Education names Woods its COO for aid
As the government's new education financial aid chieftain, Greg Woods will get the chance to implement the ideas and policies he championed as deputy director of Vice President Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The Education Department earlier this month named Woods as its chief operating officer for the Office of Student Financial Assistance, a performance-based organization.
FTS users left hanging as AT&T scraps X.25
Come June, AT&T Corp.'s FTS 2000 Network A users will no longer be able to buy X.25 service. AT&T's imminent withdrawal from the X.25 market, coming at the height of year 2000 preparations, will force agencies on Network A to migrate to frame relay service from AT&T or to find other network providers that offer X.25 service.
First FTS 2001 award goes to Sprint | Breaking News
The General Services Administration on Dec. 18 awarded the first-round FTS 2001 contract for long-distance telecommunications services to Sprint Corp. The eight-year contract guarantees Sprint at least $750 million in revenue. A second round of bidding for a second FTS 2001 contract was set to begin immediately, and that award could come by mid-January, said Dennis J. Fischer, commissioner of GSA's Federal Technology Service, which will manage the contracts.
Software training is on course
A distance-learning initiative has cut the Education Department's training expenses by nearly 4,000 percent, an agency official said. Costs have dropped from about $200 per course to just $5.20, said Steven Corey-Bey, director of the Special Projects Group in the Office of the Chief Information Officer. "Given the economies, what's not to love" about software training? he said.
A world that merges Netscape, AOL doesn't make for sweet dreams
Packet Rat R. Fink While visions of sugarplums dance in the heads of GCN readers, the Rat has been having a recurring nightmare. It starts off with the grating buzz of an alarm clock. The windows are covered by blackout curtains, but a glance at the clock reveals that it's 6 p.m. For some reason, it's time to go to work.
Database helps agency supply answers on date code progress
Federal Aviation Administration employees invited by the Transportation secretary to a listening session in September told the secretary that year 2000 oversight and reporting burdens had added to their stress in an already stressful job. Until as recently as July this year, the FAA maintained no centralized database of year 2000 system-readiness data, despite frequent calls for information from oversight officials in the General Accounting Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and the President's Council
Year 2000 program director has confidence in FAA's success
GCN last spoke with Ray Long, director of the Federal Aviation Administration's Year 2000 Program Office, in July when Congress and the General Accounting Office were hammering the agency for getting off to a slow start in its year 2000 work. Since then, FAA met the Office of Management and Budget's Sept. 30 renovation milestone, reporting that 99 percent of its mission-critical systems are year 2000-ready.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The article "PC managers seek the real deal on real-time clocks" [GCN, Nov. 23, Page 48] misleads your readers into thinking that they do not have Y2K-compliant systems and that the answer is to buy hardware fixes from referenced vendors, a point that Dell Computer Corp. strongly contests. In the article, I am accurately quoted in stating that new systems with real-time clocks "by themselves are not compliant." What is missing is the continuance of the
Policy for saving electronic records applies to PCs only, Justice asserts
In what appears to be a change of course, the Justice Department now adamantly contends that a disputed federal policy on saving electronic records applies only to PCs. The Justice Department and Public Citizen, a Washington public interest group, have been arguing the point in a series of letters to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Advanced OCR system will capture Census 2000
The Census Bureau's Data Capture System 2000 will let the agency process more forms electronically than it did for the last decennial census, reducing data entry errors and personnel costs. Because the system uses an optical character recognition program running under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 to capture data from scanned documents, the Census Bureau will need fewer part-time employees to key in data, bureau officials said.
GSA's terms for Microsoft site licenses include upgrades of OSes andapplications
The General Services Administration has bought a three-year site license for Microsoft Corp. products for its 13,000 users. The $3.3 million delivery order, under Unisys Corp.'s GSA Systems contract, covers Microsoft Windows 9x, Windows NT Workstation and Server 4.0, Office Professional and Standard, and client access licenses for Microsoft SQL Server and Systems Management Server, said Mark Miller, the team leader for GSA's Acquisition Management Team.
Study pegs federal PC ownership cost at a cool $8,400/year
A study to calculate the total cost of ownership of desktop PCs at one General Services Administration office, conducted as the agency is developing a task order for the Seat Management Program contracts, found the GSA office spends an average of $8,400 per computer a year. The study is not completely representative because it looked at only a small portion of GSA—just 300 PC users, the agency's Seat program manager Wanda Smith said.
BREAKING NEWS
The seven-year, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract covers software support agencywide, including application development, data administration, database support and software engineering, SSA contracting officer Wayne McDonald said. Most of the code for SSA's administrative systems, such as payroll, travel and training, is written by agency programmers, but it is difficult to keep the code up-to-date, McDonald said.
As SBA finishes date code work, OMB lauds federal 2000 progress
The Small Business Administration crossed the year 2000 finish line first, the Office of Management and Budget reported last week as it released agencies' latest date code status reports. The Social Security Administration is right on SBA's heels and will finish a close second, OMB said. After reviewing the quarterly reports, the administration has an optimistic view of the government's year 2000 status, senior OMB officials said.
For PC-3, Army officials choose IDIQ contract method over BPA
The Army will award PC-3 contracts by mid-February, said Lee Harvey, a division chief at the Communications-Electronics Command Acquisition Center-Washington. The current PC-2 contracts expire at the end of January. Army officials surveyed vendors about pricing differences before deciding to stay with an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract instead of negotiating blanket purchasing agreements.
PDAs let many users hit the road without excess PC baggage
For accessing the Internet via handheld computers, smaller is smarter. In these days of processor envy and browsers fatter than Bill Gates' wallet, it might seem silly to keep harping on thin clients and low-power CPUs. But the handheld market continues to drive the development of simplicity in TCP/IP connectivity.
New year, old problems
I remember as a child seeing a pad of memos or business forms that contained a date space partially filled in with a 19, leaving just enough space to put in the last two digits for the year. I wondered what people would do if such forms lasted until 2000.
EC is a hot topic with Commerce
Before he came to Commerce, Baker was vice president of marketing and product development for Visa International's Interactive subsidiary in Herndon, Va. He helped build an online system for Visa's member banks. Baker has a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master's in business from the University of Michigan. He talked with GCN about Commerce's Digital Department initiative and how electronic commerce will help the department carry out its mission.
CellCase2 increases Secant's range of ATM encryption speeds
With the release of CellCase2, Secant Network Technologies Inc. of Research Triangle Park, N.C., says its line of virtual private networking products can now encrypt asynchronous transfer mode traffic at wire rates all the way from 1.5 Mbps to 155 Mbps. Earlier CellCase products secured WAN communications at T3 and OC-3 rates of 45 Mbps and 155 Mbps. The newest entry, introduced last month, covers T1 rates at the low end of the range.
Computers, bodies warm up DOD's cold mountain
The Cheyenne Mountain complex near Colorado Springs, Colo., the Defense Department's underground nerve center for detecting missile launches around the world, has a novel way of keeping its staff warm in the subterranean environment. Nestled in a cavern fortress safe from earthquakes and nuclear explosions, the 1,500 or so military and civilian employees who work in this hardened bunker are warmed by the heat generated by the complex's computers.
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