Like most of Jonathan Ive's work, the iPad is beautiful. Like most of Apple's work, it also makes me uneasy. I was planning to write about this feeling of unease, so imagine my delight when I discovered that Timothy B. Lee and others have already done the work for me. In "Why Geeks Hate the … Continue reading Education and the iPad’s Architecture of Control
Tag: Technology in Government
Where IT and government collide — mostly at the doorstep of system integrators.
What the Open Government Directive Means for Open Source
On the heels of the Open Government Memo of January 21st, 2009, the Obama Administration has issued the Open Government Directive. The Directive tells agencies what they must do to meet the expectations set by the Memo. The directive names many deadlines for agency compliance, most of them around reducing FOIA backlogs and increasing the … Continue reading What the Open Government Directive Means for Open Source
What you need to know about the 2009 DOD OSS Memo
In mid-October, the U.S. Department of Defense CIO released a memo on the use of open source software in the DOD. The Clarifying Guidance Regarding Open Source Software (OSS) was hailed as tremendous leap forward for open source software in the US Government. And indeed it is. At its heart, the memo is fairly simple. … Continue reading What you need to know about the 2009 DOD OSS Memo
Read My Ramblings About CONNECT
Here's a really nice writeup on the CONNECT Code-a-thon at iHealthBeat. They quote me a lot, which is what makes it really nice.
My OSCON 2009 Talk on Open Source in Government
The good people at O'Reilly have posted my Open Source in Government talk at OSCON 2009 on blip.tv. It's also on YouTube. I'll admit to cringing a bit when I started watching, but I'm pretty happy with how it all went. Here are the slides. In the panel afterward, someone asked my why open source … Continue reading My OSCON 2009 Talk on Open Source in Government
Open Source on the Battlefield
In Iraq, Sergeant 1st Class Martin Stadtler had nothing. He was stationed near Mosul, at a base that covers 24 square kilometers. Surrounding the base was a wall, and at intervals along that wall stood watchtowers. Those towers were improvised; they were large concrete water pipes, stood on their ends. Inside each tower is a pair of soldiers. They're watching for insurgents. To communicate with the home base, they had standard-issue tactical radios. Unfortunately, these radios couldn't reach home base -- the base was too big. Soldiers had to play a game of Telephone to reach the base: one tower radios the next until they are finally in range of the home base. Obviously, this would not do.
The NSA’s Security Challenge
Using open source software, the National Security Agency was able to gather a community of professional and amateur security experts together to make unprecedented security protections available to public. The National Security Agency has a mission. It is not just the nation's code keeper and code breaker, but it must ensure the security of the … Continue reading The NSA’s Security Challenge
The Navy’s Standardization Problem
Using open source software, the US Navy was able to standardize the shipboard systems on its new destroyers, reducing the complexity of the ship's systems and their reliance on proprietary real-time software. Wall Street now uses this same technology to execute orders predictably, without relying on vendor-specific hardware and software. Every ship in the Navy … Continue reading The Navy’s Standardization Problem
a technology job is no excuse 