A NASA flight system interface goes commercial
The command and control interface familiar to shuttle flight engineers is moving out of the NASA world and becoming a general-purpose systems interface. Kinesix Corp. of Houston has groomed its Standards-based Advanced Man-Machine Interface as a $300-per-seat window for high-level managers to see "the very same data the guys in the control room are seeing, pretty much any time they wish," said Russ Jamerson, Kinesix vice president of marketing.
2000 could cause recession, experts say
NEW YORK--A former Federal Reserve Bank official and a former Defense Department systems chief both recently warned the government about global fallout from the year 2000 computer crisis. "It's time to prepare for trouble," said Edward Yardeni, who once worked at the Fed in New York and is now chief economist and managing director of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, a multinational investment bank. He spoke at a conference here late last month.
Curator holds the IT artifacts
While many of his government colleagues plot ways to get new computers, David Allison spends his days collecting old computers and thinking about their impact on society. The Smithsonian Institution's curator of computers at the National Museum of American History works with a small staff to preserve and interpret the artifacts of the information age.
NOAA scientists reach new depths in sea data collection
A crew of systems engineers, normally creatures of the office, sailed this month on the 230-foot hydrographic survey ship Rainier from Seattle to the uncharted coasts around Alaska. Their job: to install a four-way Silicon Graphics Inc. Origin2000 data server on the shipboard network that will receive floods of new information about the ocean bottom.
JPLwashes hands of PC work
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is turning over its client-server management to a prime contractor after putting up for years with spacecraft designers spending agency time as systems managers. Interplanetary space exploration just isn't the same as managing service levels on client-server networks, said Richard Green, deputy manager of the Institutional Computing and Information Services Office at JPL.
Date code crisis spreads
Just 20 months away from 2000, it's dawning on systems managers that client-server networks might pose even more insidious date code problems than the mainframe systems they have concentrated on fixing. Government organizations cannot deal with the client-server crisis until they have accurate inventories of their networks, said year 2000 consultant William Ulrich, president of the Tactical Strategy Group Inc. of Soquel, Calif.
StatServer analyzes situation
StatServer 2.0 brings World Wide Web publishing capabilities to the S-Plus statistical data mining tools from MathSoft Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. Built for sharing multidimensional data sets over intranets or the Internet, StatServer performs more than 2,000 analysis and visualization functions, MathSoft officials said. The S-Plus 4.0 statistical data mining tools do exploratory data analysis, visualization and statistical modeling, all of which aid analysts in generating hypotheses, said Rick Bohdanowicz, vice president and general manager
VRML earns ISO's blessing
Government employees who assisted in the birth of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language in 1994 are surprised by how fast VRML grew up. Last December, the language received the blessing of the International Standards Organization as VRML97. "We're all very happy," said Don Brutzman, assistant professor in the interdisciplinary academic group at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Brutzman sits on the board of directors of the nonprofit VRML Consortium and is a technical
USDA rule proposal draws abundant online comments
If sheer numbers qualify electronic government applications as successful, then the Agriculture Department is onto something. Using the World Wide Web as its conduit, USDA set up a system to receive and post comments on proposed organic produce and livestock standards. The public has participated in record numbers in a process that usually attracts mostly well-funded, special-interest groups.
Agencies worry about future of DEC's OpenVMS
Agencies have been running VMS ever since Digital introduced the original 32-bit VAX 11/780 minicomputer 20 years ago. Many federal applications still rely on VMS, now called OpenVMS, and systems managers said they don't want to move those applications any time soon. Digital officials have rushed to assure OpenVMS users that the OS is key to Digital's enterprise strategy and that Digital will continue to support it along with Microsoft Windows NT and Digital Unix.
Sim model speeds decisions
Engi described his systems as combining protein computers--human experts--with silicon computers. Both are necessary in his global approach to making infrastructure models for government officials who respond to hot spots domestically and overseas. As yet, the Energy Department lab has no paying customers for the decision-support technology. But Engi is convinced the work his team is doing with dynamic simulation language models will prove invaluable to U.S. and international policy-makers.
Microsoft backs away from tech support of NDS for NT
The areas of tech support affected are in NT user directory and security services, NT Server product managers said. Both areas are essential for use of NT's strong password option and for replication between NT domain controllers. Microsoft recently announced the tech support limitations through a market bulletin circulated to the company's field sales force. In the bulletin, the NT Server product team warned users that installing Novell Directory Services for Windows NT, a product
Navy decimates data overload
Under contract with the Navy, Muse Technologies Inc. of Albuquerque, N.M., will adapt its Multidimensional User-oriented Synthetic Environment (Muse) to cut training time at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and improve sonar interpretation and decision making. The Navy requested a version of the multisensory Muse environment to run under Microsoft Windows NT on the desktop PC. The Unix-based shell software, which includes user interface tools and controls for interactive devices, currently runs only on high-end
Army revs up its biggest iron
The Army center will receive the first Cray Research Inc. T3E-1200, a liquid-cooled supercomputer with 256 600-MHz Digital Equipment Corp. Alpha processor nodes and 16 internal system processors. Cray Research of Eagan, Minn., the supercomputing subsidiary of Silicon Graphics Inc., will deliver the machine with 139G of 50-nanosecond distributed RAM, 500G of internal disk storage and 1 terabyte of High-Performance Parallel Interface-attached RAID storage.
Fed tests will soon show if NT, Unix can interoperate
Results from 60 federal pilots of OpenNT are expected early this year. Before the Defense Department or NASA approves any large-scale deployments, however, Windows NT 4.0 and OpenNT must first prove their prowess as interoperable platforms. The trials could last at least six months, government officials said. "The OpenNT product would let me get off Unix" and potentially save the Navy lots of money, said Capt. Michael Bachmann, program manager for the Naval TacticalCommand Support
Project managers get a hand
KnowledgePlan 2.0 from Software Productivity Research of Burlington, Mass., measures three variables in software development--cost, quality and schedule--using a knowledge base the company has built over years of software consulting. Unlike its Checkpoint predecessor, KnowledgePlan requires no expert knowledge of how software function points relate to programmer productivity. "To get this into lots of hands, we needed to simplify the interface and put in more wizards," company president Charles Douglis said.
Standard unifies facilities data
A free CD-ROM with a Tri-Service Spatial Data Standard is bringing a semblance of order out of confusion for military facilities managers. The Tri-Service CAD/GIS Technology Center in Vicksburg, Miss., developed the spatial data standard to stop the practice of military bases spending up to $250,000 apiece to develop their own data models and schema for displaying computer-aided design and geographic information system data.
Time machine tests 2000 code
Blue is the color code for systems certified to run properly before and after the century rollover. The time machine is a Defense Department-owned Unisys Corp. mainframe whose system clock is set forward. The time machine shows whether Air Force applications will fail when 2000 arrives. Nothing about this Air Force Standard Systems Group project is secret. SSG officials at Gunter Annex know the status of every automated information system at Maxwell Air Force Base,
Distributed objects will reign
As vice president of technology for Oracle Corp.'s Government, Education and Health Division, Tim Hoechst is responsible for all the technology issues of Oracle's federal customers. Hoechst, an avid promoter of Oracle's newest technologies, says the federal government needs the network computing architecture because NCA will let applications talk to each other--finally.
Agencies want their apps off the shelf, survey reveals
After decades of catering to its own unique requirements, the federal government is newly eager to try commercial software, according to an exclusive GCN survey. Leading integrated business application vendors such as PeopleSoft Inc., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG are more than willing to oblige. Part of the heightened appeal of commercial software comes from improvements in the applications, which let users tailor functions through simple table changes rather than writing new C code.
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