RealNetworks sees intranets as streaming media venue
When President Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony was released in September, an estimated 2 million people watched it on desktop computers using viewers from RealNetworks Inc. of Seattle. Web news outlets such as ABCNews.com, Fox News, CNN and National Public Radio used the company's RealVideo to distribute the video over the Internet, giving RealNetworks what executive producer Mark Hall called its first near-cable-sized audience.
Persistence pays off for agencies seeking electronic copyrights
Two things the Internet has always lacked are a standard system for establishing who owns a digital copyright and an easy way of contacting the copyright owner. The federal government, unlike most other publishers, gives much of its data away for free. But it still claims a copyright on many computer files, including Web pages, data collections, artwork, sound files and video.
It's a smart lesson
Few stories in GCN over the last year have produced as much reaction as our coverage of the Smart Ship USS Yorktown. Back in July, GCN reporter Gregory Slabodkin uncovered the fact that on at least one occasion, the systems aboard the Navy's model fly-by-wire ship had crashed, leaving the vessel partially disabled. It took two hours for the crew to reboot.
3Com introduces high-speed storage network
3Com Corp.'s StorageConnect family, announced this month, joins an emerging market for storage area networks, or SANs. A Fibre Channel SAN works behind a LAN, connecting external storage devices to servers. The most common external storage configuration at present is a SCSI connection between a storage device and a single server. SAN will make a high-speed link among multiple servers and multiple storage devices, in effect creating a virtual data pool.
Revised FAR widens avenue for contract discussions
The revised Federal Acquisition Regulation is filled with opportunities for vendors and buying agencies to discuss real issues before the awards are granted. The opportunities stem from the greater flexibility in contract terms and conditions than existed in the pre-reform days. The new FAR represents best prospects for novel approaches when you're buying commercial items. Luckily, most information technology products fall into this category.
Beat the Clock
Second opinion. The number of civilian and Defense Department agencies seeking a second opinion about their year 2000 readiness is likely to rise sharply, judging by the fact that several large agencies have already hired compliance auditors. The IRS and Postal Service have brought in year 2000 auditors from SRA International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., to check their readiness. The Health Care Financing Administration also has hired SRA to do independent verification and validation that will
MAS audits irk vendors
The petition, authored by the Government Electronics and Information Technology Association of Arlington, Va., and believed to be the first use of a little-noticed provision of the OFPP Authorization Act, contends that the pricing and audit clauses are inconsistent with the Federal Acquisition Regulation. The group plans to submit the final petition next month.
With LCD monitors, big is in at Comdex trade show
LAS VEGAS—LCD flat-panel display makers were touting the biggest LCDs on the block at the Comdex trade show here last week. Officials of ViewSonic Corp. of Walnut, Calif., which makes both LCD and CRT monitors, said buyer interest is shifting rapidly toward LCD monitors. ViewSonic's newest LCDs have a 160-degree viewing angle, which means images stay sharp at the sides. The top-end, 18-inch VG180 can show 16.7 million colors in native mode and suits almost every
Shareware welcomes users to a new world of PC opportunities
Although Microsoft Windows' decade-old graphical interface has made life easier for most users, anyone who could write a .bat file in MS-DOS still feels betrayed. One of Windows' shortcomings is that it won't let users cut and paste in advanced ways as they could in MS-DOS environments such as DesqView from Quarterdeck Corp. of Marina Del Rey, Calif.
New Energy CIO brings IT skills to job
The Energy Department's new chief information officer said he believes his diverse background in information technology acquisition, architecture and policy at the Air Force has prepared him well for the federal CIO ranks. "I view my job as providing a focus and coordination in IT across the department," John H. Gilligan said.
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
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