Gigabit Ethernet quenches Army's bandwidth thirst
The Army site's "need for a backbone that won't affect other traffic is growing," said Steve Lewis, a former network design engineer with Dyncorp of Reston, Va., which runs the Aberdeen network. "Gigabit, from what we've seen so far, is going to work well." At the headquarters building, Dyncorp has installed two Gigabit Ethernet switches with eight ports each from NBase Communications of Chatsworth, Calif., on the base's Fiber Distributed Data Interface network, Lewis said. Now
Boots leaves Justice for NPR and beyond
His first stop will be the National Performance Review, where he will spend six months on an online security project. After that, Boots, the director of systems technology at Justice, will be job hunting again. "I really think that at the end of the six months, I will have given the Department of Justice and the National Performance Review their money's worth, and I will be ready to move on to something new," Boots said.
Proper protocol sends the best message
It has changed the way we work and done more than any other technology to rid the office of paper. E-mail is faster than conventional postal delivery and almost as dependable. Neither rain nor snow nor sleet nor gloom of night will stop e-mail from arriving shortly after you hit the Send button. That is, unless your e-mail server, local network or provider's connection is down.
PKZip replaces ARC files, provides compression using Windows
ARC compressed and combined files for faster modem transmission. Until now, PKZip has retained ARC's old command-line interface, which means you have to type commands in MS-DOS or an MS-DOS window to zip or unzip files. There are graphical shells that insulate Microsoft Windows users from such command-line interfaces, the most popular being Nico Mak Computing Inc.'s WinZip.
Sportster x2 modem craves the fast lane but often gets stuck in traffic
The Sportster x2 does transmit significantly faster than conventional V.34bis modems. What neither x2 or K56Flex can give you yet is full, bidirectional 56-kilobit/sec throughput [GCN, March 17, Page 65]. There are several barriers within this speed trap. For starters, the x2 delivers full speed only when pushing information downstream from a provider's server to you. When you upload, you're stuck back at the 33.6-kilobit/sec V.34bis rate. That's fine for browsing the World Wide Web or
Latest Intel chip coming soon to federal PC users
Intel has shipped more than 100,000 chips in 233- and 266-MHz clock speeds, and a 300-MHz version should be ready within 60 days. The chips are PC processors, although some vendors plan to deliver workgroup servers this summer. Intel's next chip, code-named Deschutes and server-optimized, won't arrive until 1998. The Pentium II has been described as a Pentium Pro with MMX multimedia instructions. speedier handling of 16- and 32-bit applications, and Intel's Dual Independent Bus (DIB)
Weary of order backlog, Air Force bumps ZDS off Desktop V contract
After suspending orders for the company's products for the second time in a year, the Air Force Standard Systems Group decided this month it will not extend ZDS' Desktop V contract past the base year. Charging that the company could not maintain an acceptable level of delivery and warranty performance on the contract, the Air Force on April 1 halted ZDS Desktop V ordering and never lifted the suspension. That was no surprise, however, because the
Health records project hits pay dirt
After five years of work, the Office of Defense Health Affairs now has something to show for its investment in a medical records system. The Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS) system, a transaction-processing application and data warehouse, is helping Defense Department hospitals reduce pharmaceutical inventories while avoiding costly open-market buys, DOD Health Affairs officials said. Before DMLSS work started, most DOD hospitals had 60 to 150 days' worth of inventory
Warehousers get a shortcut
In data warehousing, it's easy to overload a network with bulk data transfers between a mainframe and Unix servers. One storage manufacturer gets around that problem by bypassing the network entirely. Symmetrix Multihost Transfer Facility software from EMC Corp. of Hopkinton, Mass., supports 17-megabyte/sec bulk file transfers between EMC's Symmetrix 5000 or Symmetrix 3000 storage systems and any mainframe or midrange servers running the SMTF software. "The network is removed from
Pay less than $2,000 for a high-performing Toshiba notebook
Power users might yawn at the 100-MHz Pentium chip and sluggish 772M hard drive in the Satellite 200CDS notebook computer from Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. But they'll smile at the bottom line: less than $2,000. For a bargain-basement model, the 200CDS performed better in GCN Lab testing than similar notebooks costing twice as much. It earned a strong second place among seven 100-MHz Pentium notebooks we tested last year, well ahead of
The Rat turns tail from a tempting but busy busy busy pyramid plan
The Rat caught his annual case of the ComNet flu this year. It amazed him that anything, including flu germs, could survive in the dry environment of the recent communications trade show in Washington. The only thing that excited the Wired One was getting home to a bottle of decongestant. Back at the burrow, he emptied several tissue boxes while watching Steve Case present America Online infomercials. He dozed off and
QED configures Windows dialog boxes just how you want them
Utilities for Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows 3.x often do such esoteric things as defragment hard drives or find orphaned entries in the Win95 Registry. Q.E.D. from Qualitas Inc. gives more immediate gratification. Windows environments rely on their dialog boxes to list files, fonts and many other types of user-selectable information. Unfortunately, you can't resize these boxes to make more room for long filenames or numerous folder entries. This isn't a
Think it's hard to get on the Net now? Sit back and enjoy the jam
The slowest way to access the Internet will get even slower in the months ahead. If you connect by mo-dem, expect to see performance steadily erode. Whether you work in a small government office with a single, low-end Internet connection or in an agency with a dedicated dial-up connection, you might want to look at changing to an Integrated Services Digital Network or dedicated 56-kilobit/sec or T1 line.
Alaska warms to art software
If you're accused of a crime in Alaska and can't afford an attorney, don't give up hope. You might be rescued by Visio software. Gary Eichhorn, a computer systems administrator with the Federal Public Defender Office (FPDO) in Anchorage, has used Visio Corp.'s graphics software since 1993 for making courtroom displays. The FPDO division of the U.S. Courts represents defendants who can't afford attorneys. With the Visio 4.1 Technical package, Eichhorn
Is past performance a factor in GWACs?
How can you use past performance to select a vendor for a governmentwide acquisition contract? That's the question more than a dozen federal officials got together to hash out. The consensus: It ain't easy. Federal Consulting Services Inc. of Vienna, Va., organized the recent session. It took place at a specially equipped conference room at Soza & Company Ltd. of Fairfax, Va. The meeting's members consisted of managers and customers of
Survive the pitfalls of e-mail installation
All I wanted to do was change a password. But changing the administrator's password under Windows NT Server 4.0 in the GCN Lab triggered a nightmare in Exchange Server 4.0. None of Exchange's services would start, and e-mail was down. In today's office, that's a crisis. It all started last year, when the GCN Lab installed Exchange Server to connect to the Internet and establish e-mail internally and in the cyberspace
Let the C2 evaluations begin
The government's new security technology evaluation program-touted as a fast-track approach for C2-level systems certifications-has opened its doors for business. Last month, the National Security Agency announced that it is accepting applications from organizations interested in serving as Trust Technology Assessment Program (TTAP) evaluators to rate low-end commercial security products. Accredited TTAP evaluation facilities will run tests to certify vendor compliance with the government's list of Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria,
Beware the loopholes in using performance history to rate bidders
It's nearly time to declare victory. At long last, procurement has been reformed. Notice that the word improved was not used-even the reformers know better than to make too grandiose a claim. Many in government buying circles will argue that the changes are for the better. Now, for a while at least, most people will know how hard it is to make change, which means that they will be reluctant to
Apex 4.6G magneto-optical drive is pricey but worth it
Removable media is H-O-T. Consider the storage benefits gained from Travan tape drives and Iomega and SyQuest cartridge drives, and look at the digital versatile disk, or DVD, which is on the horizon. To achieve these advances, storage companies such as Pinnacle Micro Inc. are bending or outright breaking standards. They initially take a proprietary path, but the computer industry has a history of taking a proprietary method that succeeds and
Commerce's Daley OKs AWIPS deployment
Twenty-one National Weather Service sites this year will begin using an operational version of the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System now that Commerce Secretary William Daley has approved AWIPS deployment. The weather service has been running a prototype version at 12 test locations to evaluate system performance. AWIPS contractor PRC Inc. developed the forecasting application software that runs on Hewlett-Packard Co.'s 750 and 755 series workstations. Daley's approval of the deployment
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