Energized TravelMate notebook runs six hours on one charge
The TravelMate 7060, one of Acer America's first portable offerings after acquiring Texas Instruments Inc.'s mobile computing group, is a fairly impressive addition to the 166-MHz Pentium MMX notebook market. Most notably, it operated for more than six hours on a single lithium-ion battery under normal use--a feat made possible by Acer's power management and suspend technology.
FEDCAC will connect IT puzzle pieces
Ron Decker defines his new job as Washington's matchmaker. As the incoming administrator of the General Services Administration's Federal Computer Acquisition Center, Decker will be responsible for expanding FEDCAC and creating a local presence in the nation's capital. Unlike his predecessor, Stephen Meltzer, Decker will work in Washington. "Right now, most of FEDCAC's resources are in Boston, where we have had a very positive history with large contracts," he said. "But the truth is that
Splinter networks will fix bandwidth ills, but development is slow
It seems that good ideas come in twos on the Internet. A perfect example involves Internet 2 and UseNet II. They're taking a while to get off the ground, but they hold enormous promise for government users who can take advantage of them. Of the two, Internet 2 shows more promise. It's an effort to develop ultra-high-speed private TCP/IP networks just for government research centers and universities.
Direct e-mail access opens door for unwanted spam
Should agencies provide employee mailing lists? Under the old Freedom of Information Act, agencies could hand out hard copies of the agency telephone book. But the new Electronic FOIA says that agencies must provide the information in electronic media if available. With the rapid growth of electronic mail directories, most agencies are consolidating and integrating their e-mail directories.
Tread carefully in dealings with vendor teams
It has been said that second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience. In that sense, choosing teaming partners for information technology is like choosing mates. Having represented both large and small companies, I have an array of anecdotes that range from horror stories to tales of bliss.
Gateway weighs in with contender to NetPC
Gateway had sealed the diskettes in baggies inside a plastic bag almost as big as the E1000 itself. This starter kit might be necessary if the E1000 didn't have a CD-ROM drive, but it comes with one as standard equipment. Price is certainly a consideration for network computers and NetPCs, and a single CD-ROM would have cost less than 87 disks.
Fed market will see faster Epson ink-jet printers
SUWA CITY, Japan--Government buyers can expect a range of high-end printing products previously unavailable to federal customers, Seiko Epson Corp. officials said at presentations at their headquarters. For example, Epson's two latest ink-jet printers, the Color Stylus 1520 and 3000, can print on paper as large as 13 inches by 19 inches.
OMB cracks 2000 whip, might suspend IT funds
Although the Office of Management and Budget this month issued get-tough year 2000 warnings and threatened to bar systems modernization spending at four agencies, it is unlikely that any agency will lose much--if any--funding, administration officials said. In the wake of its latest quarterly report to Congress, OMB told the Agriculture, Education and Transportation departments and the Agency for International Development that unless OMB sees immediate improvements, the agencies risk severe information technology budget limits
Big Blue backout deals potential death blow to Microsoft's NetPC
Is the NetPC a goner? Although I never really doubted the survival of the standalone PC, I've been keeping an eye on the NetPC and network computer. NetPC is shorthand for the Microsoft Corp.'Intel Corp. vision of a Network PC, a crippled client that would run software from servers and over the Internet. It's sort of an enhanced terminal, priced as low as $600 and too short on storage and memory to run most of
If it seems spam rains on your e-mail, here are two umbrellas
Spam Shot, still in beta testing, works hand-in-hand with your e-mail client's filters. It operates like a virus program, creating a kill filter full of identifying data from known spammers. The program scans your e-mail header fields such as From, To and Subject. When it finds something that matches your filter data, Spam Shot zaps the information into the trash.
100 new brushes improve Fractal Painter's effects
When Fractal Design Corp. and MetaTools Inc. merged to form MetaCreations Corp., they upgraded Fractal Design Painter to Version 5.0.1. It has the largest collection of mind-blowing image brushes I've seen in a single program. Painter installs easily and takes up about 37M on a hard drive. It will run on Apple Mac OS, Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows NT, but unfortunately it no longer supports Windows 3.x. If you don't have a Pentium
The AJ-D200 digital videocamera archives and edits like a pro
There's no comparison between the resolution of a $5,000 digital still camera and the far better resolution of a good $500 single-lens reflex film camera. The bother of paying for film and processing, then scanning images into a computer is what makes the digital still camera's extra cost and lower image quality acceptable to buyers.
Feds can't work by the book
Leigh Zarbough was unwittingly hindered in her work at the Census Bureau by a software licensing trend that limits access to instruction manuals. Zarbough, a statistical assistant in the bureau's Population Division in Suitland, Md., changed from MS-DOS 6.22 to Microsoft Windows 95 when the agency bought 166-MHz Gateway 2000 Inc. PCs late last year.
Castelle's FaxPress is good for a 350-user office
Fax machines have changed from novelty to ubiquitous appliance to dinosaur in only a few years. They still do most of the transmitting, but fax modems and fax servers are clearly where fax is heading. The GCN Lab looked at the Castelle Inc. FaxPress 3500 network fax server, which can attach to Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 or Novell NetWare networks and deliver fax services to all network clients.
PC lifecycle plans arrive
Driven by federal legislation and the need to cut costs, agencies are designing lifecycle management plans for their desktop systems. The Information Technology Management Reform Act, which mandated that agencies demonstrate how technology investments help them achieve core missions, has affected agencies' fiscal 1998 budget requests, as has implementation of the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act.
NASA team tests switches, routers for Net's successor
BOSTON--The tools that make up the Next Generation Internet are not all vaporware. An entire NASA division is devoted to testing the technologies for the backbone of a future Internet 100 times faster than today's. The current focus of NGI testing is on routers and switches, said NASA computer specialist Paul Grams, who works with a team of NASA testers in the NGI Division at Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. The center is
Demise of Mac cloners fulfills Jobs' wish, but Apple will pay dearly
The Rat's computer justice antenna went on full alert after Apple Computer Inc.'s unanointed messiah, Steve Jobs, engineered the purchase of Power Computing Corp.'s Macintosh business in exchange for Apple stock. The cyberrodent knows why Jobs likes to wear black. It's the executioner in him. The acquisition of Power Computing, of Round Rock, Texas, was the Jobster's way of killing a business he never liked: Mac cloning.
Distributed objects will reign
As vice president of technology for Oracle Corp.'s Government, Education and Health Division, Tim Hoechst is responsible for all the technology issues of Oracle's federal customers. Hoechst, an avid promoter of Oracle's newest technologies, says the federal government needs the network computing architecture because NCA will let applications talk to each other--finally.
Go 1,000 years back to see checkered past of current code problem
We take you back to the Dark Ages, in the year CMXCVII. King Unred the Unready was approached, obsequiously as usual, by the Duke of Oxnard, his esteemed yet befuddled inspector specific. Oxnard: Sire, we have a problem. The year M is approaching--or at least we think it is, the calendar is such a mess what with the lunar and solar years being so out of whack.
Hitch up your database to your Web site
Agencies are hard at work building bridges between their vast database collections and their World Wide Web sites. Some even plan to maintain and update the databases across the Internet. I've had the same goal for more than a year. The ideal program to achieve this goal would be easy to use, scalable to enterprise level and capable of handling free-form documents as well as relational databases.
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