Route Fifty

Pioneer brings back gas plasma displaysthis time for $22,000

Gas plasma displays, which seemed to have a bright future in mid-1980s monochrome portable computers, have made a comeback in color. The displays work by heating up a gas until it turns into charged particles, which excite a phosphorescent layer that displays vivid colors. Pioneer New Media Technologies Inc., of Long Beach Calif., is one of the few companies now shipping gas plasma color monitors. Most CRT and LCD vendors are months or years away from releasing

By GCN
March 8, 1999

ENTERPRISE COMPUTING | Beat the Clock

| Beat the Clock Countdown to 2000. Most agencies are now midway into the last phase of the largest and most complex information systems projects they have ever managed. The General Accounting Office has advised agencies that the final validation and implementation phase of year 2000 computing projects cannot be done adequately in less than a year. GAO predicted this will burn up more than half of every agency's year 2000 resources and budget.

By GCN
March 8, 1999

Justice makes a motion to put court papers online

Consider this scenario: It's 4 p.m. and a lawyer with the Justice Department has to make sure a filing gets hand-delivered before the federal district court closes its doors for the day. Or, another lawyer wants to review all the documents concerning a case. He has got to get to the courthouse during open hours and request to see the court docket. And because there's only one copy, he has to hope no one else is

By Merry Mayer, GCN
March 8, 1999

USPS preps for use of software package to reach goal of 700 electronic forms

When the Postal Service begins using JetForm Corp. FormFlow in September, the goal is 700 electronic forms developed with the Ottawa company's software, said Clara Hankins, acting manager of Corporate Information Services in USPS' Forms Management Group. About 200 of the service's 1,700 forms already exist in electronic form through another software product USPS used until early this year. USPS software developers are now converting the most heavily used forms for personnel actions, procurement, travel and

By Bill Murray, GCN
March 8, 1999

Report offers recipe for net protection

The security of networked information systems has become a hot topic. Since the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection issued a report on the subject in 1997, the FBI, the Commerce Department and other agencies have established new security offices. Given the importance of networks, attention to security is overdue.

By GCN
March 8, 1999

Can directories keep NOSes in sync?

A still-immature network operating system, NT Server does not have a directory structure and cannot scale up to enterprise levels as well as other NOSes can. Nor has Microsoft Corp. developed good ways of making NT work with other NOSes. But the competition has. Novell Inc. has delivered a second version of Novell Directory Services for NTessentially acting twice as an organ donor.

By Jason z_rne, GCN
March 8, 1999

Defense plans buying push to spread DISN worldwide

The Defense Information Systems Network will span the Pacific through a transmission contract the Defense Department wants to award this summer, possibly followed by a similar contract for European services later in the year. DOD pegs the worth of the two contracts at roughly $10 billion. They are just two of more than a handful of communications buys the department has in the DISN pipeline.

By William Jackson, GCN
March 8, 1999

New Compaq Pentium III offers this: 50 more MHz

TEST DRIVE Here's the only reason to rush out and buy a PC with a Pentium III processor: You get 50 more megahertz of processing speed. Intel Corp. trumpets the security and Internet features of its newest processor, but in reality it runs current applications only a bit faster than a 450-MHz Pentium II.

By Michael Cheek, GCN
March 8, 1999

CIOs mull how to compete for IT talent

The council's Education and Training Committee hosted a brainstorming session at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's Virtual Government conference in Washington to get feedback on its ideas. The committee in May will submit a final plan to the CIO Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Personnel Management.

By Christopher J. Dorobek, GCN
March 8, 1999

SAIC picked to run systems at Energy facility

The Energy Department's Oak Ridge, Tenn., facility will outsource its systems operations to Science Applications International Corp. under a $72 million contract the company recently won. The San Diego company will take over work now done by 400 department information technology employees at Oak Ridge, but it will offer jobs to all of the employees.

By GCN
March 8, 1999

Argus develops trusted Gibraltar OS for e-commerce, other federal online apps

Argus Systems Group Inc.keeping pace with rivals Hewlett-Packard Co. and Sun Microsystems Inc., has designed a trusted operating system for electronic commerce and online government applications. Argus' preconfigured Gibraltar operating system is based on SunSoft Solaris 2.5.1. "You can install it right out of the box and drop applications into it" without any special knowledge of trusted systems, said Paul McNabb, Argus chief technology officer. The current Gibraltar OS supports 200 server compartments or partitions.

By Florence Olsen, GCN
March 8, 1999

Storage area networks take the place of hot spares

The storage area network, or SAN, is so new that agency network managers have had little time yet to evaluate the high-availability storage architecture. SANs are designed to save money for sites that buy twice as many servers as they need for data processing just to protect their databases against hardware failure.

By Florence Olsen, GCN
March 8, 1999

Data warehousing and the Web

Organizational countercultures, radical paradigms and living librariesthis is the language of data warehousing. It's all about the impact of the Web. "In the future, the world is going to be composed of content sitting in data warehouses, and the mechanism for distributing, accessing and loading will be netsintra-, Inter- and extra-," said Ramon Barquin, founder and former president of the Data Warehousing Institute in Washington. "It's part of a paradigm shift from a processing-centric world to

By Richard W. Walker, GCN
February 22, 1999

USPS inks preferred vendor agreement for open-ended payroll systems support

The Postal Service has selected Computer Sciences Corp. as a preferred vendor to provide open-ended payroll systems support for the next year. USPS signed an order agreement with CSC in December, but that agreement has no specified value, not even an estimate, contracting officer Beverley Goodale said. The agreement is for one year, with an option to extend that for another eight years.

By Merry Mayer, GCN
February 22, 1999

NARA: Agencies must set own records policies

The burden of determining whether an electronic document must be preserved as a record will fall to agencies, a senior National Archives and Records Administration official said last week. Much to the frustration of many agencies, NARA is not likely to establish regulations for identifying among the masses of online data what is or is not a record, said Michael L. Miller, director of NARA's Modern Records Program.

By Christopher J. Dorobek, GCN
February 22, 1999

High-bandwidth backbone handles Texas-size Internet traffic

Internet traffic heads for Abilene this week. The newly launched high-bandwidth Abilene backbone for Internet 2, together with the National Science Foundation's very-high-performance Backbone Network Service, will foster growth of the government's Next Generation Internet. "Since Internet 2 is all about next-generation applications, you have to have a heterogeneous network to test them on," said Greg Wood, communications director for Internet 2.

By William Jackson, GCN
February 22, 1999

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