Vivid bidders cut teeth on Navy's fictitious air base
That's why the service encouraged Vivid bidders to max out their creative talents on a fictitious naval air station called NAS Anywhere. "NAS Anywhere does not exist, but its characteristics are everywhere," said Nikki Isfahani, head of the Navy's information technology umbrella contracts group. "We tried to put an umbrella contract into place that would meet diversified needs, but we didn't want to inhibit the imagination of the solutions," she said.
FTC gets earful from NASA, forces nasa.com off the Web
Soon thereafter, Internet domain registrar Network Solutions Inc. of Herndon, Va., pulled the plug on the nasa.com domain. The real NASA site is at nasa.gov. NASA, citing the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, threatened legal action last October against Host Networks of Hewlett, N.Y., the owner of nasa.com and other government-style domain names.
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
USPS moves to a TCP/IP net
"At the stroke of midnight, I had my wife in one hand and a keyboard in the other, watching the network die," said Rick Yost, telecommunications program manager at the USPS National Network Service Center in Raleigh, N.C. On schedule, the IBM Systems Network Architecture network went offline and the new WAN went into business, with PCs replacing dumb terminals to run applications on mainframes at USPS data centers. The TCP/IP conversion was the first
Missiles launch a net upgrade
"We figured technology was technology," said Hurley, assistant program executive officer for business, finance and management information. But good network management would be essential to keep missiles flying smoothly to their programmed targets. SRA International Inc. of Fairfax, Va., got the task order in June 1996 and began taking stock of the LAN at the Program Executive Office for Cruise Missile Projects and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (PEO-CU) in Arlington, Va.
ADSL extends base network
It's all connected by "a very large, robust, fiber-optic intelligent hub network," said Frank Dawson, chief of Fort Bragg's Automation Division, and the Synchronous Optical Network backbone operates at 155 megabits/sec. "It does almost all of our connectivity, logistical to financial to personnel," Dawson said. But it made no sense to run such a big fiber-optic pipeline to the base's 48 scattered point-of-sale (POS) terminals, which use primarily text applications to exchange sales and inventory figures with
FTS 2001 bid deadline slips 2 months as vendors squawk
Once again, the General Services Administration's $5 billion FTS 2001 procurement is facing delays as the agency continues to iron out disagreements with vendors over the requirements. In its most recent move, GSA extended the bid deadline. Proposals are now due Sept. 29 instead of July 31. Federal Telecommunications Service commissioner Robert J. Woods said the postponement was necessary because "all the likely players have asked for extensions in one form or another."
FDA takes tobacco to movies
How did the agency do it? Broadband videoconferencing. "We wanted to find as many ways as possible to effectively communicate what the regulations were," said Sharon Natanblut, FDA associate commissioner for strategic initiatives. "And satellite videoconference seemed a perfect vehicle to do that." To reach retailers across the country, FDA teamed up with the United Artists Satellite Theatre Network and the Public Health Service's Division of Communications Media to beam the February conference to 25 major metropolitan
Who needs an auditorium
The Defense Department streamed video broadcasts to Pentagon and DOD PCs around the world this month for the third annual Acquisition Reform Week. Top officials held interactive conferences—viewable through Web browsers over the Internet or on a Pentagon intranet—using software from Starlight Networks Inc. of Mountain View, Calif. The audience was able to take part in the webcast discussions or play back the videos on demand.
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
Mandatory EC clock is ticking
Before long, they will have no choice. The first step in the government's move to mandatory EC is the Central Contractor Registry (CCR), where vendors must register by Oct. 1 if they want to do business with Uncle Sam. So far, only about 6,000 companies appear in the registry, despite the fact that "the 800-pound gorilla has spoken," said Jim Gordy, lead software engineer for the DISA registry. "This is not for negotiation," Gordy said. "The laws
All parties reach consensus on FTS 2001 RFP
The 30-day delay gave GSA time for what GSA administrator David J. Barram described as a "consensus-forging process." The final version includes refinements in the procurement strategy for both long-distance and local telephone service, worked out in April meetings between GSA officials, congressional committee staff members and vendors. Everyone got something in the compromise. Vendors received a streamlined bidding process and a one-year forbearance on competition from optional services. Congress got assurances that prices would continue to
Training shortfall postpones DMS start-up until summer
The Defense Information Systems Agency gave a pop quiz for the Defense Message System late last year, and many of those who will operate the system came unprepared. DISA judged that "the amount and level of training for people in the field probably needed to be expanded," said Jerry Douglas, DMS advanced programs director for Lockheed Martin Corp., the prime contractor for the $500 million program. Additional training will likely push
FCC charges for online bidding
The Federal Communications Commission has generated more than $20 billion for the Treasury in two years, auctioning pieces of the personal communications services spectrum. Part of the cost of the electronic auctions is defrayed by charging bidders for access to an FCC server from their PCs over a 900-number telephone service.
Latest Web worry: fake fed sites
As they step up their use of the World Wide Web to disseminate government information, agencies are finding a new nemesis in cyberspace: the copycat Web site. The problem is serious enough that the Federal Webmasters group has planned to discuss it at an upcoming meeting. "It's a tremendous problem, both for me as a user of the Internet and as a business person," said Pat O'Hern, senior Internet consultant for Utopia Inc. of Waltham,
Congressional Concerns delay weather system
Despite the National Weather Service's best efforts, its Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System will not be installed in government forecasting offices and weather centers before year's end. NWS had planned for AWIPS implementation to begin late last month. But Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor postponed his decision on whether to approve nationwide deployment of AWIPS until January.
DOJ incident exposes Web insecurities
When Adolf Hitler showed up as the attorney general on the Justice Department's Web pages last month, it was just the latest hacker invasion into government systems. With the proliferation of federal World Wide Web sites, such tinkering is just a hint of what's to come. Many industry and government systems experts are suggesting that Web servers are the weak link in the security chain. Because many Web sites were created to get information on
Appeals ruling puts EBT project in limbo
A federal appeals court has ruled that the Treasury Department improperly awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to Citibank to provide electronic benefits transfer services in eight southeastern states. The decision, handed down Aug. 13, reverses a ruling by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that upheld Treasury's use of a noncompetitive invitation for expressions of interest (IEI) for selecting an EBT services contractor [GCN Sept. 18, 1995, Page 72].
NASA IG heeds call of angry Mac users
NASA's inspector general has called a halt to Johnson Space Center's replacement of Apple Macintoshes pending a review of the center's PC-Windows-only standard for desktop computers. The review, expected to be completed any day, was spurred by complaints to NASA administrator Daniel S. Goldin and inspector general Roberta L. Gross. Many complaints came from disgruntled Mac users in Houston who don't want to give up their computers for PCs that run Microsoft Windows.
Energy, NRC to scrap 13 years of planning
The Energy Department and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that if a system project bogs down long enough--in this case 13 years--technology likely will find a better way. So now, after years of fits and starts, an NRC-DOE panel is looking at tossing out plans to build a Licensing Support System in favor of using the World Wide Web to process DOE's application to operate a high-level radioactive waste disposal site.
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