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.
Army shuts 996 Web sites for security check
The Army late last month took a dramatic step to remove sensitive information from its Web sites: It shut down all 996 sites as part of a servicewide security review. Lt. Gen. William Campbell, the Army's director of information systems for command, control, communications and computers, ordered commanders on Sept. 25 to immediately remove from the Internet all publicly accessible Web sites under their control. As organizations clear their sites of sensitive data, they are restoring
ProSwap lets users change notebook drives on the fly
Pros and cons: + No rebooting to swap devices in notebook bay – Doesn't work with all Dell notebooks, possibly others Real-life requirements: Win9x, 4M of RAM, 500K free on hard drive, 31/2 inch floppy drive Tioman ProSwap from Agate Technologies Inc. may turn out to be one of those obscure products that sweeps the computing world.
New token-ring LANs close in on Fast Ethernet speeds
Token-ring LANs are following Fast Ethernet into the 100-Mbps range. Under the emerging High-Speed Token-Ring standard, Olicom USA Inc. of Plano, Texas, has introduced a 100-Mbps file server adapter and a switch uplink module. Both HSTR products will reduce congestion on LAN backbones and extend the life of aging token-ring networks, said Dan Jude, senior product marketing manager.
BREAKING NEWS
Vice President Al Gore announced this month that a new government crackdown on software piracy will start at home—in federal agencies. "Today, we are declaring war on software piracy," Gore said. "The message is clear: Don't copy that floppy. At home or abroad, intellectual property must be protected." The vice president unveiled an executive order instructing agencies to inventory their software to ensure that they are not violating copyright laws. Under the order, all agencies must develop
GAO: Defense must trim $180 million from IT
The Defense Department should cut $180 million in information technology programs from its fiscal 1999 budget, the General Accounting Office said in a report to Congress. GAO wrote the report after reviewing DOD's procurement and research, development, test and evaluation programs, looking for ways to reduce Defense's budget request. It is also considering potential rescissions to appropriations in past years.
PROFESSIONAL CALENDAR
20-21 Information Management Conference Conference. Washington. Contact Federal Business Council Inc., 10810 Guilford Road, Suite 105, Annapolis Junction, Md. 20701; tel. 301-206-2940. 20-22 InfoTech '98 Conference. Dayton, Ohio. Contact the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, 4400 Fair Lakes Court, Fairfax, Va. 22033; tel. 703-631-6130. 28 Managing Knowledge to Improve Performance GAO Technical Conference. Washington. Contact Federal Business Council, Inc. 10810 Guilford Road, Annapolis Junction, Md. 20701; tel. 301-206-2940. 28-29 Fall
Administration uses a grassroots tack to boost year 2000 awareness
The administration is calling on the national field offices of federal agencies to mobilize small and mid-sized businesses to prepare for year 2000 computer failures. A National Y2K Action Week scheduled for later this month is the government's first nationwide effort to help communities avoid problems come 2000. "We've decided to give a full-court press to this effort," said Janet Abrams, executive director of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion. Council members are senior executives from
Border Patrol: Web spoof ad
"Think we won't hire you? Think again!" said an advertisement for Border Patrol agents posted on the Web. "We have recently hired known criminals, drug smugglers, gangbangers, people out of drug rehab, pizza delivery guys … people who write on a fifth-grade level, and, yes, even illegal aliens." Although the ad appeared on the Web site of a Border Patrol agents' union, it was not an official want ad for the agency. It was a spoof,
OMB shelves new Web policy
OMB suggests principles for agency Web sites Strategic planning: Set clear goals with performance measures that demonstrate value, support consistent service, maintenance and product delivery, and ensure the security of information and systems. Service delivery: Use the Web to complement other service delivery tools. Exercise judgment when linking to nongovernmental sites. Public access, dissemination and the Government Information Locator Service: Strive for accuracy, relevance, timeliness and complete information for sites, and
Notebooks are main PCs for some feds
—Bill Wall, supervisory systems analyst, Navy Fleet Material Support Office, Mechanicsburg, Pa., on his Compaq notebook "The keyboard is a problem for me. I'm not a very good typist, and I've got big hands.'' —Dan Grispino, financial specialist for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Cleveland, on the Dell notebook he shares with his office mates
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