coming UP
Take a tour of the front lines. The Aug. 10 GCN Spotlight will look at the daily trials and triumphs of six federal systems managers who work in the trenches, from the General Services Administration to the Navy. Webmasters, hone your page-making talents with authoring tools. The Aug. 10 Buyers Guide will have all the details on packages to build sites.
SQL Server gets an overhaul
C2 security is extremely important, and historically SQL Server has not been C2-certified. Jim Gray, a senior researcher at Microsoft Corp.'s Bay Area Research Center, is the company's database guru and chief scalability architect for Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. Besides supporting terabyte databases, Gray said SQL Server 7.0 will have an integrated online analytical processing (OLAP) server and an application programming interface called OLE DB for OLAP.
Agencies discover tool set to cure development ills
Program managers at NASA and the National Security Agency recently bought automated tools from Software Emancipation Technology Inc. of Burlington, Mass., to attack some of their most vexing client-server software development problems. The software craft is less than 50 years old, company president Donald Henrich said, and it lacks the structured processes that older engineering disciplines have evolved to handle complexity.
Navy hosts exercise without Coalition WAN
For Rim of the Pacific '98, a monthlong international maritime wargame, navies from six nations are running exercises without the benefit of the Coalition WAN. CWAN is the common coalition backbone that provides real-time collaborative planning, interoperability and connectivity between U.S. and allied forces. Forces set up the secret-level network for each use and dismantle it afterward.
Consolidation efforts give Navy leverage
GCN: During a recent briefing on the future of IT in the Navy, you didn't once mention the Information Technology for the 21st Century initiative. Is IT-21 still viable? MILLER: It's very much alive. IT-21 as an initiative is not going away, but it's not a program of record. What I'm trying to do is take IT-21, which is a fleet-driven initiative that doesn't consider all of the Navy, and extend it.
Walter Reed prescribes ATM
The Walter Reed Army Medical Center is replacing its tired and sickly information systems network with a new architecture. At the Washington medical center—the Army's largest—an asynchronous transfer mode network project will give the hospital better speed and fluidity in its information systems, hospital officials said. It will also put more flat-panel displays in patient wards and support as many as 470 X Window terminals, said Capt. Richard J. Gordon, the center's chief information officer.
PROFESSIONAL CALENDAR
24-26 Managing Information Security Programs Seminar. New York. Contact Michael I. Sobol Training Institute, 498 Concord St., Framingham, Mass. 01702; tel. 508-879-7999. 28 Management Problems of TechnicalPeople in Leadership Roles Seminar. Washington. Contact Fred Pryor Seminars, P.O. Box 2951, Shawnee Mission, Kan. 66201; tel. 800-255-6139. 9-11 Federal Database Colloquium Exposition and conference. San Diego. Contact Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, 4400 Fair Lakes Court, Fairfax, Va. 22033; tel. 703-631-6133. 14 Federal IT Systems
Fliers scout with GIS package
The Navy is installing a geographic information system on notebook PCs in E-2C Hawkeye early warning aircraft to overlay map data on targets in real time. Co-pilots in two Navy squadrons started using the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System (JTIDS) Moving Map Tactical Information Display System (JMMTIDS) in late March, said Cmdr. Kevin T. McCarthy of Airborne Early Warning Squadron 113.
Feds develop freeware app to foil hackers
Shadow combines monitoring with statistical assessment to detect events that filters cannot decode. A consortium of agencies and private organizations has released a free network intrusion detector to combat about 40 types of cyberattacks. The intrusion detection team at the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Dahlgren, Va., primarily developed the Shadow freeware using Energy Department code.
DOD raises concerns over possible AT&T, British Telecom deal
A proposed $10 billion global venture between AT&T Corp. and British Telecommunications PLC has raised security concerns about a major Defense Information Systems Network contract held by AT&T, Defense Department officials said. The Defense Information Systems Agency is studying whether the deal would compromise AT&T's $5 billion DISN Transmission Services for the Continental United States contract. AT&T is providing backbone and access area transmission services at bandwidth rates of T1 and higher to DOD facilities in
System details
Server hardware: Dell Computer Corp. PowerEdge 4200 server with single 333-MHz processor RAM: 256M Storage: 20G Operating system: Microsoft Windows NT Web server: Microsoft Site Server Connection: T1 line Application interface: Allaire Corp. Cold Fusion, augmented by Unix perl scripts. Java applications are available in the kids' section. Host: A Washington-area FEMA office Personnel: Technical support from Bell Atlantic Federal Services Webmaster: Dave Wellman of Bell Atlantic Corp. Content manager: Mark Wolfson of FEMA Graphics:
Set your sights on smart sites
Heading into the new millennium, the Internet will evolve into an ever-more sophisticated tool for communications and collaboration, according to industry analysts. Just about everything that can be done on a standalone computer now probably will be fused to the Net. Several emerging technologies have a head start in transforming the Internet over the next few years.
New Intergraph graphics bundle is a whiz at 3-D apps, company says
Intergraph Corp. is claiming that its Wildcat 3-D graphics system can perform up to 10 times better than current 3-D desktop systems running Unix or Microsoft Windows NT. The Huntsville, Ala., company announced the graphics package last month at the Siggraph trade show in Orlando, Fla. The performance boost comes by way of the Intense 3-D Wildcat 4100 accelerator chip set and ParaScale architecture, which will be standard in all Intergraph TDZ 2000 ViZual workstations. Users
British conservation group claims hacker had Navy Net address
An official with a British conservation group alleges that someone using a Navy computer at the Pentagon tried to hack into the group's server. In an e-mail to the media, the group claimed that an unknown user at the Pentagon tried and failed three times to breach a secure link on a Web server used by the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society located in Bath, England.
Combining e-mail from multiple accounts is a very messy process - COMMUNICATIONS
Many government employees have e-mail accounts tucked away all over the Internet: perhaps a Novell GroupWise account at work, a NetCom or America Online account at home, and an extra account at http://www.hotmail.com for watching mail lists. It's nice to be so plugged in, but multiple accounts mean lengthy address books at each location. If you want to merge address books or combine message folders, compatibility problems often ensue.
People
The General Services Administration has named William A. "Bill" Griessel assistant regional administrator of the Federal Technology Service. He will head operations in the six-state Great Lakes region, headquartered in Chicago. Frank Lalley has become the assistant commissioner of the Office of Service Delivery at the General Services Administration's Federal Technology Service. He will lead the transition to the FTS 2001 long-distance telecommunications service when contracts are awarded this fall.
BUYERS GUIDE - Presentation hardware
"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players." —William Shakespeare Check this list before you hit the road If it's important, carry a spare. If you can't, rethink your presentation. Use a carrying case that can survive a drop by a luggage handler. Consider the size of your audience. Will you need a built-in public-address system? Does your presentation demand a whiteboard, and will there be one at
A late entry in firewall assessment gets kudos for performance, speed
One product was not available during the test period—CyberGuard Firewall for NT, Version 4.1 from CyberGuard Corp. of Fort Lauderdale, Fla. National Software Testing Laboratory has since tested CyberGuard and found it a top performer. One caveat: Use of network address translation reduced performance of the other firewalls, and CyberGuard does dynamic translation that the lab did not test.
Toot your horn, and increase traffic to your Web site with portals
Portal is the buzzword of the moment, just as push was last summer. Chances are, the term will lose its panache as fast as push did. But the idea of building a popular entry point for important information will survive and thrive. The fact that portals have risen to the top of the collective Internet consciousness marks an evolution in our understanding of how people use and navigate the Internet.
HHS wants feedback on a new identification system
The Health and Human Services Department, which Congress has charged with creating a health care identification numbering system, wants to get the public's view of a new national ID. In its 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, Congress directed HHS to come up with what it called Unique Health Identifiers for all citizens. The UHI numbers would let the government, health insurers, hospitals, doctors and health researchers track peoples' medical histories from birth to death.
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