SunLabs Intellectual Dessert
Whit Diffie, Sun's Chief Security Officer, organizes a weekly "intellectual dessert", essentially a tech talk immediately following lunch in which sweets of some kind are provided. The speakers are almost entirely external (frequently from Stanford or Berkeley - for obvious proximity reasons). Recent talks have included things like "High Tech Labor Issues From A Labor Perspective" (in honor of international labor day), "Wireless Sensing Systems in Environmental Applications", and more technical talks such as "Self Imposed Temporal Redundancy".
What makes the series interesting to me is that the talks frequently give a different, outside perspective of technology which I miss as a longtime employee. How does innovation happen in battleship design (it's in the archive - seriously)? How are (or could) the technologies we build be used in the real world (e.g. SPOTs as environmental sensors)? What are the issues facing the industry?
Unfortunately, the series is internal only, but if you're a Sun employee, you can find the details of the upcoming sessions and recordings of previous sessions here.
