At conference, 23 feds win IT honors
RICHMOND, Va.—G. Martin Wagner of the General Services Administration and Nada D. Harris, formerly with the Veterans Affairs Department, took home the top leadership awards last week at the Industry Advisory Council's Executive Leadership Conference. Wagner and Harris were among 23 federal employees honored by the Government Information Technology Services Board and IAC, a member of the Federation of Government Information Processing Councils.
Service personnel join forces overseas for smart card field test
The Defense Department sent smart cards into the field for the first time this spring during joint exercises in Thailand. About 8,000 Army, Navy and Air Force personnel and Thai military personnel used the cards to automate transportation manifests during the Cobra Gold '98 exercise. It was the first large-scale military operational test of the programmable cards, and Lt. Col. Steve Cameron, the Marine Corps provost marshal, called it an absolute success.
U.S., four nations agree on security evaluation criteria
Say goodbye to the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Federal Information Processing Standard 140-1 and the National Security Agency's Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria. Five countries last week signed a new international agreement covering the evaluation of computer security products and systems that will ultimately replace NIST's FIPS 140-1 and NSA's Orange Book.
Army Corps sets IT strategy
The new architecture will show how to conduct more business online. In drafting a new computer and communications architecture for the 21st century, the Army Corps of Engineers is trying to avoid what Architecture 2000 project manager Laurens Kennedy called "the engineered solution." New generations of information technology are replacing earlier ones every 18 to 48 months, Kennedy said, and the days of drafting strictly technical architectures are over. "Not only is technology not
Sate visual appetite with Studio Max
3D Studio Max pros and cons: + NURBS support, keyframe animation and multiprocessor support + Excellent mapping and editing + Auto backup and auto filename increment – Too many hardware locks – Ray-trace rendering requires Radi Ray package 3D Studio Viz pros and cons: + Excellent, easy-to-use features in limited applications + Integrates with AutoCAD files
Unclear contracts can spell trouble down the road
The challenges are even greater when the acquisition and payment methods are complex. Creative techniques such as seat management and asset management call for careful attention to the contract terms and conditions. A recent Court of Federal Claims decision in Cray Research Inc. vs. United States shows what can happen when the contract isn't clear.
Dell maintains place atop list of vendors selling PCs on schedule
Which companies round out the Top 20? 11. GE Capital IT Solutions $74.3 12. BTG Inc.* $74.0 13. Edgemark Systems Inc. $65.0 14. Science Applications International Corp. $63.3 15. Pulsar Data Systems Inc. $58.6 16. Telos Corp. $49.1 17. PRC Inc. $44.1 18. Silicon Graphics Inc. $42.4 19. Compaq Computer Corp. $40.8 20. Computer Sciences Corp. $39.6 (Sales in millions from July
ENTERPRISE COMPUTING | Beat the Clock
| Beat the Clock Make that a Whopper. Thomas Soeder, chairman of startup RMM Inc., thinks he has a tool for the times. Soeder's Columbia, Md., company, a relative latecomer to the year 2000 tools market, has a low-priced, mass-market programmer's workbench that he calls the software equivalent of Burger King.
NASA develops software to assist nation's air traffic controllers
NASA has developed two applications to help air traffic controllers at busy airports. The agency estimates that the software can save $800 million a year in air traffic control management costs. The NASA software, Traffic Management Adviser and Final Approach Spacing Tool, will make it easier for air traffic controllers to track and direct aircraft, said Heinz Erzberger, senior scientist for air traffic management at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
DOD retreats on Web
In hastening to pull down information posted on the Internet, the Defense Department appears to be reacting to threats not to information security but to the physical security of assets and people. The brass fears that bad guys will tap into the aggregate of information—base maps, building layouts, weapons locations and personnel addresses—to attack people and places. It reminds me of the oft-stated speculation that sufficient information is available online to build a nuclear bomb.
Sonet links VA medical centers
Veterans Affairs Department hospitals and clinics in the Chicago area have brought up the department's first regional Synchronous Optical Network ring and a hybrid copper-fiber WAN. It links eight medical centers and 28 outpatient clinics in five states. The Veterans Information Systems Network (VISN) 12 began carrying data applications in August. Video, including telemedicine applications, will be added later this year.
BRIEFING BOOK
Winging IT. The 71st Flying Training Wing at Vance Air Force Base, Okla., is the service's first wing to lease PCs, servers, notebooks, printers and software. Under a leasing agreement with Dell Computer Corp., all of the wing's hardware and software will be replaced incrementally over the next three years. Non-Pentium PCs currently in use will be replaced within six to nine months, Air Force officials said.
NT critic gets audience with DOD chieftains
Not every software engineer gets a meeting with Defense Department brass. But a Texas man has made it his personal crusade to warn DOD that current versions of Microsoft Windows NT are not secure enough operating systems for the department—and DOD has decided to hear him out. Ed Curry, a contract engineer for Xplore Technologies Inc. of Georgetown, Texas, will meet tomorrow with Richard Schaeffer, director of information assurance in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of
Secure voice server condenses telephone calls to save up to 80 percent bandwidth
TimePlex Federal Systems of Washington has designed a Secure Telephone Unit III Secure Voice Server to reduce by as much as 80 percent the bandwidth taken up by STU III telephone calls. The server converts the phone's analog output to a 9.6-Kbps digital signal that consumes less than one-fifth the capacity of a standard voice line. As many as five secure calls can travel over the line at once.
FAA posts safety handbooks
To reduce printing and storage expenses, the Federal Aviation Administration has posted three aviation safety inspection handbooks totaling 6,000 pages on the Web. Aviation companies must have the manuals for FAA certification, and FAA inspectors also need them. Printed copies are available from the Government Printing Office. The Web version at http://www.faa.gov/AVR/AFS/FAA/home.htm requires an Adobe Acrobat 3.0.1 reader, downloadable from the site.
Build high-end Fibre Channel RAID storage system
Trimm's newest offering is the FR8J, a RAID enclosure that supports Fibre Channel interfaces and 10,000-rpm 3'-inch Fibre Channel disk drives. Using a dual-loop redundant Fibre Channel Bus, the FR8J can accommodate up to eight hot-swappable SCA drive canisters with cam lock mechanisms to protect against rotational vibration. An interface electronics board plugs directly into the system's midplane, eliminating cable tangles. DB9 connectors are used to interface the FR8J board with most external devices, but the
Learn how you can avoid a worldwide wait on the Web
Everybody complains about the molasses-slow Web, even if they just upgraded their access a few months ago. No matter how fast the connection is, they soon start to feel restricted again. But there are remedies. The most useful time to do this is when you conduct a search and have a list of hits. Many sites will let you go to a hit and then return to the search results by hitting
With one deadline missed, agencies scramble to finish date code repairs
One of the first year 2000 milestones came and went quietly late last month. Agencies were supposed to have their mission critical systems renovated by Sept. 30, but only a handful of agencies met the Office of Management and Budget deadline, federal officials said. OMB has ordered agencies to complete testing of all date code fixes by January. All date code work must be complete by March.
NASA privatizes management of space flight centers
NASA plans to transform itself into a commercial-like operation. To that end, the agency will spend $3.44 billion to hand over management of its flight center operations to a corporate team. The space agency late last month awarded a team led by Lockheed Martin Corp. the 10-year Consolidated Space Operations Contract to manage space operations.
Proposal would create corporation to manage IP addresses and DNS
The wild and woolly Internet could finally get a board of directors under proposals submitted this month to Commerce Secretary William M. Daley. The proposals call for a new Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to coordinate numerical IP addressing and the Domain Name System. ICANN would take over the work done by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority at the University of Southern California and by Network Solutions Inc. of Herndon, Va.
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