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.
TriniCom has its day in court
Today the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of Florida conducted its first video hearing. Lawyers in a Fort Myers courtroom pleaded their cases before Chief Judge Alexander L. Paskay in Tampa. The Sony TriniCom 5100 videoconferencing system installed in each of the courthouses synchronizes audio with full-motion video and provides document imaging. Florida court officials hope the system and its Integrated Services Digital Network connection will eliminate 125-mile trips between the two cities.
Domain mastery
The General Services Administration is wise to take over civilian governmental Internet .gov domain name registration after Oct. 1. Notwithstanding the trend toward outsourcing and using commercial services, the federal government needs to control its own domain, at least for now. In fact, GSA should extend the service to governments at all levels--federal, state, county and municipal.
Fed users want light, speedy and long-lasting notebooks -
Federal notebook users want faster processors, longer-lasting batteries and less weight to tote on the road, according to an exclusive survey of 127 GCN readers who routinely use notebooks. As for favorite brands, Toshiba American Information Systems Inc. topped the list. Twenty-two percent of respondents said they carry Toshiba notebooks.
GOESnet rains satellite data -
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Science Center in Camp Springs, Md., had to pull the plug on its two IBM Corp. 4381 mainframes. They were choking on satellite imagery flowing down from NOAA's newest geostationary satellites. In their place, NOAA's Satellite Services Division has put in GOESnet, a network of servers named for the pair of geostationary operational environmental satellites that feed the network 48G of data every 24 hours.
Domain naming game gets more confusing as more players join -
This is a good time to move the .gov registration back under government control to protect it, because the Internet's Domain Name System is about to fall into a state of chaos. To avoid problems for federal users, the General Services Administration will begin to register new .gov Internet domain names starting Oct. 1.
IrisPen 1.1a takes a stab at translating but disappoints -
Imagine waving a wand to translate documents from a foreign language and then paste the text into your favorite application. Imagine if the wand could teach you to speak and read that language. Sound too good to be true? You're right, it is. But the idea is great.
Despite stumble, GILS deserves second chance -
How can people find federal government information? This has always been a challenge for agencies and for users. In the 1940s, the Federal Register was one answer. In the 1960s, the Freedom of Information Act offered another approach. The Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 proposed a Federal Information Locator System.
New Navy ship would have made Grace Hopper proud -
SAN FRANCISCO--The new USS Hopper runs on a LAN. A portrait of the late Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper, mother of Cobol and a computing pioneer, hangs in the wardroom of the Navy destroyer. It was commissioned early this month to honor her as the Navy's first female admiral.
IRS seeks proposals to expand electronic filing -
The agency wants vendors to offer proposals to expand electronic filing and make it the preferred filing method. IRS will issue a final RFP late this year and award the contract early next year, said Terry Lutes, acting assistant commissioner of IRS for electronic tax administration. He said IRS might choose more than one contractor.
The procurement process is different, not better -
Mystified and amazed by the GCN editorial that lionized the recently departed Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, Steve Kelman, many of us were given pause [GCN, August 4, Page 30]. Perhaps Kelman will be judged by history to be a "happy warrior," but it will take several years for some of his bizarre initiatives to play out in the real world of information technology contracts.
DOD and Lockheed are pleased with DMS test -
Defense Department and Lockheed Martin Corp. officials are guardedly optimistic about results of the Defense Message System's initial operational test and evaluation, which took place last month at nine military sites. The Defense Information Systems Agency will not make the IOT&E results public for another two weeks. DMS program manager Tom Clarke said in a statement that the preliminary results "confirm DMS Release 1.0 is a viable baseline system" that likely will evolve to full
Here's the skinny on flat-panel monitors -
The first thing people say when they see a flat-panel monitor on your desk is "Cool!" The second is, "I want one." I speak from experience. Over the last four months, four active-matrix liquid crystal displays on my desk have drawn just those remarks. My Reviewer's Choice designation goes to Compaq Computer Corp.'s TFT500 monitor. Compaq is not known as a monitor maker, and the company's TFT500 is not a perfect monitor. My early production
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