Buried treasure in your office can make a dazzling Web drive
Agencies, struggling to drag their public information onto the Internet, are learning there's more to it than just designing pretty home pages. Every agency collects valuable data that resides on individual desktops or departmental servers--documents, spreadsheets, contact lists and small-scale databases--that add value to the government's raw data mother lode.
GSA to kick off public-key pilot with 250 users
After earlier failed starts, the General Services Administration this month expects to get a public-key infrastructure pilot project off the ground with tests involving about 250 federal employees and a few citizens. The participants in the Paperless Transactions for the Public pilot all will receive a special World Wide Web browser and a public-key encryption card that fits into the floppy drive of any PC. The encryption cards will be issued by the Postal Service.
Browsers limber up only to clutter your drive, tracking mud
If you like to experiment with Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Netscape Communications' Navigator, you're familiar with the incredible flexibility of Web browsers today. Plug-in modules add even more flexibility, letting you view special files and sometimes full applications right inside your Web browser. This seems so practical and gee-whiz fun that most people ignore an important side effect--file management nightmares for your enterprise.
With InContext's WebAnalyzer, you can peek behind the scenes
Web site analysis seems to be hot right now, with several companies introducing products to help Webmasters control their ever-expanding page collections. InContext WebAnalyzer for Microsoft Windows 95 deserved a look because of its price: At $149, it could pay for itself by saving just a few hours of management time. After testing it, I realized this tool could do much more than just save time--it gave me an overview of GCN's Web pages that
Govt. buyers, vendors eye EDI links via Net, bypassing VANs
NEW YORK--Electronic commerce in the government now relies on value-added network (VAN) providers to deliver solicitations and execute purchases, largely because of systems incompatibility between buyers and sellers. But on the horizon are EC products that would bypass the VANs and let government buyers interact directly and securely with suppliers over the World Wide Web.
IRS testing asks taxpayers to sign on the on-line dotted line
IRS is conducting a three-site test of electronic signatures for paperless tax filing. Ordinarily, each taxpayer who files an electronic return must sign and mail a separate paper form to the IRS. But filers at the three test sites can simply sign on-screen to authenticate their returns. IRS spokesman Steve Pyrek said the tests, known as DigEST, for digital electronic signature tests, are going on at one H&R Block tax preparation office and at two
Improvements zoom on digital lightweight camera by Kodak
The zoom lens-equipped Digital Camera 50 is both a great sequel to Kodak's ground-breaking DC 40 camera [GCN, Sept. 4, 1995, Page 1] and a missed opportunity. For less than $1,000--about the same as last year's model--you get a pushbutton 3X zoom that equals what you'd see in a 37- to 111-millimeter zoom lens on a low-end 35mm camera. Even better, a PC Card slot now lets you plug in flash memory cards for 2M
Army gives EDI a tryout on the killing fields of Bosnia
The Army is ramping up electronic data interchange at joint contracting centers in Bosnia and Hungary to see how well it will work near the front lines. A temporary contracting office in Kaposvar, Hungary, uses EDI to locate and buy materials from U.S. suppliers for quick shipment to troops working with the NATO peace-keeping force in Bosnia. A second EDI office will open in Tuzla, Bosnia, this month.
With $10,000 Creation Station, turn your desk into a TV studio
Turnkey digital video editing has reached an affordable range at last for government offices eager to produce their own personnel training systems and public information kiosks. The Creation Station from Advanced Digital Systems Inc. of Waltham, Mass., and Sigma Designs Inc. of North Kingston, R.I., is priced from $7,549 to $11,649 on ADS' General Services Administration schedule. It comes complete with Motion Picture Experts Group MPEG-1 encoding and decoding cards plus image- and sound-editing software
Test Drive: No user should be without the utility that peeks
Quick View Plus for Microsoft Windows 95 is one of those utilities you wonder how you ever got along without. Previously known as OutsideIn for Windows 3.x [GCN, July 3, 1995, Page 33], it's now offered by Inso Corp., which bought developer Systems Compatibility Corp. earlier this year. The $49 utility opens files so you can peek inside without needing the application that originally created them. Support for Windows' Object Linking and Embedding 2.0 lets
Some agency Web pages were not on furlough this time
Congratulations to all agencies that made the effort to keep their Internet servers up and running during the furlough. Face-to-face and telephone services might have been out, but much of on-line government remained functional. It reflects well on agency personnel that, of dozens of government Web and gopher servers I tested in January, only a handful failed to respond. Those I couldn't reach included the Census Bureau at http://www.census.gov and the Environmental Protection Agency at
Which & Why package doesn't just organize your data--it tells you what to do
Which & Why decision-support software for Microsoft Windows 3.x not only helps you organize and analyze your options statistically, but also makes its own recommendation. The software, which runs on a Windows PC with at least 13M free on the hard drive, or on Novell NetWare or Banyan Systems Vines networks, breaks up decisions into bite-size factors, weighted for importance.
Let Web bots do the grunt work
If you want to know the World Wide Web today, talk to a robot. So-called bots are a cheap source of labor if you'd like to stay up-to-date on various kinds of information but don't have the time to search hundreds of Web home pages every day. Also known as Web-walkers, spiders or wanderers, these software agents fall into two types: personal bots set up and operated by end users, and bots offered by Internet
How domain names work on the net
In the Internet's Domain Name Service, each named group is called a domain, and strings of domains are separated by periods. The largest domain appears at the end: .gov represents the entire government domain, .mil the entire military. GCN's address, gcn.com, has a .com extension to indicate a commercial organization. Some GCN machines have their own names, such as igor.gcn.com.
Experienced gridlock on the Internet lately? Here's why.
What we have here on the Internet today is a failure to communicate. There's not only traffic gridlock, there are failures in the Domain Name Service (DNS) system. Some Internet providers have set their routers to drop packets with long addresses. The upshot? If your agency counts on the Internet for business or public communications, you're less reachable than you think.
Considering the move to NT?
Is your office rehosting legacy applications to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT environment? If so, you're not alone. Like their private-sector counterparts, government systems professionals are choosing Windows NT as their client-server platform and then confronting hundreds of issues, big and small, associated with the move. But federal decision-makers have a special challenge on their plate. They must decide whether they want a Unix application to remain a Unix application or become a Windows application with
GIS data unites in team pool
Information embedded in geographic information system maps helps government agencies monitor large areas for environmental shifts and other changes. Until now, this meant maintaining two sets of databases--one specifically for the GIS. Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. of Redlands, Calif., a leading GIS vendor for almost a quarter-century, wants to streamline this double bookkeeping. Under an agreement with Oracle Corp., ESRI will give its GIS tools direct access to information in Oracle-based data collections.
New Wang PC with secure OS earns NSA's B3 security rating
Wang Federal Inc. has received the National Security Agency's highest B-level security rating, B3, for its XTS-300 computer system running Wang's Unix-like Secure Trusted Operating Program (STOP). The new XTS workstation is the first such system to run on standard PC hardware. It carries the Wang label and is built on an Intel Corp. 486 50-MHz DX2 processor and commodity PC parts.
DOE picks Intel to Build teraflops machine
By the end of 1996, the Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratory plans to hit one of supercomputing's big targets: 1 trillion floating-point operations per second. Sandia has a $46 million agreement with Intel Corp. to build a teraflops machine containing more than 9,000 CPUs. It will be Intel's first supercomputer based on the new P6 chip, soon to succeed the popular Pentium once known as the P5.
Measure performance with Spec95
Try on some new Specs before looking at your next Unix or Open VMS workstation. The System Performance Evaluation Corp.'s new Spec95 benchmark suite has replaced the 1992 Spec tests of integer and floating-point computing performance. The updates will be administered by the National Computer Graphics Association of Fairfax, Va.
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