Digital Government
Agenda
SEPTEMBER 14 10th Annual FiveYear Forecast of Federal Information Systems. McLean Hilton. McLean, Va. This conference will identify IT opportunities in the federal government and help attendees understand key issues in the government's buying decisions.
Digital Government
Father of ASCII tackles Y2K
A new company, BigiSoft Inc., is marketing a tool that attacks Year 2000 problems at the level of ones and zeros, rather than in source code, and plans to bring this tool to the federal market. Vertex 2000, created by Bob Bemer, who is known as the father of ASCII, is a departure from source code s
Digital Government
NIH research yields dividends
With the goal of the National Institutes of Health's 15year project to catalog and map human DNA becoming more of a reality and potentially commercially profitable two businesses this summer turned the effort into a race that pits the government against the private sector. NIH began its ambiti
Digital Government
Air Force discusses its networking woes
MONTGOMERY, Ala. The Air Force will revamp its network and systems operations in the coming years, with plans calling for everything from outsourcing more than 10,000 jobs in the information technology work force to adopting hardware and software standards and integrating worldwide networks into
Digital Government
GPO bill a stake in the heart of procurement reform
Few government procurement reforms of the last decade have done more to set the tone and style for a smaller and more flexible government than the ClingerCohen Act of 1996. Passed with strong bipartisan support, the procurement framework that ClingerCohen created finally allowed federal agencies
Digital Government
Compaq brings Digital into notebook fold
Compaq Computer Corp. last week announced two new offerings in its Armada notebook line, including the first notebook to come out of the Digital Equipment Corp. acquisition. Compaq introduced the Armada 3500 as a replacement for its 4200 line of midrange lightweight portables, and it unveiled a reb
Digital Government
USPS must prove benefits of removal
How would you like it if your employer forced you into a different job involuntarily and then fired you because you didn't have the necessary skills to do the work? That happened to a U.S. Postal Service employee a few years ago. Fortunately, the U.S. Court of Appeals recently was able to help him
Digital Government
Feds brace Web sites for Starr report traffic
Federal computer specialists last week struggled to prepare World Wide Web sites to manage an onslaught from the public trying to access the hottest document in Internet history Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's report to Congress on President Clinton. Hours before the expected release of the 4
Digital Government
EIA says cost to fix Y2K bug will hit $6B
Less than a week after the Clinton administration estimated it would cost $5.4 billion to fix the millennium bug in tens of thousands of federal computer systems, a key industry group predicted the total cost would be more than 10 percent greater. Gerald Harvey, head of the group that conducted the
Digital Government
Panel slams EOSDIS
Congress last week threatened to pull a major NASA program and transfer it to another agency because of cost overruns, software glitches and substantial delays in the space agency's effort to create what would be the world's largest civilian database. At a hearing before the House Subcommittee on S
Digital Government
EPA enhances Envirofacts' mapping
The Environmental Protection Agency last month unveiled an enhanced World Wide Web site that will provide citizens with better information on potential environmental hazards in their neighborhoods and will help agencies build their own electronic maps. The site, the EPA's Envirofacts Warehouse (www
Digital Government
DOE contracting: 'If at first you don't succeed...'
In February 1994, at the very beginning of the procurement reform movement and several months before passage of the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act, the Energy Department issued a report on contract reform that promised drastic changes in how the agency conducted contracting. DOE, the report a
Digital Government
Air Force pitches info operations command
Concerned that information technology has become central to the Defense Department's ability to wage war successfully, the Air Force recently sent a proposal to top Pentagon officials to create a special command for information operations (IO). Speaking at the eighth annual InfowarCon '98 conferenc
Digital Government
CBT Systems unveils IT-support training
CBT Systems last week announced a new computerbased training package aimed at information technology support personnel. The new Technical Support 'curriculum,' which is focused on the A+ certification program of the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA), covers PC hardware configurat
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FCW issues hacker challenge
Testing by Andreas Uiterwijk and Chip Pettirossi So you think your network is secure just because you have a firewall? Think again. No network that allows external traffic is 100 percent secure, no matter what kind of firewall is in place. Any type of traffic entering and exiting a network opens up
Digital Government
Senate to OK GPO bill; House wary
With the clock running out on legislation that would reform how the government maintains public access to its print and electronic documents, feverish negotiations by a Senate committee appear to have mollified many opponents who had been working to delay and effectively kill the bill. However, opp
Digital Government
Dell teams with ESRI for PC/GIS bundle
Seeing a growing interest in desktop mapping in the federal market, Dell Computer Corp. this month began offering federal customers a package that includes a Dell PC workstation and software from Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. The package bundles Dell's 410 or 610 Precision WorkStati
Digital Government
Interagency project measures impact of Hurricane Bonnie
Three federal agencies are collaborating on a coastline mapping project used this month to help determine Hurricane Bonnie's impact on North Carolina's dunes and other coastal structures. NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey have teamed up to col
Digital Government
Intercepts
SPAWAR RAIDERS REPELLED. Rear Adm. John Gauss and his Spawar crew continue to try to raid key personnel from the Defense Information Systems Agency based on reports I picked up last week. The most recent raid for a key civilian official at DISA HQ failed, I'm told, leading to speculation that the S
Digital Government