DOD News Briefs
It may well be the most popular World Wide Web site in the Defense Department. Run by the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, ACQWeb is also the most sluggish, needing about 15 minutes to load a file during peak usage times. Under a "Why so slow?" link on the home page, the sysop explains that ACQWeb runs on a Sun Microsystems Inc. Sparcstation IPC capable of handling a maximum of
Year-end thoughts
In 1995, several big bets on change were made. But 1996 will show how much payoff we'll get. On the technology front, the biggest story was the mass deployment of World Wide Web authoring and browsing tools. Hundreds of agencies and members of Congress already have built Web pages, as have tens of thousands of private companies and people.
Which & Why package doesn't just organize your data--it tells you what to do
Which & Why decision-support software for Microsoft Windows 3.x not only helps you organize and analyze your options statistically, but also makes its own recommendation. The software, which runs on a Windows PC with at least 13M free on the hard drive, or on Novell NetWare or Banyan Systems Vines networks, breaks up decisions into bite-size factors, weighted for importance.
AT&T wins FTS rematch; feds to save $600m
Agencies will pay one-third less for FTS 2000 switched-voice and leased-line services, thanks to the General Services Administration's recent price recompetition in which Sprint Corp. lost a substantial amount of its FTS 2000 business to AT&T Corp. AT&T's lowball prices for switched voice service will drive down the cost of an average one-minute call on the governmentwide long-distance network from about 5 1/2 cents to about 3 1/2 cents. That includes local access and termination
House approves overhaul of e-mail for Cyber-Congress
E-mail for House offices will be totally overhauled under House Speaker Newt Gingrich's "Cyber-Congress" plan, giving members a common directory and on-line collaboration. Integral to the plans is the purchase of new PCs for all 435 House members' offices. The House Oversight Committee earlier this month unanimously approved the House systems upgrade proposal, which it dubbed the Office 2000 Project.
GCN Editorial: Stop bellyaching
The government telephone service sweepstakes is getting downright nasty--and complicated. Why? First, a lot of business is at stake. Second, "telephone'' really means more than a dozen discrete communications services, all with different market dynamics. Third, the telecom industry itself is in turmoil. Vendors are throwing billions on this bet or that, yet they don't really know how the next five or 10 years are going to shape up. They are anxious about the future.
Computer, read me the e-mail and voice mail
The ultimate "thin" client could be your telephone keypad. The federal furlough cut attendance at the trade show sharply. Alan Fedder, chairman of the Washington Area Unix Users Group that sponsored the show, said many government computer professionals had to stay at their offices, where they were considered essential during the government shutdown.
No budget for a CD jukebox? Try this virtual server instead
Until I test-drove CD-QuickShare, I thought jukeboxes with multiple quad-speed drives represented the state of the art in CD- ROM disk sharing. Was I wrong! Stac's software-only virtual server dishes up the disks quickly and inexpensively. From a single CD drive on a host server, CD- QuickShare copies compressed CD image files onto the server's hard drive, building a library that can be accessed by a whole gang of networked or remote users at once.
DOD News Briefs
Army Brig. Gen. Frederick H. Essig, commander of Defense Information Systems Agency for the western hemisphere, retired Oct. 31. As WESTHEM commander, Essig inherited the unenviable task of implementing the Base Realignment and Closure Commission's 1993 mandate to consolidate 59 Defense Department data centers into the current 16 megacenters. He is credited with accelerating the consolidation schedule by nearly two years. DISA has not named a successor.
In shutdown, some fed IT pros show just why they're essential
"This is Bob Morris. Unfortunately, I've have been deemed a nonessential employee for purposes of the government shutdown. I will return to work when we have a continuing resolution or a federal budget." For six days, that message played on the voice mail of Robert A. Morris, director of national network operations at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
DISA set to site-license software
Before year's end, the Defense Information Systems Agency expects to sign enterprise licensing agreements with several software vendors that would let Defense users buy licenses and download programs in less than a week. "We are optimistic that several agreements will be in place by late December," said Don Black, DISA's program manager for enterprise licensing and the Electronic Shopping System. DISA staff first began working on the enterprise licensing project more than two years ago
AF Abandons rigid specs for base upgrades
The Air Force has scrapped its original strategy for the 10-year Base-Level Systems Modernization II contract and asked industry to provide the specifics on how the program should work. Why? Because the service wants to avoid the pitfalls that have plagued many of the Defense Department's complex systems modernization and integration projects, Air Force officials said.
Intel Corp.'s Pentium Pro
No sooner had Intel Corp. annnounced, with predictable fanfare, its latest chip, the Pentium Pro, than Compaq, the largest manufacturer of PCs, said it would hold off building Pentium Pro machines until a timing problem with certain network cards was resolved. In essence, the problem is that the cards are too slow for the chip, and that can result in terminated network connections. Intel acknowledged the problem, and both companies said lists of compatible network
IRS, SSA to let public try digital signatures
The government will use electronic tax filing and on-line Social Security benefits reviews as the first public tests of a public-key infrastructure for the Digital Signature Standard. Starting in February, the Internal Revenue Service and Social Security Administration will let about 1,000 citizens in San Jose, Calif., and Dayton, Ohio, file income taxes and check the status of SSA benefits using home PCs, federal kiosks and the Internet.
VA home finds you really can get doctors to use keyboards
Who says doctors can't type? At the Veterans Affairs Department's residential center for homeless veterans in White City, Ore., it's a requirement for all 15 physicians and the other 212 clinical staff members. Since August, the staff has been relying only on its PC network running the VA's home-grown Decentralized Hospital Computer Program to handle all administrative and patient information.
PC makers are quick to adopt Pentium Pro
Intel Corp.'s 150- to 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors roared off the runway this month in single, dual and quad formations that should make the ride rougher for Silicon Graphics Inc. Rx000 reduced-instruction-set-computing platforms. Leading computer makers are positioning their Pentium Pro boxes as enterprise servers, but they'll come workstation-style, too, with at least 16M RAM and Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 or Windows 95 preinstalled.
Media module travels light, flies right on the sleek HiNote Ultra
Anotebook PC that weighs only 4 pounds has a heavy advantage. We've praised the HiNote Ultra for just that, and for its sleek, attentive design [GCNMarch 20, Page 1]. If the Ultra had a CD-ROM drive, it would come even closer to notebook nirvana. Digital now has put a double- or quad-speed drive and two speakers into a thoughtfully constructed add-on, the Mobile Media Module.
Defense Department News Briefs
Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc., Intergraph Corp. and Wang Federal Inc. all recently won contracts to help out Defense Department organizations on systems programs. Booz Allen in McLean, Va., will help the Army's Information Systems Engineering Command Technology Integration Center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., determine whether systems now under development meet technical and functional requirements. The five-year contract is worth up to $18.2 million.
Experienced gridlock on the Internet lately? Here's why.
What we have here on the Internet today is a failure to communicate. There's not only traffic gridlock, there are failures in the Domain Name Service (DNS) system. Some Internet providers have set their routers to drop packets with long addresses. The upshot? If your agency counts on the Internet for business or public communications, you're less reachable than you think.
How domain names work on the net
In the Internet's Domain Name Service, each named group is called a domain, and strings of domains are separated by periods. The largest domain appears at the end: .gov represents the entire government domain, .mil the entire military. GCN's address, gcn.com, has a .com extension to indicate a commercial organization. Some GCN machines have their own names, such as igor.gcn.com.
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