Sysadmins sing the IP blues down in the domain name dumps
The Rat was browsing the news while eating lunch. He choked on his ratatouille at learning of the network administration goof of all time. How could the domain administrators at Network Solutions Inc. have mistakenly purged the domain name for Microsoft Corp.'s and NBC's joint venture, MSNBC? To make really big networking mistakes, it certainly helps to have a big network. Network Solutions, the Herndon, Va., contractor chosen by the National Science Foundation in 1993
Don't simply judge a PC by its processor clock speed alone
Speed sells. An average user judges a PC by its processor clock speed, but a power user knows that hard-drive access time, video accelerators, processor efficiency and memory speed play equally important roles. There's always one component that limits performance. You must loosen that bottleneck to see any real performance improvement.
DOD Brief
The Major Automated Information System Review Council has given a green light to two Defense Commissary Agency programs. DeCA's Point of Sale (POS) Modernization Program can now spend up to $5 million on POS systems in preparation for its Milestone III MAISRC review. And the Defense Commissary Information System (DCIS) program has passed Milestone II, which will let DeCA begin further applications development.
Bumper-sticker logic: the four myths of procurement reform
Read this and learn the four myths of procurement reform A quicker buy isn't necessarily better or Deregulated doesn't equal commercial Myth is a word with two very different meanings. It can be a story that is not literally factual but contains a spiritual or emotional truth. A myth, however, can also be an unfounded belief that obscures the truth.
Postal Service's WINGS pilot takes flight with 14 kiosks
The Postal Service last week rolled out the first 14 kiosks for the governmentwide kiosk program at sites around Charlotte, N.C. The maiden versions of the service's multiagency information delivery system launch a six-month test. USPS will install 30 more kiosks this summer and perhaps another 70 or so during the course of the test.
Microsoft 2000 plan already nonstandard
Like other software vendors, Microsoft Corp. is reassuring users that its products are "Year 2000-ready," but the company so far is ignoring industry and government recommendations for standard date formats. In 1997, the software giant will update all its software products that use two-character date fields where the two absent characters are assumed to be 19, as in 1996.
New Components suite is just what Notes users have wanted
Plenty of government users already work with Lotus Notes groupware, and more will under the forthcoming Defense Message System. Lotus' August release of Components could make Notes a real live-in environment. I've been a Notes user and developer since Release 1, and it's been a love-hate relationship all the way. But Components gives Notes almost everything it needs to fulfill my expectations.
At Army, AF Pxes, cleanup duty starts with data
The Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is becoming a big data warehouser. That means big-scale house cleaning of the data up front. As AAFES officials put their retail point-of-sale data on line in a 400G data warehouse, they've learned first hand how small data-entry inconsistencies can distort their sales forecasts--an important part of the warehousing project.
Best-value buys still require sound evaluation criteria
Recent protest decisions renew the issue of best value and the latitude an agency has in arriving at a best-value decision. If a prospective bidder thinks value is established by the mere fact that it knows the functions of the agency due to work performed under other contracts, it should take heed of a decision handed down recently by the General Accounting Office.
What's their game?
Buried in bills recently passed by the House and Senate is a provision to "privatize" the Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR) system of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not surprisingly, SEC systems officials are scratching their heads over the meaning of this provision, because most work for EDGAR already is done by contractors.
The ubiquitous Microsoft has supplanted other as king
"You'll never get fired for buying IBM." For years, this was a precept in the systems community. Now it's the Microsoft Corp. label that protects the information technology manager from customer dissatisfaction and management censure. Microsoft has replaced IBM as the computer security blanket for many information technology specialists. Windows 95 and NT Workstation are joining MS Windows, Word, Excel and Powerpoint on a great majority of federal desktops.
Canada is new kid on privacy standards block
How and why does a nation act to protect the privacy of its citizens? This is a complex, timely issue. The Canadians just proposed an interesting approach that is worthy of attention. Let's begin with some context. The United States invented modern concepts of privacy in the 1970s. We lost our leadership of the issue when European countries began to enact omnibus privacy laws later in the decade. The idea of fair information practices that
The Rat takes a sour bite of the Big Apple at this year
According to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton's book, it takes a village to raise a child. Well, it takes a city to fry a Rat, and that city is New York. Heading for PC Expo there last month, the Rat padlocked his cubicle, ordered all the servers to behave while he was gone, and caught an underutilized T1 line to Manhattan's West Side, home of the Javits Center--the world's largest freestanding, permanent, scaffolding structure.
Procurement sleuth makes short shrift of commercial buys
Do not be seen reading this article. It may be a violation of federal norms to learn what you, the reader, are about to learn. If some of the organizations and pronouncements in the following seem eerily familiar but you can't pinpoint why, it's because ace reporter and sometime procurement sleuth King Oxnard has changed the names of those involved to protect the innocent. (Wink, wink!)
Web naysayers are louder, but it's still a useful tool
Trashing the World Wide Web is rapidly becoming the latest journalistic fad. Once the darling of the press, the Web is getting closer scrutiny and more negative reviews from those who were uncritical advocates. Is the Web really such a disappointment? Now that the Web is a household word, articles extolling its virtues are not news. When the journalists stop extolling the Web, it's a sign that the Web is a mature technology.
Software upgrades have all the grace of dancing elephants
Long-time readers will recall my opinion of software upgrades: Most are useless. A few have really good tools. The rest contribute little except thrilling new ways to corrupt data and waste time on help lines. But I'm schizophrenic about upgrades. It's been several years since I found a really useful one that would speed or improve my basic working systems. Nevertheless, I make a lot of upgrades to test systems to keep up with the
House committee OKs bill to decimate IRS spending power
While Capitol Hill budgeteers fight over funding and contract management for the IRS' Tax Systems Modernization program, a new commission chaired by two congressmen will consider ways to restructure the service. The commission, created at Congress' behest as part of the Treasury Department's 1996 appropriations, met for its first organizational meeting last month. At the meeting, the group chose Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) and Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) as its co-chairmen.
A wacky idea
You heard it right. Rep. Jim Lightfoot (R-Iowa) wants the Defense Department to take over design and contracting for the IRS's Tax Systems Modernization project. This would cost 2,000 IRS jobs. TSM is a troubled program, no doubt about it. There's certainly precedent for Agency A's outsourcing its contracting to Agency B. But Lightfoot's proposal sounds a little wacky.
Let TSM emerge from black cloud of criticism
No one likes paying taxes, and public opprobrium for tax collectors can be read in the Old and New testaments. In this election year, IRS is a politically vulnerable agency, and within IRS, the most vulnerable portion is the Tax Systems Modernization program. TSM will let IRS replace its legacy systems with modern hardware and software and communications. It has evolved from one of the grandest of grand-design systems to a chastened and smaller
Six companies share $3 billion pot for DEIS II
It was deja vu last week for the Defense Enterprise Integration Services II buy. The Defense Information Systems Agency awarded five-year contracts jointly worth up to $3 billion to the six original DEIS contractors. The follow-on nearly triples the procurement authority of the original buy and vastly expands the range of engineering and technical services available.
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