AID awards contracts for global PC upgrades
The Agency for International Development last month awarded three companies contracts worth $50 million in total to upgrade AID's desktop systems around the globe. Government Technology Solutions Inc. of Placerville, Calif., Vanstar Government Systems Inc. of Fairfax, Va., and World Wide Technology Inc. of St. Louis will supply hardware and software for the upgrade, said John Streufert, the agency's IRM director.
Treasury creates site on the Web for selling bonds
The Treasury Department will begin selling Treasury bills, notes and bonds over the Internet next week under a new service called Buy Direct. To buy bonds online, users must already have an account with the department, said Peter Hollenbach, spokesman for Treasury's Bureau of the Public Debt. The Treasury site will ask for proprietary information to identify buyers.
We must have laws for lawyer-client e-mailing
There is a critical need for Congress and state legislatures to protect e-mail communications between clients and lawyers. With all the scandal investigations going on in Washington, you may think this issue is only for high-level politicos. But the fact is, anyone who may communicate with an inspector general or agency counsel on a contract dispute could get into trouble.
Work begins on Government Computer-Based Patient Record
The goal is a "seamless exchange and access to information." Litton PRC Inc. will develop the first version of the Government Computer-Based Patient Record, under a one-year task order that could set broad new standards for health care records. Six of the seven Lot 3 prime contractors for the Defense Medical Information System/Systems Integration, Design, Development, Operations and Maintenance Services II contract submitted GCPR proposals to the Defense Supply Service–Washington in June, said Col.
Database update | BUYERS GUIDE
In recent years, many database management system vendors struggled to move their products from a relational to an object-oriented model. Now the dust has settled a bit. Most databases described as O-O actually are what end users consider O-O, but this hasn't always been true. For a while, any remote link to object-orientation, including relational DBMSes created in an O-O language, were categorized as O-O.
VA expects to meet March year 2000 deadline
VA's Harold Gracey says VA's success is due to department-wide planning and an early start. The Veterans Affairs Department will meet the administration's March deadline for year 2000 readiness, VA's senior systems officials said last month. VA has renovated 94 percent of its 319 applications, which support 11 mission-critical systems, said Harold Gracey, acting assistant secretary of VA for information and technology. VA has tested 84 percent of the systems and
GAO: Sloppy oversight lessens accuracy of spending data
Data on agencies' procurement habits is still unreliable despite improved financial systems, GAO said. Procurement reform and budget cuts have slowed agencies in their end-of-the-year race to spend, but bad data makes tracking the trend difficult, the General Accounting Office said in a recent report.
Theorizing atoms as a computing tool is like taking a quantum leap
Over the years, I've followed research in photonics (using light instead of electrons for transmissions) and quantum-molecular computing without finding anything of practical use. That may be changing. At some point we'll reach the scientific speed limits of solid-state computers that use very large-scale integrated chips. I'm not talking about hard-drive or bus speed limits, both of which have lots of room to grow. What I mean is that circuit components inside a processor can't get
HCFA develops draft standards for protecting privacy of medical data
HHS Secretary Donna Shalala says the department must expand the legal protections for patient medical information. The Health and Human Services Department last month proposed what it called a carefully developed set of new national security standards to protect electronic medical records in the United States. The standards were ordered under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). The law doesn't mandate the kind of technology that must be used because
Services agree on a proposal for modeling architecture
JMASS is a tool box that lets you build simulations. The Army, Navy and Air Force last month approved an operational requirements document that could result in a common simulation and modeling architecture. The document outlines the elements needed for the Joint Modeling and Simulation System and provides a framework for analyzing the engineering, design, testing and evaluation of weapons systems the Defense Department wants to buy.
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."
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