Minor tweaking will correct some monitor ailments
You turn on your monitor, it hums a short, tuneless little ditty as it warms up, and then—uh-oh, the monitor looks funny. This can't be right. Ideally, the monitor's electronic gun beams tiny light signals onto the phosphor dots on the inside of the monitor tube, and then the resulting images are translated to digital signals to be communicated to the host computer. The trouble is, a lot can go wrong between these two steps.
Bringing high tech to the seas proves a tough challenge
The USS Yorktown and USS Rushmore are not the only technologically advanced surface ships in the Navy with systems integration problems, according to a General Accounting Office analyst. Software interoperability problems aboard the cruisers USS Vicksburg and USS Hue City recently forced the Navy to delay a full-rate production decision for a new combat system called the Cooperative Engagement Capability, said Richard Price, a naval analyst for GAO's National Security and International Affairs Division.
New England air traffic control systems crash
A bad data interface may have frozen the IBM Corp. mainframe the Federal Aviation Administration uses for air traffic control, causing radar screens to go blank at New England airports for more than 37 minutes on Aug. 19, FAA officials said. The systems failure kept airplanes grounded as air traffic controllers passed handwritten notes to each other to keep track of aircraft already in flight.
Cost overruns suspend Smart Ship installation
Budget overruns led Navy officials to halt the installation of Smart Ship technology on the amphibious ship USS Rushmore for a few weeks earlier this year, Navy records show. When Navy officials realized the service had spent many millions of dollars more than it had budgeted for the project, they halted the project.
Graphics systems tackle visual workload
When Dorothy visited Oz, she saw a horse of a different color. And when PC users move up to Silicon Graphics Inc. workstations, it's like visiting the Emerald City. Impossible things suddenly get easy. Silicon Graphics makes midrange and high-end workstations, servers and supercomputers, all oriented to visual computing. If you have admired movie special effects in the last several years, chances are the most eye-popping ones came from an SGI system.
Federal Contract Law - Let me put contract lingo into plain English for you
The Clinton administration has attacked a sacred cow here in the nation's capital. I'm not referring to sanctity of the Lincoln bedroom or even the ever-widening scope of grand jury subpoenas. I'm talking about something more fundamental. I mean bureaucratese, the English-like language in which government regulations and contracts are written.
Clarification
Judith Dahmann, chief scientist in the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office, provided the High-Level Architecture graphic that appeared with a story in the Aug. 24 issue of GCN about Defense Department plans to use the simulation standard.
Air Force uses network system for flight operations
Don Snelgrove, a systems engineer and former Air Force pilot, plots a practice mission on the Air Force Mission Support System. The Air Force is using an automated mission-planning software developed from commercial technology and with an open architecture that lets air crews use software to organize flight operations.
BRIEFING BOOK
Black money hole. The National Security Agency has drawn its cloak of secrecy over money matters, according to a Defense Department inspector general report released earlier this month. The classified report, FY 1997 Financial Statements for the National Security Agency, found that NSA has not instituted required internal controls and does not comply with laws and regulations, such as the Chief Financial Officers Act, necessary to produce accurate financial statements.
NOAA launches Web site displaying wacky goings on in world's weather
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has created a Web site that tracks chaotic weather patterns. "We wanted to give as much useful information in one place to the media and the public," said Tom Peterson, research meteorologist for NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. "The Web site will save our time with less questions to answer. It's cost-effective."
Koskinen stands out
Political appointees rarely seem to understand the challenges faced by the career federal managers they oversee. Sometimes appointees aren't at an agency long enough to do much, or they stay removed from the day-to-day routine. One example: Steve Kelman. Before returning to his Harvard University teaching post last year, Kelman ran the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. He had a real feel for the concerns and frustrations of lifelong federal managers.
Maryland vendor sets up routers for network managers to test drive
World of Routers of Rockville, Md., has set up an array of Cisco Systems Inc. routers that networking professionals can experiment with in a controlled, real-world environment. "As far as I know, it's the only one of its kind," president Thomas W. Graham said. Some companies and government agencies maintain in-house test facilities, but Graham said World of Routers is the first place anyone can pay by the hour for hands-on experience with live network routers.
Transportation funds date code repairs for state systems
The department has created a Web site to help state and local governments prioritize year 2000 repairs. The Transportation Department will let state and local governments use federal highway and transit funds for year 2000 repairs in their intelligent transportation systems, a department spokesman said late last month.
New modules diversify use of network simulator for engineers and planners
The modules can model traffic over satellite and circuit-switching networks. CACI Products Co. has introduced a suite of new modules for its flagship Comnet III network simulator. The modules can model traffic over satellite and circuit-switched networks, as well as predict application behavior. The Satellite and Mobile Module is targeted to the government market, said Chris LeBaron, vice president of strategic marketing for CACI Products of La Jolla, Calif.
Breaking News | NSA outsources IT work | GCN
For the first time, the National Security Agency has awarded a contract to outsource its systems operations. Under its NSA Breakthrough Program, the agency awarded Computer Sciences Corp. a five-year, $20 million contract to maintain its computers and provide software enhancements, configuration management, installations, and hardware and software upgrades. More than 50 CSC software engineers and computer specialists will handle the project from CSC's Maryland Intelligence Center in Hanover, Md. CSC subcontractors include Data Procurement Corp. of
IRS awards contract to develop public-key infrastructure
The IRS has awarded a contract to VeriSign Inc. to create and test a public-key infrastructure, a key piece of the service's future systems security architecture. Under a two-year contract, the Linthicum, Md., company will test whether a PKI will provide secure transmission of employee e-mail within the IRS. If the test is successful, the IRS will extend the contract for another year to test the PKI for the electronic filing of tax returns by IRS employees,
Microsoft will beef up product security for feds
REDMOND, Wash.—Microsoft Corp. is raising the ante in the competition to sell secure operating and messaging systems to the federal government. Company officials last week said that their client-server messaging and browser products would meet Level 2 of the Federal Information Processing Standard 140-1 for cryptographic security, rivaling that of Netscape Communications Corp. products.
SNEAKER
Q. OK, I know the Good Times virus was a hoax, but it sounds as if fiction has become fact. I keep hearing about weaknesses being discovered in many e-mail clients. How can I protect myself? A. Good Times is one of those urban legends that rose out of the collective paranoia of an increasingly wired world.
Will ODIN give the Macs at NASA another nudge?
As NASA officials gear up for the first orders under the Outsourcing Desktop Initiative for NASA program, they acknowledge they are sending a somewhat mixed message about the future of Apple Macintoshes at the space agency. "We ultimately don't know the outcome" regarding long-term support for Mac users, said Don Andreotta, NASA's deputy chief information officer for operations. Business decisions by ODIN contractors will determine the outcome, he said.
Beat the Clock
Test and verify. Maybe it's not too late to automate regression testing of code fixes. Officials of Mercury Interactive Corp. of Sunnyvale, Calif., say mainframe regression testing can proceed an order of magnitude faster with QuickTest 2000, which is sold on the General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule. Running under Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT, QuickTest 2000 simplifies and accelerates the creation of test scripts to verify the proper functioning of online transaction processing (OLTP) systems
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