IRS' plan for ETA pilots displeases contractors
After the IRS decided to make its Electronic Tax Administration procurement a series of pilots, four would-be contractors said this month they are not bidding on the ETA contract. Officials of the companies--Andersen Consulting of Chicago, Electronic Data Systems Corp., H&R Block Financial Corp. of Kansas City, Mo., and TRW Inc.--said an October draft solicitation had implied the IRS would seek integration services for a vast electronic filing program.
Compaq Deskpro EP gets modest boost from 440BX
As PC makers climb on the BX bus, don't expect an express ride--at least not yet. Intel Corp.'s new 440BX chip set runs the system bus at 100 MHz; the 440LX chip set in previous PCs and servers ran at 66 MHz. An extra 34 MHz of bandwidth between processor and memory does improve performance, but less dramatically than you might think.
Power User cleans up disks, reviews books and chases a Tiger
Have you ever gotten a few scratches on a CD audio disk that made it skip? The same thing happens to far costlier CD-ROM program and data disks, and replacement costs can really add up. Damaged program and archival disks will proliferate as time goes by because users have been led to expect CDs to last for years. But when they get passed around an office or library, rather than protected inside a CD server,
Procurement proposal stacks deck in agencies' favor
The government may be trying to act more like a company in its procurements, but old habits die hard. One persistent old habit is the tendency to strengthen its bargaining power by changing the rules. In the midst of the reinvention revolution, the Defense Department is the latest recidivist. It is floating a legislative proposal that is a classic example of changing the rules to get an advantage. Most of the plan's provisions give the
Servers, workstations have edge in taking advantage of BX speed
The new 100-MHz 440BX motherboard bus, which Intel Corp. rolled out last week, will enhance system performance, particularly for workstations and servers. The current 440LX bus runs at 66 MHz. New Intel 350- and 400-MHz Pentium II processors take advantage of the faster bus. Chips that are faster still will arrive before year's end.
Justice aims to block merger
The Justice Department is suing to block an $11.6 billion merger between Lockheed Martin Corp. and Northrop Grumman Corp. on the grounds that it would stifle competition for military contracts and raise the price tags on critical Defense Department systems. Justice filed the anti-trust lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington late last month after negotiations broke down between the government and Lockheed Martin. If the merger is successful, the defense industry will be left
Is less enough?
The situation between the Social Security Administration and Unisys Corp. has been called a classic agency-contractor confrontation. Well, not exactly. SSA is merely sticking to the terms of its Intelligent Workstation/LAN contract, which calls for 100-MHz Pentium PCs--tens of thousands of them--to be installed on LANs at SSA offices throughout the United States.
Quarterdeck's CleanSweep 4.0 excels at purging Net caches
CleanSweep 4.0 diligently catalogs your data clutter, empties your trash cans, alphabetizes your CD-ROMs and presents a laundry list of things needing repair. If you didn't buy its predecessors, check out this version. The Quarterdeck Corp. utility for Microsoft Windows 95 has resident programs called Smart Sweep and Internet Sweep that comb your hard drive for residual files left behind after deleting programs manually or via Win95's imperfect Add/Remove Programs.
Raines resigns, will return to Fannie Mae
Franklin D. Raines, director of the Office of Management and Budget for the past eighteen months, is returning to the private sector. Raines will leave OMB May 20 to become chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Fannie Mae in Washington. He had been vice chairman of Fannie Mae before taking the helm of OMB in September 1996.
FTS data transfer is growing
FTS 2000 networks, which started a decade ago supplying mainly long-distance voice service, are expanding to handle booming data transmission demands. "Data traffic [growth] is going to continue to be exponential," said Dennis J. Fischer, commissioner of the Federal Technology Service, at the FTS 2000 Users Forum in Atlanta last month.
IT helps Navy manage bases - Pilot ATM intranet links security, administrativesystems and cuts costs
The Navy hopes a pilot called Smart Base will help it run its bases less expensively and more efficiently. Smart Base, which uses an asynchronous transfer mode intranet to consolidate base-level operations, would incorporate smart cards, bar codes and cameras at security gates and other automated systems to reduce staff and manage administrative tasks.
VA strikes gold, stores agencies' data in old mine
Veterans Affairs Department officials see no decline in the government's demand for off-site storage, in spite of and partly because of digital technologies. The VA Office of Information Resources Management (OIRM) runs a successful business storing not just government-generated paper and microform records but also tapes, floppy diskettes and CD-ROM disks.
Judge chides NARA for bucking archive ruling
Enough is enough is the view a federal judge has taken on a government records policy that lets agencies delete electronic records as long as they have printed copies on file. The National Archives and Records Administration "flagrantly violated" an October order that prohibited federal agencies from deleting electronic records without regard for their content, U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman concluded this month in a 10-page ruling.
Untapped GovNews groups spring eternal with federal material
If there's a shining star in Internet UseNet News, it has to be the GovNews group. Organized last year with help from FinanceNet, a cooperative association affiliated with Vice President Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government, GovNews has become a large and active resource for information sharing by government users.
AWIPS gets a final OK
Secretary William Daley this month approved the final deployment plan for 152 weather stations. The announcement brought a collective sigh of relief from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials, who have battled for full deployment of the $520 million system for the past two years. But the struggle to field AWIPS, a one-time presidential priority system, goes back roughly a decade to NOAA's original plan to modernize the government's weather systems.
Infrastructure security needs feds' full attention
What can anyone do about infrastructure threats? You come home at night and park a block from your house. Walking home, you are vulnerable. Anything can happen. Robberies and worse can occur. What do you do to protect yourself from potentially life-threatening situations? This is the type of problem that the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection considered at the national level in a study completed last year. The nation's infrastructure--energy, banking, transportation, human services,
BioMouse fingerprint ID system digit-izes PC access
On the screen, a dialog box asked for my user name. After I entered it, the software displayed a crosshair and invited me to place a finger on the BioMouse's red scanner. When I pressed down my left thumb, a clear fingerprint image appeared along the bottom of the screen, so I moved my thumb closer to the center of the sensor window. Almost instantly the security window disappeared, and I was in.
Agency buyers find they're shelling out far less for PCs
Agencies have paid 20 percent less for desktop PCs in the past 12 months than they had previously, government vendors said, and feds will be able to buy monitorless systems for as little as $500 before the year is out. "If you're talking about a 233- or 266-MHz PC, the price points are outrageous," said Chris Zukowski, a systems analyst in the Corporate Information Office at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Md. "We're seeing prices
NASA meets via switched nets
The public switched telephone network has had a good 100-year run, but circuit switching "is obsolete. Its time is passed," said Tom Evslin, chairman of ITXC Corp. Evslin, who heads the Internet telephony company in North Brunswick, N.J., spoke at the recent Computer Telephony Expo in Los Angeles. But agencies aren't ordering flowers for the funeral yet. NASA's Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, for example, looks to the public switched network for dataconferencing instead of
Global roaming, virtual private network duo builds efficient intranet
Every now and then, a pair of ideas converges to change the way we do our daily work. This is happening right now with a pair of technologies: virtual private networks (VPNs) and global roaming (GR) services. Government workers who telecommute or do a lot of work on the road have been overtaxing the aged modem banks that offer the only full access to their office networks. One promising solution has been to put a
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