What sort of laws will affect health data?
It is time to take a fresh look at a tough information policy issue now at the heart of the debate over health privacy legislation. The issue sounds simple: Should federal privacy law pre-empt state laws? The implications of the debate are indirectly important to managers of federal systems containing individuals' health information. Should federal prevail, it would be more likely to foster a single, governmentwide privacy policy as opposed to a patchwork of agency-by-agency
DOE gives systems makeover
The Energy Department is giving a major face-lift to information systems for its Chicago Operations Office, upgrading servers, workstations and PCs, and constructing an intranet that will tie all the pieces together. "We're hoping to have the intranet up and running this spring," said Ronald Kuziel, systems design and analysis manager for SVRS of Argonne, Ill., DOE's contractor.
SSA faces a training challenge
Almost 10 years after the advent of Microsoft Windows, Social Security Administration employees are getting client PCs with graphical user interfaces. The agency has installed more than a third of the 1,742 LANs running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 through the Intelligent Workstation/LAN contract with Unisys Corp., said Tony Urreta, vice president of operations for Social Security programs at Unisys' Federal Systems Division.
StatServer analyzes situation
StatServer 2.0 brings World Wide Web publishing capabilities to the S-Plus statistical data mining tools from MathSoft Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. Built for sharing multidimensional data sets over intranets or the Internet, StatServer performs more than 2,000 analysis and visualization functions, MathSoft officials said. The S-Plus 4.0 statistical data mining tools do exploratory data analysis, visualization and statistical modeling, all of which aid analysts in generating hypotheses, said Rick Bohdanowicz, vice president and general manager
Dreamweaver brings ease to HTML coding
Just when you thought you had Hypertext Markup Language authoring down pat, the World Wide Web Consortium goes and changes it. The latest HTML specification, Dynamic HTML, promises slicker presentation, tighter browser integration and multimedia without plug-in hassles. Although DHTML can be complicated, its blend of JavaScript, style sheets and HTML may do wonderful things for your Web site.
Date code crisis spreads
Just 20 months away from 2000, it's dawning on systems managers that client-server networks might pose even more insidious date code problems than the mainframe systems they have concentrated on fixing. Government organizations cannot deal with the client-server crisis until they have accurate inventories of their networks, said year 2000 consultant William Ulrich, president of the Tactical Strategy Group Inc. of Soquel, Calif.
Suit of armor fits 21st century
ORLANDO, Fla.--The Army is developing a weapons and body armor system that will give foot soldiers a digital battlefield map on a helmet video display. The system, known as Land Warrior, is a combination of body armor, weapons system and command and control system. The soldier wears a helmet assembly subsystem with software and radio communications.
The Rat takes his show on the road and finds train travel on track
The Rat's agency headquarters has tightened its security following a wave of pie attacks on the information technology hierarchy over the past few weeks. No one can pin down the identities of the attackers. The only thing they have in common is a strange war cry: "MEII--Minimum Essential Information Infrastructure--nincompoops!"
Disk Mapper does spring cleaning of your hard drive, anytime
As hard drives clog up with ever-larger files, it's getting to be a real challenge to clean them out properly. Disk Mapper shows all your files graphically, so you can pinpoint the largest ones for deleting or compressing. It has handy management tools for large and small files, too.
Clinton nominates Lee for OFPP post
President Clinton has nominated Deidre A. Lee as the next administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. If the Senate OKs her nomination, Lee will replace Steven Kelman, who left the Office of Management and Budget post in September to return to his teaching job at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
FBI suspects two teens in DOD systems attack
The FBI is investigating whether two California youths are the culprits behind a hack attack that breached 11 Defense Department systems last month, an FBI official said. "We did two searches on [Feb. 25], and we seized hardware, software, printers and other peripherals," said George Grotz, an FBI spokesman in the agency's San Francisco office.
'98 shapes up to be doozy for telecom, feds predict
With billions of dollars' worth of federal telecommunications contracts up for grabs, this year will be a big, if stressful, one for networking and telecommunications negotiations, top government telecom executives predicted recently. The government will be ruthless in leveraging its buying power, said Dennis J. Fischer, commissioner of the General Services Administration's Federal Technology Service, last month at the 11th annual Federal Telecommunications Conference in McLean, Va.
Congress does U-turn on NGI's future funding
In a change of heart, House and Senate lawmakers have drafted bills that would ensure that Next Generation Internet research receives at least $200 million for fiscal years 1999 and 2000. Both houses of Congress last fall refused to fund NGI at the level the administration had requested. After complaining that agencies had no clear plan for NGI research, Congress approved $85 million instead of the $105 million Clinton requested for the program for this
MathWork's math tool requires advanced programming skill
There are two kinds of advanced math programs for PCs. One kind has an interactive, graphical interface with a programming language hidden underneath. The other kind is mostly just a programming language. MatLab falls into the second category. It's easy for mathematicians, engineers and programmers to learn, but hard for nontechnical users. Although you can solve problems interactively at the command line, MatLab's strength is its powerful, C-like language.
Education limits PC buys to Dell, Compaq brands
Although the Education Department is limiting PC and server buys to Compaq Computer Corp. and Dell Computer Corp. brands, it has drawn no flak about whether it's restricting competition, Education officials said. In an August letter, chief information officer Don Rappaport announced a decision by the department's Information Technology Investment Review Board to adopt what he termed a standards approach.
With Microsoft OSes, choose carefully
There are so many desktop operating systems on the market that choosing one is like picking a card, any card. Some government users can't or won't buy an OS from Microsoft Corp. For the many who do, here's a look at what that choice will mean down the road.
GIS packages come to rescue
After a January storm left three inches of ice on parts of New England, New York and Quebec, two geographic information system packages helped federal and New York state officials organize rescue operations. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, Army National Guard and five New York state departments cooperated using software from Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. of Redlands, Calif., and MapInfo Corp. of Troy, N.Y., said Dan O'Brien, program manager at New York's Emergency Management
Is DOD the archiving savior?
A Defense Department archiving program could be a white knight for government agencies working to establish an archiving policy for electronic documents. The Defense Information Systems Agency's Joint Interoperability Test Command Records Management Application (RMA) test at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., could become the standard for storing and managing documents governmentwide.
Pastry bandits deliver just desserts to Gates, fellow techno cohorts
When Bill Gates' face collided with a pie in Belgium, the incident illustrated something that even the Winter Olympics was unable to show: There are events that unite the world in moments of victory and satisfaction. The Rat wishes that he had lent a paw in the custard cake flinging. Alas, he was tied up here in the States, setting up LAN and WAN connections for a temporary office.
Make sure that if you buy an inexpensive PC, it doesn't bite back
My last column mentioned sub-$1,000 PC deals from small as well as big-name companies. I decided to spring for a super cheapie to judge for myself. A PC from TigerDirect Inc. of Miami cost $1,059 without a monitor. I liked the bundled Corel Corp. software, 32M memory, 200-MHz IBM Corp. 6x86 processor, 3.2G Ultra DMA Western Digital hard drive, 56-kilobit/sec modem, Yamaha wavetable sound card, IBM dictation software and Microsoft Windows 95.
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