Playing the name game with national treasures has unlimited potential
The news of a budget agreement this early in the year may have cheered up some federal employees, but the Rat is not among them. An agreement now means no government shutdown later. The Rat had been looking forward to a couple of free weeks in the late fall. In fact, he'd already made reservations for some prime post-hurricane season beach space in late October.
WebRamp M3 lets you set up Net-ready LAN
For field offices, dial-up Internet accounts for modems on standalone computers are too expensive and cumbersome. Modem pools cut the hardware costs but support only one Net connection at a time. Even an experienced administrator may have trouble configuring the routers and hubs for a small network, let alone connecting it to the Internet.
Some timely words of wisdom for a new agency CIO
As he admires his aircraft carrier-sized desk, your agency's new chief information officer discovers three numbered envelopes inside the center drawer. Attached to these envelopes is a note from his predecessor saying, "Open in order of your next three major crises." Sure enough, the first crisis arrives in just six months. The General Accounting Office conducts an audit of the department's information technology modernization. The project is late and over budget. Auditors dig into the
Intergraph ventures into PCs
In 1969, Jim Meadlock left his job as an IBM Corp. contractor at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to found Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala. Now its chairman and chief executive officer, he has built Intergraph into a $1.1 billion hardware and software business. Intergraph made its name selling proprietary Unix workstations with other companies' geographic information systems and computer-aided design products. Now, Intergraph has shifted its emphasis from Unix to Intel-based desktop systems and
DOD center seeks teraFLOPS
DAYTON, Ohio--The Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is upgrading its supercomputers so that by 2000 it can achieve computing power of 1 trillion floating-point operations per second. But Wright-Patterson officers said the center might not stop at teraFLOPS. The center is home to one of four Defense Department major shared resource centers (MSRC). Created by Congress as part of a $1.6 billion DOD High-Performance Computing Modernization Program, the goal of the centers
CIO programs face 1st hurdle
As the Information Technology Management Reform Act turns one year old this month, agencies are preparing to prove that their revised systems management programs can live up to Congress' requirements. Chief information officers face their first test this fall when they must use the new funding and performance measures to argue for fiscal 1999 systems funds.
Customer survey uncovers identity crisis
Although the Federal Telecommunications Service is serving up more than long-haul communications these days, it seems few federal users know the extent of FTS' services beyond networking. "FTS, to a lot of people, tends to focus on long-distance telephone service," FTS commissioner Robert J. Woods said. "We're looking at whether we need to change the name of the larger service."
Privacy paper offers options, no prescription
Don't hold your breath waiting for a federal privacy office. At the end of April, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget released a long-awaited options paper for promoting privacy on the National Information Infrastructure. The author is listed as the Information Policy Committee of the NII Task Force, but OMB did the drafting.
ATA decision throws IT buying reforms into doubt
On June 27, 1997, the Court of Federal Claims struck down a purchase order contract because it included items not covered in a vendor's General Services Administration schedule contract. As a result, agencies may be required to change the way they use purchase order contracts and blanket purchasing agreements.
NIST urges IT quality checks
The government's growing reliance on commercial software puts federal users at risk because of bugs in software that is rushed to market, a National Institute of Standards and Technology study has concluded. What government users need is a better way to measure the quality of the information technology tools they buy, said Mike Hogan, the NIST IT Lab's standards liaison and the study group's leader. The group concluded that NIST should rethink its role in
MultiRead standard builds bridge between CD-ROM and DVD-ROM
A new specification called MultiRead will protect agencies' existing CD-ROM investments as the computer industry starts moving to digital video disk storage. Most new CD-ROM and DVD-ROM devices will carry the MultiRead logo, which means they can read any CD-ROM, CD-recordable or CD-rewritable disk. But the reverse is not true: CD devices will not read the new DVD disks. Until now, DVD devices were not expected to be compatible with recordable CDs either.
DOD administers system cure
Some medical logistics problems are too complex for military personnel to solve without help from an intelligent algorithm. That's why the Defense Department has spent more than $25 million on a medical decision-support system to improve the efficiency of theater airlift and medical evacuation. The development cost will reach $40 million by the end of 1997.
Before you drop big bucks for a faster Web server, try tweaking
As the visit odometer for your World Wide Web site starts turning over faster, your server performance may bog down. But that doesn't mean you have to rush out and buy a bigger server with a faster processor. Try tweaking first. On government networks with multiple Web servers, there's a lot you can do to empty the sludge out of the circuits. Make the fix now if you can, because overloaded machines will deny service
Interior Dept. upgrades its procurement system
American Management Systems Inc. of Fairfax, Va., won a five-year, $10 million contract to build the system for Interior. AMS' Procurement Desktop application will run under Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows NT. Zipora Brown, vice president of AMS financial management and administration, said the app accepts word processing and spreadsheet data from other applications, too.
Navy cruises with fiber optics
The backbone installation is complete on the USS Rushmore, an amphibious ship whose home port is San Diego. Work on the USS Rainier, an oiler in Seattle, is in the design phase, said Capt. Grey Glover, SmartShip program manager at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Philadelphia. Along with the cruiser USS Yorktown, which received a shipboard LAN last year, the new vessels represent SmartShip prototypes in three classes of ships. A review board soon
Security group seeks funding
Having lined up just three agency clients so far, the government's central security incident center is searching for a finance plan that will let it stay on the job. The Federal Computer Incident Response Capability (FedCIRC) began offering agencies incident alert and security consulting services last November after receiving $2.8 million in seed money from the Government Information Technology Services Board's Innovation Fund Committee.
Forget going sleepless in Seattleget the real deal on Microsoft's big plan
The Rat trained his remote viewing gear on Microsoft Corp.'s recent Windows Platform conference in Seattle, eager to see how Chairman Bill's minions would indoctrinate the world about the future of the Windows operating system. After fine-tuning his eavesdropping apparatus toward the stage and opening a video link, the cyberrodent grabbed some popcorn and waited for the drama to unfold.
Sun finds Net creates users for secure OS
A black hole is how Sun Microsystems Federal officials describe the government's security certification process. And though the company has invested 12 years and $50 million to develop a multilevel-secure (MLS) and compartmented-mode workstation (CMW) version of the Solaris operating system, sales to date have been unimpressive. But the growth of the Internet "has brought people to our door," said Joe Alexander, product manager for Trusted Solaris 2.5, the newest B1-level MLS+ release of Solaris
So long, happy warrior
Few come to mind who have had a more positive impact than Steve Kelman. As he returns to his job as professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, the outgoing administrator of the once-sleepy Office of Federal Procurement Policy can take satisfaction in having initiated a minor revolution.
Choose your tool and keep your Web server from sprawling wildly
As intranets sprout like weeds on the fringes of government networks, LAN managers are figuring out how to manage new intranet services when their LAN management tools aren't adequate anymore. Intranets let almost anyone who has the skill turn a PC into a World Wide Web server. This Web sprawl can quickly get out of hand. Network response degrades, but you may not have the tools or knowledge to see the broadcast storms raging around
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