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.
70 CPUs add up to big power
Researchers at the Energy Department's Los Alamos National Laboratory—tired of prohibitive pricing and long queues for supercomputing time—took matters into their own hands and wired 70 CPUs into one of the fastest and cheapest supercomputers in the world. Their homespun improvisation, called Avalon, can perform 20 billion floating-point operations per second (GFLOPS).
MathSoft boosts reporting feature of latest MathCAD
MathSoft Inc.'s MathCAD 8 Professional draws 2-D and 3-D charts and has rich OpenGL graphics features for reporting, said Chris Randles, vice president for sales and marketing at the Cambridge, Mass., company. Users can mix different measurement units, such as meters and feet, within the same MathCAD 8 document. An IntelliMath feature attempts to automate routine calculations by anticipating the user's next move.
Feds find uses for cameras, scanners
"It's a super little camera. We've used the daylights out of it.'' —Ronald Phelps, project manager, John F. Kennedy Space Center, about Ricoh's RDC-2 digital camera "We've had [an Epson 1200C scanner] for about a year and a half. However, we just started using it not too long ago because we didn't have anyone who knew how to use it and the software that goes with it. And I don't have the extra time
IT workers view 2000 through rose-colored glasses
There are no deadline extensions for the Year 2000 problem. We can rail and curse like King Canute, but the tide of time is rolling inexorably on. Ready or not, that magic New Year's Day of reckoning is coming. Unless you've been off on a desert island for the last 18 months, you know that computer types worldwide are finding they must pay for the previous generation's shortsightedness. Three decades of "this will be someone else's problem"
TECH REFRESH
GE Capital IT Solutions Inc. has added Hewlett-Packard Co. 9000 K-class enterprise servers to its General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule contract. The high-end HP 9000 K380 server starts at $61,983 with up to six 240-MHz, 64-bit PA-8200 processors and 8G of RAM. The seven-slot server supports up to 32-way symmetric multiprocessing under HP-UX 10.20.
PROFESSIONAL CALENDAR
24 Y2K vs. American Prosperity:Liability and the Links Conference. Washington. Contact Discovery Institute, 1402 Third Ave., Suite 400, Seattle, Wash. 98101; tel. 206-292-0401. 27-29 Space and Naval Warfare Systems Conference. San Diego. Contact National Defense Industrial Association, 3525 Del Mar Heights Road, #377, San Diego, Calif. 92130; tel. 888-816-2618. 29-30 MIL-STD 498 on Software Development Seminar. Washington. Contact System Technology Institute, P.O. Box 6907, Malibu, Calif. 90264; tel. 888-299-9071.
Panafax UF-770i suffers from difficult installation routines
Pros and cons: + Can save long-distance charges in some cases + High-quality fax machine – Difficult to configure using standard documentation – Cannot handle e-mail attachments Panasonic's Panafax UF-770i gives more than just the fax. The high-end fax machine can transmit not only over ordinary phone lines but also via the Internet, circumventing long-distance charges. But there are a few glitches.
Internet will treat you to cool info along the way of your research
One neat aspect of Internet research is that, on the way to look up something, you generally stumble across something else of significance. Here are some significant things I've stumbled across in recent weeks: Internet 2. It's going to be Indiana-based. The forthcoming national research network will operate at rates up to 1,000 times faster than the current Internet. The so-called Abilene portion, a dedicated network sponsored by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development, will connect
Bombings keep security hot topic
Tightened security against terrorist attacks at federal buildings and facilities will not translate into an immediate strengthening of security in government systems, leading security experts predicted. In fact, the barricades placed around the Washington Monument to block car bombs in the wake of the embassy bombings last month in Africa have little correlation to the cyberworld, experts said.
Lee says she'll continue on reform path
OFPP's Deidre A. Lee says she has been studying the best way of keeping reform on track. Deidre A. Lee has not finished decorating her new office in the Old Executive Office Building, but she has been busy setting priorities for the Office of Federal Procurement Policy.
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