Following delays, GSA releases RFP for governmentwide digital certificate service
After making significant revisions, the General Services Administration last month issued a final request for proposals for a digital certificate service to be used by agencies governmentwide. Through the Access Certificates for Electronic Services program, GSA wants a vendor to provide a certificate service that will make it possible for citizens to do business electronically with agencies. The winning vendor must establish a public-key infrastructure using commercial products.
Fore Systems switches will support MPLS
Fore Systems Inc. of Pittsburgh will support the Multiprotocol Label Switching standard in its ForeRunner ASX-4000 switches late this year. MPLS, an Internet Engineering Task Force specification for Layer 3 switching, uses tags with forwarding information to speed packets on their way. It saves switches and routers from having to look up destination addresses in Internet routing tables, and it can assign various quality-of-service levels to traffic across IP and asynchronous transfer mode WANs.
Find answers to nagging compatibility questions
"Even all Microsoft Corp. products don't interoperate." How can we make all this stuff work—together? It's a common refrain that echoes through systems shops. Now a group of agencies and vendors is working to create an online clearinghouse to help government agencies answer that question for specific products.
Study warns of acute risk to federal infrastructure
The Clinton administration's efforts to protect the nation's critical systems infrastructure is unlikely to keep the country from averting an "electronic Waterloo," a Washington think tank recently warned. In its new report, the Center for Strategic and International Studies said there are "info-guerrillas intent on doing major damage to the citadel of capitalism, and cybergeniuses in their late teens and early 20s are the new frontline fighters, arguably more important to the nation's defense than the
GCN | OPINION
As rabidly partisan as Congress has become, conservative and liberal members' agendas do occasionally intersect. Today's example—an overlapping information policy agenda—comes from the good old Freedom of Information Act. FOIA began life as a nonpartisan effort, driven mainly by persistent congressional fights with the executive branch over access to records. Over time, however, the political ground has shifted. Over the last 10 or 15 years, conservatives have tended to grumble about FOIA while liberals defended it.
Online biomedical database tracks equipment for date code readiness
The Veterans Affairs and Health and Human Services departments have established an online database that identifies the year 2000 status of biomedical equipment. VA and HHS have restricted data in the online clearinghouse, at http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/yr2000/year2000.html, to publicly releasable information from manufacturers. "The clearinghouse will provide timely and easily obtainable information about medical devices that health care practitioners, medical treatment facilities and consumers may use or manage," said Dr. Kenneth W. Kizer, VA undersecretary for health.
FAA begins upgrade project on its controller-pilot comm system
The Federal Aviation Administration has taken the first step in rolling out a next-generation communications system for air traffic controllers and pilots. FAA last month awarded a two-year, $6.1 million contract to Computer Sciences Corp. to build the first component, known as Build 1, of the Controller Pilot Data Link Communications System.
LAB NOTES
As time goes by. Scene: Redmond, Wash., 1997. First Microsoft Outlook programmer: "So when's Columbus Day observed?" Second Outlook programmer: "Oct. 12, I think." First programmer: "Thanks." That was probably what happened during development of Microsoft Outlook 98, which has the oddball notion that Columbus Day is observed on Oct. 12, instead of the proper one: second Monday in October. Outlook lists the observed dates for holidays without listing the true dates, which is an oversight.
Chewing on recent GAO rulings leaves bitter taste
Two recent decisions leave me scratching my head. One of them concerns Dual Inc. (B-280719, Nov. 12, 1998), in which GAO sustained a protest. In the case, the Air Force was procuring a training system. Camber Corp. submitted its timely proposal at an unspecified date, probably in March or April 1998. It proposed using its Flight Simulation Division to perform the contract. At the time, it was negotiating the sale of that division.
GPO's value is more than saving money | LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The Government Printing Office takes a different view from that expressed by my friend Robert Gellman in his column, "Government printing has centralized problem" [GCN, Jan. 11, Page 17]. With a price exceeding $1 billion a year, only half of which goes through GPO, the government needs a system that maximizes printing value for its tax dollar, not one that results in wasteful duplication of staffing, resources and effort throughout myriad departments, agencies, bureaus and offices.
Clinton budget proposes $10 billion for Defense IT operations
The president's fiscal 2000 budget has a $267.2 billion slice for the Defense Department, including approximately $10 billion for information technology. The budget is only a slight increase over this year's. The budget proposal earmarked $2.8 billion for the Army's Force XXI battlefield digitization program—a $200 million increase over this year's budget. Force XXI is designed to network tanks, trucks, humvees, helicopters and soldiers in the field through the service's
Online services can help office managers trim resource budgets
In spite of agencies' enforced frugality, the costs of running an office continue to climb. Managers looking for creative ways to cut costs can tap online resources for some office services. If you don't trust e-mail for sensitive documents and you don't want to give outsiders access to internal systems via File Transfer Protocol or an extranet, look into secure e-mail.
Windows 98 offers few clues on fixing hardware failures
Sometimes computers seem to live a bug's life. Having postponed an upgrade to Microsoft Windows 98 for quite a few months, I decided to try it out on a sub-$1,000 GT200 system bought last year from TigerDirect Inc. of Miami. Surprise: The 24X CD-ROM drive no longer would read any disks, although its drawer kept popping out randomly against my knee.
Neil J. Stillman will retire in April after 30 years of federal IT service
Neil J. Stillman, the deputy chief information officer at the Health and Human Services Department and a career federal official, will retire in April. Stillman has spent more than 30 years in government service. He came to HHS in 1990 from the Defense Intelligence Agency's Office of the Systems Architect. Before that, he held systems posts at the General Services Administration, the former Defense Communications Agency and the Customs Service.
DUAL-SPEED WORKGROUP HUBS
Are you looking for flexibility, low cost and a good price-performance ratio in a workgroup hub? Who isn't, you say? Your search is over. A move to dual-speed 10/100 Ethernet/Fast Ethernet autosensing hubs is the way to go to fold 10-Mbps LANs into a high-speed 100-Mbps Fast Ethernet system.
Commerce program looks to bolster EC with common library of XML definitions
"Without some kind of common business library, the whole promise of XML goes out the window," Tenenbaum said recently. Officials in the Commerce Department's Advanced Technology Program apparently shared Tenenbaum's view enough to award a $4.8 million contract in 1997 to the CommerceNet consortium and three Internet startup companies.
ENTERPRISE COMPUTING | NEW PRODUCTS
The Xerox Model 8825 printer for engineering workgroups produces A- to E-sized drawings at 400-dot-per-inch resolution. Powered by a 200-MHz PowerPC 603e chip, the 8825 can render 33 levels of grayscale and single-pixel lines. The TCP/IP network printer comes with a suite of client software tools for remote access and queue management.
Air Force groups set controls on use of products
But SSG and AFMC will have to rely on friendly persuasion, mindful of each unit's control over its own budget, Air Force officials said. Debra Haley, AFMC's chief information officer at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, said she is careful to refer to the command's users as customers. At SSG, the mandated presence of Microsoft Exchange Server and a modified version of the Exchange client for the Defense Message System forced officials to implement more central
Net conniptions
The Internet continues to give agencies fits. I hear a refrain. Something bad happens—perhaps one isolated incident—and agencies backtrack until they can devise new policies. Or, like Justice, they plow ahead with a heavy-handed policy. The danger is real; the velocity and unruliness of the Web resists security. An agency's ability to ensure that it posts accurate information reflects well on the organization.
Inexpensive Advan monitor doesn't stand up to close scrutiny
Out of the box, the AGM15T looked impressive. It has a large screen for an LCD and was fairly easily connected to my test computer. An optional Universal Serial Bus hub could make the monitor compatible with ultra-modern as well as older office environments. Unfortunately, neither Microsoft Windows 95 nor Windows 98 could properly detect the AGM15T as new hardware. Both operating systems instead used a plug-and-play monitor driver that gave the Advan poor resolution and
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