Army seeks A-76 waiver for logistics project
An A-76 review could delay modernization by up to two years, Gen. Johnnie Wilson says. Gen. Johnnie Wilson, commander of Army Materiel Command, has signed a waiver designed to bypass the formal A-76 process and let the service proceed with a controversial $1 billion logistics modernization program to outsource some Army software support functions.
Sysadmins eye software that simplifies RAID
Systems administrators like the security of redundant arrays of independent disks, but they hate the complexity of choosing RAID levels for their applications. And they dislike the performance hit that RAID storage can exact. That's why storage vendors are introducing software to simplify RAID administration. An example is the Adaptive RAID package from nStor Corp. of Lake Mary, Fla.
Nuclear systems could crash in 2000, study says
The Defense Department's nuclear arsenal may be at greater risk from date code problems than DOD has publicly acknowledged, according to a report from the British American Security Information Council, an independent research organization. The report, The Bug in the Bomb: The Impact of the Year 2000 Problem on Nuclear Weapons, concludes that the Pentagon has only recently recognized that the year 2000 problem could result in the crash of nuclear weapons and related command and
Logistics present DOD another year 2000 challenge
LONG BEACH, Calif.—The Defense Department is in the throes of a logistical revolution to deploy troops and materiel faster, a panel of Defense experts at the 21st Century Commerce 1998 exposition said last month. "One of the most critical challenges we face is reinventing logistics for the [next] century," said Lou Kratz, director of logistics systems re-engineering in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Battle of the Blues: Whose supercomputer is fastest?
Two supercomputers at Energy Department labs are duking it out for the title of world's fastest machine. IBM Corp. in September delivered two-thirds of an RS/6000 SP supercomputer, called Blue Pacific, to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The supercomputer, when fully assembled at IBM's laboratory in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., achieved a peak performance of 3.88 trillion floating-point operations per second, said Dave Turek, IBM's marketing director for RS/6000 SP. IBM will deliver the final third of
Clemins says a global intranet will help DOD achieve systems goals
HONOLULU—The De-fense Department next year should develop a global intranet to ensure the success of initiatives such as electronic commerce and paperless contracting, Adm. Archie Clemins urged this month. "You hear all these people talking about how we're going to electronic commerce, electronic budgeting and an electronic assignment policy," the Pacific Fleet commander said this month at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's TechNet Asia-Pacific '98 conference.
BREAKING NEWS
Under the five-year contract, Ball Aerospace and Technology Group of Boulder, Colo., BTG Inc. of Fairfax, Va., Computer Sciences Corp. and MacAulay-Brown Inc. of Dayton, Ohio, will compete for task orders designed to provide the Air Force Information Warfare Center with a wide range of information technology services. "We lean on industry through technology to provide us with solutions," said Col. James Massaro, commander of the Air Force Information Warfare Center. "As we come up with
Mystery memos, free software deliver a way to pull Microsoft down
Packet Rat R. Fink The cyberrodent received an unexpected Halloween goodie last month from—of all places—Microsoft Corp. He suspects the Redmondites had intended it more as a trick. The Rat acquired the so-called Halloween Documents—two internal memos that Microsoft leaked to the world—from the grubby paws of children dressed as Bill and Monica, who came to the burrow door seeking favors.
PC powerbrokers maintain fairly low profiles at Comdex
LAS VEGAS—Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp. and IBM Corp. all stayed away from last week's Comdex, the capital of geekdom. But the most noticeable absentee was Intel Corp. None had booths at the trade show. The string-pulling chipmaker has PC makers at a standstill waiting for next year's introduction of a 500-MHz processor, which will have new instructions for floating-point computations in multimedia and 3-D video.
Report: White House's cyberdefense too close for comfort
The Clinton administration's efforts to fight cyberterrorism could infringe on the civil liberties of citizens, a privacy advocate has charged. The recommendations of the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP) constitute "a proposal to extend the reach of law enforcement, to limit the means of government accountability, and to transfer more authority to the world of classification and secrecy. These proposals are more of a threat to our system of ordered liberty than any single
Classifying a document? Mean what you say
Twenty years ago, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission made headlines by announcing a plan to throw into the Potomac River all the rubber stamps used by his agency. He said that this was the only effective way to eliminate the stamping of documents as confidential.
PROFESSIONAL CALENDAR
30 Innovations Award Workshop Workshop. Washington. Contact the National Partnership for Reinventing Government, attn: Pat Gould, 750 17th St. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006; tel. 301-948-4741. 1-3 Federal Wireless Users' Forum Workshop. Las Vegas. Contact Department of Defense, 9800 Savage Rd., Suite 6516, Fort Meade, Md. 20755; tel. 301-688-0292. 1-3 Revolution in Communications Conference and exposition. Ft. Gordon, Ga. Contact Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association, 4400 Fair Lakes Court, Fairfax, Va. 22033; tel. 800-564-4220.
Compaq's fingerprint ID device gets a thumbs-up
Thanks to PCs, telephones, e-mail addresses and automated teller machines, I have accumulated more than two dozen passwords and personal identifiers that I must remember to prove who I am. So when Compaq Computer Corp. sent in its Fingerprint Identification Technology biometric device, I immediately dreamed of freedom from all the tedious password typing.
Rambus makes run at SDRAM with modules
LAS VEGAS—At the Comdex trade show, an official of Rambus Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., predicted the high-speed Rambus memory interface will eclipse synchronous dynamic RAM by 2000. Julia A. Cates, Rambus' product marketing manager, said about 500 64M Rambus modules have gone to Dell Computer Corp. for evaluation and prototyping. Each module consists of 16 64M error-correcting chips made by LG Semicon America Inc. of San Jose, Calif., on a circuit board from Kingston Technology
Census, other agencies tap NetWare for new networks
Leased servers running Novell NetWare 4.12 will populate 450 or more field offices as the Census Bureau next month begins to set up temporary LANs for the 2000 census. That and sizable government orders for NetWare 5.0, released in September, are helping Novell Inc. regain visibility in the network operating system market, Novell officials said recently.
DOD plans new Hawaiian HQ
HONOLULU—The Pacific Command is planning to build a state-of-the-art command and control headquarters at Camp Smith in Hawaii that command officials said will serve as a model for other Defense Department C2 centers in the 21st century. The command will break ground on the new headquarters in 2000 and move into the complex in 2003, said Army Brig. Gen. James Bryan, the command's director for command, control, communications and computer systems.
Agencies are told to tap existing budgets for cyberterrorism security
At least for the coming year, agencies will have to use their own funds for cyberterrorism security efforts, officials working on the Clinton administration's critical infrastructure protection initiative said. The word came just before 14 agencies were to submit vulnerability studies on Nov. 18. Eight more agencies must submit similar studies in February.
FEMA calls on president's council for more help on 2000 preparations
The Federal Emergency Management Agency needs more readiness assessments from the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion before it can prepare an emergency response plan to handle possible year 2000 disruptions, a FEMA official said. "We have to plan for the unknown at all times," said Lacy Suitor, FEMA's executive associate director for response and recovery. "We need the assessments."
IG tells Navy to conform with frequency regs
HONOLULU—The Pacific Command is one of the Defense Department's worst offenders in failing to coordinate frequency spectrum operations with allied nations, according to a recent DOD inspector general report. Because PACOM's systems do not conform with international agreements involving the frequency spectrum, its DOD systems may interfere with the systems of other foreign governments in the Pacific, the IG said in its report, Coordination of Electromagnetic Frequency Spectrum and International Telecommunications Agreements [GCN, Nov. 9. Page
Win 2000 server bigger than it is better
Windows 2000 Server, Beta 2 Pros and cons: Microsoft Windows 2000 is coming at us like a slow-motion unstoppable avalanche. From the desk to the server room and on to the data center, Win 2000 threatens to cover everything. Will this be a new era in computing or a megaflop? As the GCN Lab discovered, in the server arena it will depend on an agency's
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