee's "e Policy Orchestrator" (ePO) plus a bunch of modules that plug in to ePO. One of the ePO modules is a data loss prevention agent that was pushed out to the client endpoint that prevented anything other than USB HID devices from functioning

https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?page=content&id=KB60861 looks like an accurate description of what was done with HBSS policies.

Just for the sake of completeness, see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2949213&cid=40510411 for a response to this entire thread...

I'm going to quietly bail out of this argument now... I'm already starting to feel like this XKCD: http://xkcd.com/386/

I was replying more to the grandparent post than your post, but both of your posts are misleading. USB keyboards and mice are perfectly acceptable in DoD...

The whole point of my post was simply to point out that there seems to be a lot of misinformation out there about what's acceptable and what's not.

Comments like the parent and the grandparent irk me... Information Assurance is not the personification of "Mordak, the preventer of information services." Sometimes IA policies really do make sense.

I have worked in the world of DoD information assurance (really, I have, see http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericgearhart), and I completely disagree with what you're saying. Your example is built on the premise that the guys on this ship will be connecting to DoD information systems... that's simply not what the original poster is asking.

Think about what you're saying... you wanted to set up a "private wifi" in order to allow instructors to to monitor simulations. Don't you think that's sensitive data? If someone brute forced or rainbow tabled that WiFi access point's WPA2 key (you're using WPA2 pre-shared keys, right?) and got onto that private wifi network, wouldn't the data they could siphon off be valuable?

Setting up a completely separate WiFI network *that does not have any DoD sensitive data flowing over it* and is only connected to via personal information systems (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones, whatever) is perfectly acceptable.

Even your original premise, that "wifi is the devil according to IA" is untrue - there are wireless STIGs (Security Technical Implemenation Guides - basically they define how information systems are to be implemented on DoD networks) that cover a variety of wireless situations... nevermind USB devices, there's even one that covers the use of wireless mice and keyboards!

http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/net_perimeter/wireless/smartphone.html
http://iase.disa.mil/stigs/net_perimeter/wireless/wireless_net.html

I know you're joking, but winning a seat in Congress is like winning free tickets to an insider trading buffet. Also all the wonderful laws we have in the US thay prohibit insoder trading don't applt to those in Congress...

Google the book " Throw Them All Out" for more depressing details

You should come on over to Hacker News if you're looking for what Slashdot used to be circa 1998... http://news.ycombinator.com/

I agree with you... the comments were the big draw, and mostly it's "herd mentality" on /. any more.

OK, point taken, and I'm taking a look at Niven's shortstory collections on Amazon now, and 'Crashlander' as well.

Thanks for the help!