Call it a comeback for 2000 crackerjack
Kathryn "Kitty" Guion took an early retirement from her federal job in 1995. Now she is back at full salary, helping her former colleagues meet their year 2000 project deadline. Guion downplayed her new role, which is to manage the entire mainframe code validation effort at the Agriculture Department's National Finance Center in New Orleans.
Programmers say knowing process is fundamental to their art
Even the world's best programmers get no help from automated test tools until they have first worked their way manually through the software processes in question. John Woodruff, lead software architect for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's $1.2 billion National Ignition Facility and Integrated Computer Control System, said automation tools are useful "only after the process is so well understood that you can be confident of what is going to happen."
The coming release of OS/390 will bear a heavy resemblance to Unix
When IBM Corp. delivers the latest version of OS/390 next month, the operating system will resemble Unix more than ever. The rewritten TCP/IP stack in OS/390 will run "at least as well as it does on the Unix platforms that have had TCP/IP for many years," said David Carlucci, general manager of the IBM S/390 division.
Navy enlists tool to amass disparate electronic documents
The Naval Air Systems Command has adopted integrated work management tools to improve its engineering change proposal process, according to officials of Universal Systems Inc. of Chantilly, Va. The company's work management applications send out small Visual Basic programs called device servers, which grab whatever electronic documents are needed to assemble a work package. The tools lend themselves to managing executive correspondence or processing claims, for example.
DOD revs simulation models
Government designers of simulation models still work in stovepiped groups that are only beginning to face reuse and interoperability issues. Defense Department groups soon will have no choice about interoperability. Beginning Oct. 1, DOD organizations will get no funding for simulations that cannot or will not comply two years from now with the department's High-Level Architecture standard for simulations.
Banyan Vines networks flourish in federal gardens
The Marine Corps is moving away from its longtime network partnership with Banyan Systems Inc. and migrating to Microsoft Windows NT Server, said Greg Edwards, federal sales manager for the Westborough, Mass., networking company. But Banyan's ties to other federal organizations are growing. The Treasury Department's Office of the Comptroller uses Banyan consulting engineers to migrate from Banyan Vines to a StreetTalk for NT network, he said.
HP touts VirtualVault as the EC platform for feds
Hewlett-Packard Co. is eyeing a new market for its VirtualVault operating system: federal agencies that want to run electronic government and electronic commerce applications on the Web. A Hewlett-Packard official said he expects federal users to discover a killer app among the potentially unlimited electronic government and EC applications for the B1-level secure operating system.Andy Suchoski, security consultant with Hewlett-Packard's electronic business software organization, said the trusted platform works by securing Internet gateway applications from standard
Tight-lipped Justice starts hardware, software rollout of JCON II
Justice wants to position itself to take advantage of new technologies, deputy CIO Mark Boster says. The Justice Department has brought up the first 700 PCs and 12 servers on the new Justice Consolidated Office Automation Network, but Justice officials are saying little else about the replacement for current office automation systems.
PTO upgrades systems to store patent data online
The Patent and Trademark Office has 27 terabytes of online storage and will keep adding more until it hits 35 terabytes, said A.K. Borough, the deputy chief information officer and director of technical support services. PTO plans to publish 20 million pages of patent and trademark information on the Web, beginning this month.
Agencies automate libraries
Library automation systems have turned into enterprise systems as the need to share information outweighs the desire for autonomy, according to library industry executive Bob Humphrey. "Every little library used to do its own thing," especially Defense Department libraries, he said. But large library system procurements are becoming a trend. Government libraries "tend to gang up, even though they're all buying out of separate funds," Humphrey said.
Microsoft's specs development procedures cause DISA advisers to say no to DCOM
Microsoft Corp. operating systems may be low-cost and easy to use, but they fall short of Defense Department requirements for openness, said Terry Bollinger, principal information systems engineer for Mitre Corp. of Bedford, Mass. Bollinger, a technical adviser to the Defense Information Systems Agency, said Microsoft's closed procedures for developing technical specifications led him and other DOD technical advisers to recommend against deploying battlefield applications that rely on Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model definitions.
XML promises to transform government's use of the Web
Government information managers and commercial application developers alike are buzzing about the Extensible Markup Language, which tags nontext Web content for easier searching and delivery. "This is one of the rare technologies that all the big players, who tend to disagree on most everything else, are in favor of," said Charles F. Goldfarb, the Standard Generalized Markup Language's chief inventor. "XML is mass-market SGML."
Agencies discover tool set to cure development ills
Program managers at NASA and the National Security Agency recently bought automated tools from Software Emancipation Technology Inc. of Burlington, Mass., to attack some of their most vexing client-server software development problems. The software craft is less than 50 years old, company president Donald Henrich said, and it lacks the structured processes that older engineering disciplines have evolved to handle complexity.
SQL Server gets an overhaul
C2 security is extremely important, and historically SQL Server has not been C2-certified. Jim Gray, a senior researcher at Microsoft Corp.'s Bay Area Research Center, is the company's database guru and chief scalability architect for Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. Besides supporting terabyte databases, Gray said SQL Server 7.0 will have an integrated online analytical processing (OLAP) server and an application programming interface called OLE DB for OLAP.
Software execs state case for Microsoft antitrust suit
Sen. Patrick Leahy says he wonders whether Congress should rewrite antitrust laws. Executives of large and small software companies gathered on Capitol Hill last month to plead again for enforcement of antitrust laws against Microsoft Corp. Mitchell Kertzman, chief executive officer of Sybase Inc., told the Senate Judiciary Committee investigating Microsoft's business practices that Microsoft abuses monopoly power through intimidation and other practices that "should be viewed as violations of the
Feds eye single sign-ons for full access to network apps
Federal users have a growing need to simplify their password access to dozens of applications, according to industry officials who develop access control software. "Last year it was mostly tire-kicking. This year there are funded, dedicated projects for single sign-on," said Michael McLaughlin, federal sales manager for PassGo Technologies of Boxborough, Mass.
Marines face challenge of moving older systems from Vines to NT
Maj. John R. Burnette remembers when the Marine Corps' 10-year enterprise network partnership with Banyan Systems Inc. started to come apart. Burnette, who had backed Banyan Vines and StreetTalk messaging for more than a decade, said an enterprising programmer in Okinawa wrote a routine that converted the Marines' StreetTalk global directory into an export file that worked fine under Microsoft Exchange Server.
Toshiba takes the plunge and manufactures departmental and workgroup PC servers
All Toshiba servers will have year 2000-ready Phoenix 4.0 BIOSes. The Computer Systems Division of Toshiba America Information Systems Inc. will move into full-line computer manufacturing this summer when it delivers its first departmental and workgroup PC servers for the U.S. market. The two-way 350- and 400-MHz Pentium II servers will have hot-swap drive bays and optional Intelligent Input/Output RAID storage drives. An I2O PCI slot supports direct throughput from the
USGS opens gateway to Earth
Before the Geological Survey teamed with Microsoft Corp. to set up the TerraServer Web site, USGS had never tried to put so much data online over the Internet. The earth science agency typically distributes its aerial image data on CD-recordable disks or 8-mm tapes, or stages it over the network using the File Transfer Protocol.
ENTERPRISE COMPUTING
Paper is cheap, paper archival isn't Archival medium/Estimated cost per megabyte Paper: $10.00 Microfiche: $1.20 12-inch WORM optical disk: 0.11 51/4-inch optical disk: 0.09 Near-line archival tape: 0.01 WORM optical disks once were the only electronic storage media approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Now the write-once, read-many-times media faces lower-cost competition from tape cartridges that mimic WORM disks, according to a storage industry official.
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