Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
The Navy's Smart Ship technology may not be as smart as the service contends. Although PCs have reduced workloads for sailors aboard the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown, software glitches resulted in system failures and crippled ship operations, according to Navy officials. Navy brass have called the Yorktown Smart Ship pilot a success in reducing manpower, maintenance and costs. The Navy began running shipboard applications under Microsoft Windows NT so that fewer sailors would be needed to
Twelve HHS systems professionals win recognition
The Health and Human Services Department and GCN have honored 12 HHS employees for excellence in systems development, management and implementation. The HHS employees received their awards at a recent GCN Forum luncheon in Washington.
ENTERPRISE COMPUTING | Beat the Clock
| Beat the Clock A unique event. Industry executives and federal officials are worried about survival of the telecommunications infrastructure as devices tick over to Jan. 1, 2000. An AT&T Corp. executive testified at a recent House subcommittee meeting that averting network and service outages may be the most critical task the telecom giant has ever faced.
Carl's Cartoon
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Online or off, DropChute tells you when a file is waiting
To send a file via DropChute, you designate the recipient and the file to transfer, but—and this is the important part—you don't send to the recipient's e-mail address, and the recipient need not be online. If you are online and the recipient isn't, DropChute from Hilgraeve Inc. of Monroe, Mich., sends a note saying that a file is ready to send. The note pops up on the recipient's DropChute icon when the person goes online again.
First servers with Xeon chips wear Dell label
Dell Computer Corp. last week became the first enterprise server maker to ship systems based on the new Pentium II Xeon chip and 450NX chip set from Intel Corp. Chairman Michael Dell vowed to lower prices in the high-end server market through efficiencies that Dell's build-to-order business model has spread to other parts of the computer industry.
Armada 7800, Solo 5100XL serve well as weapons for road warriors | GCN BuyersGUIDE
The Armada 7800 from Compaq Computer Corp. is a good example of a high-end portable notebook that could also do double-duty service as a desktop device. The one I tried came with a 13.3-inch XGA active-matrix screen, 266-MHz Mobile Pentium II CPU, 64M of synchronous dynamic RAM, S3 Virge/MX graphics controller with 4M of RAM, built-in modem, removable 5G Smart hard drive and 20X CD-ROM drive.
SNAPSHOT
PARKER: I think HUD has a very strong appreciation of IT. For the most part, the end users and middle management understand it and understand its benefits. I'm not sure that the middle management and end-user community have totally come to grips with the benefits of technology as an enabler to do what we call "One HUD"—to be able to share information across the board. We have to utilize technology to do that. They're still
This $150 contact database maximizes your limited time
Box Score B+ Maximizer 5.0 Multiactive Software Inc., Vancouver, Wash.; tel: 800-804-6299 http://www.maximizer.com Price: $150 Pros and cons: + Good interrelation of contacts – Steep learning curve Real-life requirements: Win95 or NT running on a 75-MHz Pentium, 35M free on hard drive
Electronic software distribution is a hit at Defense
Some estimates put ESD sales as high as several billion dollars per year by 2000. Defense Department employees are at the head of the line for installing Microsoft Windows 98 on their desktops, because electronic software distribution (ESD) lets them download it immediately.
Two offices TRIM archiving
The Center for Army Lessons Learned and the Office of Thrift Supervision both have archiving projects under way using a Defense Department 5015.2-Std-certified software application called TRIM. The Tower Records and Information Management package, from Tower Software Corp. of Fairfax, Va. [GCN, June 29, Page 1], is a C++ client-server application originally developed for the Australian government.
ENTERPRISE COMPUTING
New-generation System/390 complementary metal-oxide semiconductor servers from Amdahl Corp. can execute up to 686 million instructions per second when configured with the maximum 12 processors. The Millennium 700 Series CMOS servers have a single-processor speed of 80 MIPS. They accept up to 16G of memory and 15 logical partitions, and they can be reconfigured online.
DLA swats at E-Mall's bugs
E-Mall items can be bought using IMPAC credit cards or via the Military Standard Requisitioning and Issue Procedure, a DLA official says. The Defense Logistics Agency's E-Mall is running into technical problems on the user side, a DLA official said. E-Mall, a Web site that gives military personnel worldwide access to more than 2.4 million parts and products in vendor and government supply databases, needs minor engineering improvements, DLA analyst
Clean up Net files before they are demanded
Here is a question: Can a Freedom of Information Act requester obtain a copy of a federal employee's cookie file stored in the employee's Web browser? A cookie file lets a Web server operator tell a browser to store certain information and to give it back on subsequent visits to the same server.
All synonomous reform programs are not the same
Procurement reform in the 1990s has been a crazy quilt of programs, lacking consistency and coherence. With each round of reform, buying was supposed to be simpler than before. But because the recent procurement changes don't form a single, unitary program, we can judge each one on its own merits. With the first data coming in, it may soon be possible to decide which new reform programs are worth keeping and which are failed experiments.
Tool kit keeps mobile notebook PC users on the ball
Pros and cons: + Easy to use and not overly technical + 24-hour phone support – Settings can be overwritten on shared notebook Real-life requirements: 8M RAM and 10M free on hard drive Sometimes the simplest things work best. The utilities in Norton Mobile Essentials are surprisingly low-tech, but they throw out a lifeline to frustrated notebook computer users.
DESKTOP COMPUTING | New Products
| New Products IBM Corp.'s InfoPrint 20 workgroup laser printer prints 20 pages per minute and uses the Adobe PostScript page description language for graphics handling. The printer's installation CD-ROM has a networking wizard to set up the proper management tools and drivers for Microsoft Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0, Novell NetWare and Unix.
Television-quality Web display is possible, but browsers must catch up
Will government webmasters be SMILing in the months ahead? Probably only a few. The World Wide Web Consortium this month recommended adoption of the Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language 1.0 as a standard after six months of debate. But federal administrators won't be integrating SMIL into their sites for months yet. Championed as the first big effort to control the display format of Web multimedia, SMIL likely will find its first government use at training sites.
Date code fix bollixes predictions on federal IT budgets, analysts say
The cost of fixing date code is still a wild card when predicting federal spending on information technology, an industry analyst said. "It's obvious the government estimate is below the actual cost to fix this problem," said Michael D. Groneck, an analyst with Input Inc., a Vienna, Va., research company. The Social Security Administration, for example, started fixing its systems in the late 1980s and still isn't finished with date code remediation, he said. Agencies that
Choose SurfSaver if you need to save Web pages for reference
Pros and cons: + Easy to use + Powerful enough for professional use + Competent search tool – Works only with Microsoft Internet Explorer Real-life requirements: PC running Microsoft Internet Explorer A problem with the Internet is that there is no guarantee that the information you tapped into one day will be in the same spot the next.
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