Users continue to adjust to the complexities of federal buying
The numbers, though small, reveal how complex federal procurement can be even two years after the adoption of commercial practices. Space center officials began to set out their requirements in fiscal 1998. They wanted three-year, on-site warranties and installation under four full-and-open-competition procurements—two for desktop PCs, one for notebooks and one for engineering workstations, said John Bormann, the contracting officer's technical representative at the Information Systems Directorate in Houston.
USIA calls in the FBI after hacker hits Web site a second time
The U.S. Information Agency has asked the FBI to investigate a hack of its Web site. "We have received allegations from USIA for the alleged hacking to its Web site," said Susan Lloyd, FBI special agent and spokeswoman for the agency's Washington field office. She would not say whether the office will look into the matter.
GAO tastes agencies' pain as it upgrades its PC net
The General Accounting Office, which hunts down systems inadequacies governmentwide as Congress' junkyard dog, found out last year how painful a minor systems upgrade can be when it replaced its own aging PC network. "We had our pain period," said Tony Cicco, director of infrastructure operations in GAO's Office of Information Management and Communications, describing the three-month cutover that took place between October and December.
Customs revamp makes business sense | GCN INTERVIEW | S.W. "Woody" HallJr., Customs' information gatekeeper
GCN: The Customs Service's information technology organization is going through an overhaul. How is that going? HALL: We are trying to realign the automation legacy systems along business process lines. The IT organization is the result of years of evolution, and different parts of the organization evolved in different directions. On the applications side, for example, we were organized into a number of fairly autonomous teams and the teams each handled one application. Multiple applications now belong
Treasury begins modernization of its HR systems
The Treasury Department has begun an agencywide modernization of its human resources systems with the rollout of common software at two of its bureaus. The department has installed human resources software from PeopleSoft Inc. of Pleasanton, Calif., at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
Wireless presentation tools not ready for the stage
Ever since the days of the IBM PC Jr., many users have insisted on wireless input devices. The demand has increased with PC presentations because it is much more difficult to run a live presentation from a notebook computer than it is to switch slides or transparencies. Some wireless mice have gyroscopes to broadcast position information. This is cool, but use them in the midst of a presentation, and you might look like you are
State digitizes passport photos
The State Department has updated its Travel Document Issuance System to issue new U.S. domestic passports with digitized photos. At least 15,000 U.S. passports were stolen in 1997, making identity fraud one of the fastest-growing crimes, Rubin said. The anti-counterfeiting features of the new passport data page will deter traffic in stolen passports.
NOAA puts a satellite system out to pasture
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently decommissioned one of its main weather satellite image processing systems after 24 years of service. The now retired Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-Telecommunications Access Program, an analog system, provided near real-time imagery from weather satellites around the country. NOAAPort, a subsystem of the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System, will replace the system known as GOES-TAP.
NIH revs up supercomputer
The National Institutes of Health is cranking up its homegrown LOBOS supercomputer to Gigabit Ethernet rates to connect hundreds of nodes in the massively parallel system. LOBOS, which stands for lots of boxes on shelves, is a Beowulf-class supercomputer built in-house in 1997 to do molecular modeling for the Computational Biophysics Section of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Like other Beowulf-class machines, it consists of off-the-shelf desktop computers strung together to share large computing
Letters to the editor
Regarding the story, "Federal 2000 emergency funds are going, going, halfway gone" [GCN, Jan. 25, Page 1]: Excuse me? Lawmakers are complaining that the Y2K funds are going too quickly? I would be much more concerned that there's still so much left. If the funds aren't obligated yet, knowing the work will take months to do and check out properly, when do the lawmakers expect us to use it? Granted, perhaps 10 percent of the funds
State and USIA integrate their e-mail for overseas offices
The U.S. Information Agency and the State Department in the next few months will roll out a common e-mail system that will serve as a model for all USIA and State overseas offices. "E-mail historically has been unreliable and slow between the two agencies," said Jonathan Spalter, USIA's associate director for information and its chief information officer. "The e-mail system is an important first step that shows federal agencies can work together."
AF flies with the times
If you don't think times have changed, the Air Force's latest PC buying move just might convince you. The service's numbered Desktop procurements have come to an end. Now the Air Force will use blanket purchasing agreements to buy PCs and related gear [GCN, Feb. 22, Page 1]. At one time, the Air Force made big news awarding the laboriously crafted indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity Desktop contracts.
White House wants WebGov to be gateway to all agencies
The Clinton administration is moving ahead with development of a general government Web site. WebGov will not provide content but be a starting point for the public to search all the federal information contained on the Internet, said Rich Kellett, emerging IT policies director in the General Services Administration's Office of Information Technology.
Blocking applications can help protect your identity while surfing
You're not paranoid. On the Internet, they are out to get you—or, at least, find out who you are and what you do. First it was client-side cookie spies. More recently came a public outcry about the new Intel Pentium III processor's automatic broadcast of an identification code. Some cookies under development can even record Web addresses you've visited—something that's supposed to be impossible.
FOSE will star tech editors at GCN Lab Live
You read them every week; isn't it about time you met them? Meet GCN's own technology gurus at Lab Live, a showcase of hot products and cool technology, every day during FOSE 99. March 16 through18 in the lobby of the Washington Convention Center, GCN's technology editors will interview the managers of some of today's top products. Don't miss our sessions on Lotus Notes Release 5 and Microsoft Windows 2000.
OMB's DeSeve will move to private sector
OMB's acting IT boss G. Edward DeSeve has taken a position with KMPG Peat Marwick. G. Edward DeSeve, the top management official in the Clinton administration and stand-in information technology boss, is leaving his post at the end of the month to join the private sector.
HP promises a V2500 server with downtime of five minutes per year
Hewlett-Packard Co. has replaced its HP Visualize Model C240 graphics workstation with the Visualize C360, which does mechanical computer-aided design processing up to 77 percent faster, according to HP officials. The 367-MHz PA-8500 RISC chip in the C360 does better branch prediction and has 1.5M of four-way associative on-chip cache, said Barry Crume, product marketing manager for the HP Workstation Systems Division.
SQL Server 7.0, better than 6.5, stands up well to Oracle
In my tests, SQL Server 7.0 stood head and shoulders above SQL Server 6.5 and acquitted itself well against Oracle running under Microsoft Windows NT. Furthermore, SQL Server has a lower price structure and features that can match or surpass Oracle's. The standard edition of SQL Server 7.0 works with NT Server 4.0 and Service Pack 4. The Enterprise Edition requires NT Enterprise Server 4.0 and Service Pack 4. Both come with a third, desktop version for
DOD still buys switches that are not ready for 2000, IG says
"It sure would be nice if the things that we bought were Y2K-compliant," said Army Col. Janet Hicks, who is also commander of the 516th Signal Brigade at Fort Shafter, Hawaii. "That sounds kind of insane to say that because we're already into fiscal 1999," Hicks said at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's TechNet Asia-Pacific '98 conference. "But we had a switch that was fielded since I arrived 17 months ago that is not
Army opens up PC-3 buys governmentwide
The Army's latest PC contracts—awarded last month to Government Technology Services Inc. and IntelliSys Technology Corp.—are open to users governmentwide. "It's nice not to have to turn away anyone who wants to buy" from the PC-3 contracts, said Linda Cook, a product leader at the Army Small Computer Program office at Fort Monmouth, N.J.
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