GOESnet rains satellite data -
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Science Center in Camp Springs, Md., had to pull the plug on its two IBM Corp. 4381 mainframes. They were choking on satellite imagery flowing down from NOAA's newest geostationary satellites. In their place, NOAA's Satellite Services Division has put in GOESnet, a network of servers named for the pair of geostationary operational environmental satellites that feed the network 48G of data every 24 hours.
CRI-X reads disks in real time
Two large Defense Department projects managed by Lockheed Martin Corp. and McDonnell-Douglas Corp. are beta testing the CRI-X software, CD ROM-USA Inc. president Roger Hutchison said. One by-product of the Golden, Colo., company's compression process is an extremely high level of data encryption. Another by-product is "a proportional benefit, so that the more compression you get, the faster the retrieval is," Hutchison said.
Middleware unifies publishing
Although the Standard Generalized Markup Language promised the same thing many years ago, converting all documents to SGML proved too time-consuming, said Bill Thornburg, vice president of publisher markets for Dataware Technologies Inc. of Cambridge, Mass. Dataware's Electronic Publishing Management System (EPMS) can accept documents in many non-SGML data formats, including active news feeds, by later this year. The text-based repository for the finished documents is an SGML document store, which maps non-SGML documents to
AF coders earn 3rd star
The Air Force's Standard Systems Group has earned a Level 3 Capability Maturity Model rating, joining the elite ranks of government software development shops. Carnegie-Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in Pittsburgh designed the CMM to help organizations improve software development procedures. Level 3 is midway on the CMM scale for software development.
Agencies increase pace of year 2000 contract awards; six go to Viasoft
After months of preparation, agencies are stepping up the pace of contract awards for tools and services to fix their year 2000 date code problems. Viasoft Inc. of Phoenix will license its MVS and VM Cobol tools to six Cabinet-level agencies at discounted prices through the company's US2000 program for the federal government. Each site license runs close to $100,000.
Feds try to ease grants process using Java app
Brad Smith, manager of the Electronic Grants Pilot Project, has been testing products but said he's concentrating on packaged integration services coming into the World Wide Web marketplace. Active Software Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., makes the Active Web software that Smith's project is testing in conjunction with 200 state governments, universities, and nonprofit and other organizations that apply for federal grants.
DOD administers system cure
Some medical logistics problems are too complex for military personnel to solve without help from an intelligent algorithm. That's why the Defense Department has spent more than $25 million on a medical decision-support system to improve the efficiency of theater airlift and medical evacuation. The development cost will reach $40 million by the end of 1997.
MultiRead standard builds bridge between CD-ROM and DVD-ROM
A new specification called MultiRead will protect agencies' existing CD-ROM investments as the computer industry starts moving to digital video disk storage. Most new CD-ROM and DVD-ROM devices will carry the MultiRead logo, which means they can read any CD-ROM, CD-recordable or CD-rewritable disk. But the reverse is not true: CD devices will not read the new DVD disks. Until now, DVD devices were not expected to be compatible with recordable CDs either.
Round 1 decision goes against Java standard
Despite Defense Information Systems Agency backing for fast-track approval of Java as an international standard, the Sun Microsystems Inc. language has lost the initial round. DISA computer scientist Jerry Smith, a principal on the U.S. Joint Technical Committee considering the matter, called Sun's case a watershed that will determine the future of voluntary standards for global information and communications technology.
Data mart makes a PowerPlay
The New York consulting firm will deliver its Performance Executive data mart and query tools this fall, following a beta test of the client-server software this summer in Wade County, N.C., and elsewhere. Peat Marwick built Performance Executive's data model and warehouse around its 29-year experience in federal, state and local government systems design, said William Blaustein, a partner in Peat Marwick's Public Service Practice.
Sun finds Net creates users for secure OS
A black hole is how Sun Microsystems Federal officials describe the government's security certification process. And though the company has invested 12 years and $50 million to develop a multilevel-secure (MLS) and compartmented-mode workstation (CMW) version of the Solaris operating system, sales to date have been unimpressive. But the growth of the Internet "has brought people to our door," said Joe Alexander, product manager for Trusted Solaris 2.5, the newest B1-level MLS+ release of Solaris
2 vendors offer novel 2000 deal
The financing plan, from DynCorp and Siemens Pyramid Information Systems Inc., leverages procurement reforms that give agencies more flexibility in spending operations and maintenance funds for hardware, software and services, the vendors said. DynCorp and Siemens Pyramid officials said the Army, Air Force and Defense Information Systems Agency are evaluating their systems to see which ones are suitable for rehosting under the fixed-price, fixed-time program.
NIST tries smart engineering
Swee Leong, a manufacturing engineer with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said the federal government needs to protect itself and industry from faulty manufacturing data-the source of expensive production errors. Whenever a job order goes to the shop floor, it is accompanied by a manufacturing data package and assembled by a process engineer. It contains a numerical control program and lists of tools, fixtures, machines and operations.
VA soups up its hospital nets
The upgrade, moving briskly at about five sites per week, will give the health care agency enough processing power for the next two to three years, said Craig Neidermeier, director of contracts administration for the Veterans Health Administration in Birmingham, Ala. VA officials weighed alternatives to Windows NT, Neidermeier said, including Unix and Digital OpenVMS.
Oracle leapfrogs petabyte barrier with release 8
Oracle databases can balloon up to 500 petabytes-500,000 terabytes-before they hit the ceiling of Oracle Corp.'s new object-relational database management system. Current federal Oracle users should see immediate performance and scalability improvements when they upgrade to Oracle8, even if they don't need its object features, said Tim Hoechst, vice president of technology for the Oracle public sector group.
Energy puts SGML to work
Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) recognized the value of SGML several years ago when it adopted the language as its standard for document exchange. Now Energy is laying the groundwork for a distributed multimedia archive that agency scientists and academic researchers can access from any desktop computer.
Windows has date flaws May 18, 1998
Microsoft Windows 98, now under Justice Department scrutiny, is the only fully year 2000-ready operating system from Microsoft Corp. Other Microsoft OSes aren't quite there yet, even though company officials describe the current Windows 95, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows NT 4.0 releases as "compliant, with minor issues." The company earlier had said its 32-bit operating systems were ready for 2000.
Put everyone on the same page
That's the view of Richard Rebh of WebFlow Corp. of Santa Clara, Calif., who said the company's SamePage suite turns collaborative information systems inside out by letting several people work in the same document simultaneously. "That creates a more agile organization," Rebh said. The Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Department, NASA, Army Corps of Engineers and intelligence agencies have evaluated or purchased the SamePage 2.0 application suite, which runs under the SunSoft Solaris, Silicon Graphics Irix and
Health records project hits pay dirt
After five years of work, the Office of Defense Health Affairs now has something to show for its investment in a medical records system. The Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS) system, a transaction-processing application and data warehouse, is helping Defense Department hospitals reduce pharmaceutical inventories while avoiding costly open-market buys, DOD Health Affairs officials said. Before DMLSS work started, most DOD hospitals had 60 to 150 days' worth of inventory
Cohen will face IT leadership void at Defense
Now that William Cohen has cleared the congressional confirmation gauntlet, one of his first jobs as Defense secretary will be filling an information technology management void. The Defense Department soon will lose its two senior systems chiefs, Emmett Paige Jr. and Lt. Gen. Albert J. Edmonds. It is an ironic fate for Cohen, who last year as a senator crafted the most sweeping federal IT management reform legislation in 30 years.
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