New desktop computing products
ADS Technologies has designed three USB Port products to connect Universal Serial Bus peripherals to PCs that have no USB ports. Microsoft Windows 98, Apple Computer Inc. Mac OS 8.5 and SunSoft Solaris 2.7 support USB peripherals such as modems, monitors, printers and scanners. Multiple items can be daisychained to one USB port on a computer.
Air Force wants to keep most IT staffs stateside
LANGLEY AIR FORCE BASE, Va.—The Air Force last week kicked off Expeditionary Force Experiment '98 with the unveiling of a $1 million command and control operations center. The rear operations support center, run by the Air and Space Command and Control Agency at Langley, is part of the service's new distributed C2 concept. Packed with more than 150 computers and with a staff of 250, the ROSC is the electronic nerve center from which a joint
GCN test: Agencies vary in handling of online queries
The promise of a more consumer-friendly government hinges on an important factor: e-mail. The speed with which agencies responded to e-mail messages sent to their public information links on Web sites varied widely in an informal GCN test. GCN sent messages to 26 agencies seeking information on fiscal 1999 budget requests. A dozen agencies responded almost immediately, but 10 agencies had not responded after two weeks.
DOD seeks way to buy software enterprisewide
DOD's Marvin Langston says "there's got to be a smarter way of buying software" for users. "There's got to be a smarter way of buying software" for 2 million users, said Marvin Langston, deputy chief information officer and deputy assistant secretary of Defense for CIO policy and implementation.
Donahue: Air Force is damaging its own nets
MONTGOMERY, Ala.—Hackers might be cybertroublemakers, but the Air Force ought to look within to pinpoint the most persistent threat to its networks, Lt. Gen. William Donahue said last week. The damage done to Air Force networks by hackers and crackers is next to nothing compared with the internal destruction perpetrated by service personnel, the director of communications and information said at the Air Force Information Technology Conference.
Dell 400-MHz Pentium II has an edge
Pros: + Departmental power at workgroup price + Excellent expansion and management options + Improved chassis design for standalone or rack-mount use GCNdex32 scores: PowerEdge PowerEdge 2300 2100 400-MHz 200-MHz Pentium II Pentium Pro Floating-point math 12.05 6.16 Integer math 11.38 5.77 Video 29.68 16.43 Small-file access 11.86 5.74 Large-file access 12.81 6.61 CD-ROM access 46.98 27.66
Silicon Graphics bets future on Irix, NT
Belluzzo spent 22 years of his career at Hewlett-Packard Co. As executive vice president and general manager of its $35 billion computer organization, he was responsible for PCs, printers, plotters and scanners in addition to larger systems and consulting services. He will try to bring Silicon Graphics back to profitability as it embarks on a new line of business: desktop workstations built on Intel Corp. processors and running Microsoft Windows NT.
Lucent lets you order and buy phones online
Lucent Technologies Inc. of Murray Hills, N.J., is launching a test program that will let users design, order and finance a telephone system online. "We are trying it with about 700 government customers around the country," said Denise Gibson, director of government sales for Lucent Direct. The federal users represent a cross-section of agencies with offices that could use the small to midsized Partner Advanced Communications System, a telephone key system.
USPS will use a PKI to manage electronic postage
USPS loses about $100 million a year from meter tampering, officials said. The Postal Service moved a step closer to selling postage online after it established a public-key infrastructure last month. The service will use a PKI as part of the Information-Based Indicia Program, a program for selling postage over the Internet by letting users print bar codes on envelopes or labels from printers at their home offices or in small businesses.
Breaking News Daily
The National Institutes of Health recently chose an application to test the year 2000 readiness of some 20,000 desktop systems in 24 NIH agencies. NIH bought ClickNet Y2K from PinPoint Software Corp. of San Jose, Calif., said Sandra Bond, a computer specialist at NIH's Center for Information Technology. NIH paid $300,000.
The Air Force vows to be 2000-ready, on time
MONTGOMERY, Ala.—By ensuring that systems are not disrupted in January 2000, the Air Force will disappoint doomsayers who predict catastrophic consequences for the service, said Lt. Gen. William Donahue, director of communications and information. "Your Air Force is going to fly, and we're going to be mission-ready," Donahue said last week at the Air Force Information Technology Conference. "It's going to be a non-event."
Defense IG calls DISA's date code work on mainframes inadequate
The Defense Information Systems Agency is not adequately preparing date code on its mainframe systems at Defense Department central data processing centers, the DOD inspector general reported late last month. The report, Evaluation of the Defense Megacenters Year 2000 Program, found problems in three areas: reporting, testing and contingency planning. "DISA year 2000 status reports for executive software were incomplete and could be misinterpreted," the report said. "As a result, DOD is at risk of classifying mission-critical
Patent office will offer online access to millions of documents
PTO will post online the complete text of 2 million patents dating back to 1976, PTO commissioner Bruce Lehman says. The Patent and Trademark Office is putting more than 20 million pages of comprehensive patent and trademark information online. PTO last month began providing free Web access to trademark text data that was previously available on the agency's Cassis CD-ROM products, said Bruce Lehman, PTO commissioner.
Fibre Channel products prove interoperability
After a fourth round of interoperability tests this summer, nearly two dozen Fibre Channel vendors said they have demonstrated an acceptable level of interoperability among their products. For the first time, the tests of arbitrated loop and switched-fabric topologies included Fibre Channel drives from Quantum Corp. of Milpitas, Calif., and Seagate Technology Inc. of Scotts Valley, Calif.
Through cross-servicing effort, VA will handle GAO's data processing
The Veterans Affairs Department's Austin Automation Center will provide data processing services for the General Accounting Office. AAC won the three-year, $2 million contract last month when GAO's previous provider discontinued support in some key areas, said Bob Evans, AAC director. AAC will provide support for GAO's financial management, payroll support and statistical analysis systems. GAO will also use the center's time-sharing and help desk services, Evans said.
Many PC apps with two-digit year codes are fine, consultant says
One year 2000 consultant has begun a public campaign to educate users about widespread misunderstandings of year 2000 readiness in desktop systems. LAN managers know that desktop hardware, operating systems and BIOSes could have year 2000 problems, but most users are unsure what to do about their desktop applications, said Allen Falcon, executive vice president of IST Development Inc. of Boston.
FAA seeks budgetary nod to switch e-mail systems
The Federal Aviation Administration has laid out technical requirements for an e-mail system to replace Lotus cc:Mail and is awaiting budget approval from the Transportation Department. When FAA officials submitted their fiscal 1999 budget in March, they cut two-thirds from their migration budget, said Janet MacNab, FAA's integrated product team leader.
LAB NOTES
Strike up the band. Coming into view at last is the second beta release of Microsoft Windows NT 5.0, the first broad beta with up to 270,000 test copies. About two months behind schedule, Beta 2 has fairly complete features, although much work remains to be done on it. Once testers' comments have been weighed, Microsoft Corp. will bring out a final release version. Don't be surprised if parts of NT 5.0 don't arrive until 2000.
Here's how, where and why the 56K Faxmodem hits top speed| GCN
Pros and cons: + Impressive speed under right conditions + Easy to install and upgrade – Tricky implementation for V.90 standard Real-life requirements: Pentium PC, Windows 3.x or Win9x, 4M RAM, 2M free on hard drive, CD-ROM drive, serial cable, 56K-compatible phone line, V.90 digital modem at other end
Army Corps of Engineers keeps tabs on data use
The Army Corps of Engineers bills its districts for their CPU connect time and disk activity on data center servers. "We've got some big applications," said Sanda Smith, an Army computer specialist who maintains the resource utilization software. The corps customized a commercial accounting utility that prompts district employees for their district billing codes when they log on to the data center's Sun Microsystems Inc. servers, which run SunSoft Solaris 2.51.
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