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
2000 could cause recession, experts say
NEW YORK--A former Federal Reserve Bank official and a former Defense Department systems chief both recently warned the government about global fallout from the year 2000 computer crisis. "It's time to prepare for trouble," said Edward Yardeni, who once worked at the Fed in New York and is now chief economist and managing director of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, a multinational investment bank. He spoke at a conference here late last month.
NIH agency applies First Aid
Timothy Barnes bought First Aid for home use last year and liked it so much that he volunteered to beta-test a network version of the PC repair package. Barnes, chief of the Intramural Technical Systems Branch at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, last fall began testing the CyberMedia Support Server (CSS) Repair Engine for Workgroups 1.0 from CyberMedia Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif.
CD-ROM tower is faster with Windows 95 than with NT
When the GCN Lab previously tested SMS Data Products' Millenia CD-ROM tower, we encountered some performance and configuration problems. The new Millenia 700 has faster drives and a revamped communications module. Configuration problems were largely nonexistent this time around, but performance still lagged, especially under NT. Under Windows 95, programs can make direct calls to the disk hardware. Under NT, the operating system layer handles the calls.
Thin servers cut fat from LAN menus
Is your server feeling bloated these days? Client-server computing was supposed to rescue us from centralized mainframe networks by distributing the information more evenly. Instead, as enterprise data grew, the servers have gotten fatter and more expensive to manage. The recent trend toward a distributed server model has a new twist. In addition to setting up server-class hardware, loading an operating system and establishing thin-client accounts, you now can attach extra devices called thin servers
Pentium II notebooks are powerful but power-hungry
Although the mobile version of the 266-MHz Pentium II doesn't quite match the desktop version, it comes very close. It blows away the same-speed Pentium MMX, previously top-of-the-line in portable processors. The GCN Lab tested a Pentium II-powered Latitude CPi D266XT notebook from Dell Computer Corp. It displayed 22 percent better performance on the GCNdex32™ math benchmark than a 266-MHz Pentium MMX notebook. The score was about 6 percent lower than for a similar Dell
IRS rolls out final RFP
In the long-awaited final request for proposals for its tax systems modernization program, the IRS made changes to head in the direction IRS commissioner Charles Rossotti now wants the service to go. The IRS solicitation underscores the difference between Rossotti's vision and that of Arthur Gross, the former chief information officer who developed the draft RFP.
Navy seeks servicewide deals to cut software license costs
The Navy is working to negotiate as many servicewide license agreements as possible with its existing software vendors to get the lowest possible prices on software, maintenance and support. Navy and Novell Inc. in late January signed the Navy's first-ever enterprisewide licensing agreement, which covers all Novell products on the General Services Administration schedule. The multiyear agreement includes maintenance and telephone support for the Navy and Marine Corps.
Keep A-76 as policy
Congress should do the right thing with HR 716 and S 314. Trash them. The bills seek to turn the Office of Management and Budget's Circular A-76 policies into law. A-76 is the document that says agencies shouldn't compete with the private sector and should use commercial services when they're available at favorable cost.
It's time to make OMB Circular A-76 into law
Office of Management and Budget circulars are presidential decision directives to federal agencies telling them how to behave. One of the policy directives, OMB Circular A-76, titled Performance of Commercial Activities, has been a policy constant since 1955. During what is the 43rd year of the bedrock federal policy, it is time to enshrine the fundamental principle it represents in law. A-76 was initiated by President Eisenhower and reviewed and updated by the Johnson, Carter
CIOs advise best use of e-mail
That cute, animated Web birthday card sent to a federal employee is slowing down agency e-mail systems, a new report on improving agency e-mail interoperability said. The report, from the Chief Information Officer Council, offers guidelines on streamlining messaging. E-mail interoperability is a key issue for the CIO Council, and council members focused on it during the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's recent Virtual Government conference.
If you think you know what most techie terms mean--then read on
Readers often e-mail me questions about computer terms, so I thought it was time to write a real-world glossary of common technical words. Please e-mail me your additions and corrections. Battery life: Lies, damned lies and statistics. Boot: To reject with disgust, as in, "It didn't work, so I kept booting and rebooting it." Cold boot: The same operation, but performed with the contempt born of long experience.
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