FAA: Aged mainframes are good to go for 2000
The old IBM Corp. mainframes that the Federal Aviation Administration uses to host directional and radar applications for the nation's air traffic control systems are ready for the year 2000, an FAA official said last week. We looked at over 1 million lines of microcode in the hosts and found that it will transition to the millennium in a routine fashion," FAA spokesman Paul Takemoto said.
The sky will not fall - EDITORIAL
If the year 2000 problem was a giant asteroid, it would probably be flaming out in the upper atmosphere about now. A few embers would hit a roof here and there, but society could exhale. We're not out of the woods yet on 2000, but there are signs that the professional scare consultants ought to find other work.
GSA gets quick payback from antitheft app
In a matter of months, a General Services Administration office in Atlanta recouped the $6,000 investment it made in notebook PC theft prevention software. GSA and federal law enforcement officials in Atlanta earlier this year recovered three stolen notebook computers, breaking up a ring of PC thieves in the process. The Federal Protective Service traced the stolen notebooks using CompuTrace software from Absolute Software Corp. of Vancouver, British Columbia.
ImageCast Deluxe speeds up the configuration of multiple PCs
Price: $250 for 25-license pack; $795 for 100-pack and unlimited multicasting to limited number of target machines Pros and cons: + Multicast fast and reliable + Easy to set up host and destination PCs – Supports only Ethernet multicasts – Backup utility slow Real-life requirements: Win9x or NT, Ethernet connection for multicast, CD-ROM drive
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
GCN column is required reading Walter R. Houser's column, "Microsoft's vigilance makes it king of the desktop" [GCN, June 29, Page 24], is right on track and should be required reading at the Defense Information Systems Agency. Even with the closing of the Ada Joint Program Office, the community ignoring DISA's demand for Open Systems Interconnection over TCP/IP, the agency's vision that everything is going to Unix, the millions
ENTERPRISE COMPUTING - NEW PRODUCTS
Mercator middleware tools from TSI International Software Ltd. can transform and map data in real time for mission-critical applications. The Wilton, Conn., company's Mercator tools support one-step transformations of electronic data interchange X12 transaction sets and EDIFACT messages. New functions in Mercator 1.4 include a system editor for managing transaction workflow and a launch engine for event-driven data transformations.
Tool offloads Cobol date code work to workstations
The TouchPoint feature lets users create code fragments for testing. Micro Focus Inc. has developed a Cobol maintenance suite for workstations that is aimed at agencies overwhelmed by mainframe maintenance backlogs. Some early users of the Mainframe Express suite have boosted their code modification and testing productivity as much as 50 percent, said officials of the Mountain View, Calif., company.
Be businesslike about archiving electronic records, NARA says
NARA is not going to tell agencies in detail what to do, Miller said. The National Archives and Records Administration is recommending that agencies use an electronic record-keeping system only if it makes business sense. NARA last week published in the Federal Register its latest proposal on archiving electronic records. The proposal is a revision of the initial recommendations that NARA issued last month [GCN, June 29, Page 67].
INTERVIEW John Mercer, government reformer
Last year Mercer left government to become deputy director for government performance planning at Federal Data Corp. of Bethesda, Md. As a consultant, Mercer advises agencies how to implement the GPRA legislation. His clients include the Veterans Affairs Department, Office of Personnel Management, FBI and agencies of the Defense and Interior departments.
Border Patrol agents, working in desert and other remote areas, test portable PCs
The Immigration and Naturalization Service is testing portable computer systems to help Border Patrol agents do fingerprint identification and voice data entry. The lightweight systems have ruggedized cases for temperature extremes and rough treatment in the desert. About 8,000 Border Patrol agents make more than 1 million apprehensions each year, said Fernanda Young, INS assistant commissioner in the Data Systems Division. Agents patrol 8,000 miles of international boundaries by aircraft, boat and vehicle, on horseback and on
JCALS turns to VPNs as way to serve remote users
Challenged with providing secure transmission among more than 240 Joint Continuous Acquisition and Lifecycle Support WAN sites, JCALS prime contractor Computer Sciences Corp. investigated the types of virtual private networks available. JCALS was established jointly by the Defense Department and the Defense Logistics Agency in 1991 to link disparate automated systems at military sites across the United States through a combination of LAN and WAN connections. The connections are designed to let users access, move and
Toshiba takes the plunge and manufactures departmental and workgroup PC servers
All Toshiba servers will have year 2000-ready Phoenix 4.0 BIOSes. The Computer Systems Division of Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. will move into full-line computer manufacturing this summer when it delivers its first departmental and workgroup PC servers for the U.S. market. The two-way 350- and 400-MHz Pentium II servers will have hot-swap drive bays and optional Intelligent Input/Output RAID storage drives. An I2O PCI slot supports direct throughput from the
Marines face challenge of moving older systems from Vines to NT
Maj. John R. Burnette remembers when the Marine Corps' 10-year enterprise network partnership with Banyan Systems Inc. started to come apart. Burnette, who had backed Banyan Vines and StreetTalk messaging for more than a decade, said an enterprising programmer in Okinawa wrote a routine that converted the Marines' StreetTalk global directory into an export file that worked fine under Microsoft Exchange Server.
DOD begins certifying records management apps
The Defense Department has certified two products under its records management standard and could certify several others in the next few months, a DOD official said. The standard, known as DOD 5015.2-STD, lists the specifications for a product to be certified for use within DOD. The National Archives and Records Administration is considering recommending the DOD standard for governmentwide use [GCN, Feb. 23, Page 57].
Army plans $15b assault
Army will spend big on digitization Fiscal 1999: $2.6 billion Fiscal 2000: $2.9 billion Fiscal 2001: $2.9 billion Fiscal 2002: $3.1 billion Fiscal 2003: $3.1 billion The Army has unveiled a five-year plan to spend nearly $15 billion to digitize battlefield operations.
FSS requests proposals for support services contract worth $4.7 billion
The General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service has issued a request for proposals for a variety of information technology support services for the western United States. The solicitation is called the Applications 'N Support for Widely Diverse End-User Requirements (ANSWER). It includes requirements and design research, analysis and definition, system development, software maintenance, and facilities management support services for business, scientific and engineering applications.
PROFESSIONAL CALENDAR
10-12 Information Systems Auditing Seminar. Chicago. Contact Michael I. Sobol Training Institute, 498 Concord St., Framingham, Mass. 01702; tel. 508-879-7999. 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 Technical People in Leadership Roles Seminar. Washington. Contact Fred Pryor Seminars, P.O. Box 2951, Shawnee Mission, Kan. 66201; tel. 800-255-6139.
PRODUCT REVIEWS - Report Card| GCN
Firewall-1 HeatSeeker Pro Guardian Eagle NT BorderWare Proxy Server Overall B B B B B B C Remote administration A *C A *A B A N/A Access control B A B A B A B Logging D C C C C C F FTP traffic in Mbps 22.8 42.2 91.4 51.0 33.2 51.3 61.1 HTTP traffic in Mbps 50.1
Honest-to-goodness increases in CD-ROM drive speeds are near
CD-ROM technology is the subject of two books I've written, and I rely on it for much of my research, archiving and backup. So heed what I say: 24X, 32X and other variable-rate CD-ROM drives are hardly any faster than a single-speed 8X drive. They achieve peak performance over only a tiny portion of the 550M disk media.
SNEAKER.NET
Q. Some users say Microsoft Windows 98 is just an upgrade to Windows 95. Is that right? A. It's a good analogy. Win98 is to Win95 as Windows 3.1 was to Windows 3.0. If you're already running Windows 98, go to the Control Panel and double-click on the System icon. You'll see the words "Microsoft Windows 98 4.10.1998." Sounds to me like a long-winded way of calling it Windows 4.1.
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