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That is how Maj. Gen. David Richwine, the Marine Corps' chief information officer, says he feels at the end of many a workday. Without intelligent e-mail filters that perform the incoming message triage usually assigned to human staff, Richwine thinks we'll all end up buried in "administrivia." Somebody has to start thinking seriously about this problem, he said last month at the Defense Department's Software Technology Conference (STC) in Salt Lake City.
That is how Maj. Gen. David Richwine, the Marine Corps' chief information officer, says
he feels at the end of many a workday. Without intelligent e-mail filters that perform the
incoming message triage usually assigned to human staff, Richwine thinks we'll all end up
buried in "administrivia." Somebody has to start thinking seriously about this
problem, he said last month at the Defense Department's Software Technology Conference
(STC) in Salt Lake City.
"I was of the view last year that we should stop funding all legacy systems,"
retired Navy Adm. William Owens, until recently the second-highest ranking military
officer in the United States, said at STC.
The remark prompted spontaneous applause and a series of follow-up questions on the
best way to do away with such systems once and for all. The most popular suggestion?
Refuse to fix date-change problems in old applications, guaranteeing their collective doom
by the year 2000.
Brownouts and weird surges are a fact of life in the former Yugoslavia and a golden
opportunity for Universal Power Systems Inc. The Fairfax, Va., company has nearly cornered
the market for portable uninterruptible power supplies for critical Defense Department
systems being fielded for Operation Joint Endeavor.
UPSI's Trusted Series UPIs are hooked up to the backbone network, the Joint Deployable
Intelligence Support System and the Global Command and Control System, among many others.
The Army has picked General Signal Networks of Mount Laurel, N.J., to replace
retirement-age telephone switches at its bases under a $20 million, four-year contract.
GSN will install its 2700 Matrix equipment as part of the Automation and Integration of
Technical Controls program.
Bill Bialick, former head of Fortezza applications development at the National Security
Agency, can now be found in the Maryland offices of Spyrus Inc., one of the two companies
under contract to manufacture the encryption card for DOD. Bialick will run East Coast
business development for Spyrus.
Need a Pentium notebook with an internal quad-speed CD-ROM? The Army's Portable-1
contract now includes just such a computer. Contractor International Data Products Corp.
in Gaithersburg, Md., this month added its own IDP 530XD notebook to the contract.
The basic notebook, a 75-MHz processor upgradeable to 133 MHz with 8M of RAM and a
10.4-inch dual-scan color screen, is priced at $2,047. The internal CD-ROM will run you
another $249. An active-matrix screen? Toss in another $279. Additional memory goes for
$167 per 4M.
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