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Florence Olsen
Digital Government
Attensity masters linguistics
Company touts its mid-October release of Attensity 4 as a complete analyst's desktop
Digital Government
DOT: Help us save money
Virtualization will enable the Transportation Department to consolidate separate applications and servers in a virtual data center.
Digital Government
FAA: Knowledge sharing shouldn t be forced
Agency's use of online collaboration space has expanded to solve workgroup problems
Digital Government
VeriSign discounts PKI services to higher education
Higher institutions' open networks are frequently the target of cyberattacks, say VeriSign officials, who manage the Internet dot-edu domain servers.
Digital Government
Entrust to sign e-passports
The State Department's first generation of e-passports will store electronic information that is digitally signed using digital signature technology from Entrust, company executives announced this week.
Digital Government
Working day and night, FBI finishes IAFIS code
That's when they will start processing digital fingerprints, using more than four dozen Hewlett-Packard Convex Scalable Parallel Processor 2000 and HP 9000 K-Class servers in a secure computer room the size of two football fields. In the final building phase, the $640 million Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System is scheduled to come online this summer at 90 percent of its final functionality.
Digital Government
Agencies can touch base when evaluating designs
A British-developed knowledge base will become a subscription CD-ROM and Web service for agencies that need help in evaluating conceptual engineering design proposals. The knowledge base, developed by Engineering Sciences Data Unit (ESDU) of London, contains data, equations, charts, graphs and Fortran computer programs of interest to aerospace, mechanical, process and structural engineers.
Digital Government
Center puts IDEAS to work
A team of six programmers re-engineered an aspect of Air Force Personnel Center operations with a demographics information system that cost the government about $100,000 and has saved the center's staff a lot of time. As word of the Web application has spread, the Interactive Demographics Analysis System (IDEAS) has noticeably reduced the number of pinkies, or personnel information requests, the center gets, said Master Sgt. Eddie Stevens, Internet application developer for the Air Force Personnel
Digital Government
WorldMark servers gain speed, cut prices
The WorldMark 4800 and WorldMark 5200 servers that NCR Corp. were set to ship last month are an order of magnitude faster than their predecessors and about half the price, according to NCR officials. The gains come from 450-MHz Pentium II Xeon processors and faster interconnect technology. The WorldMark 5200's Bynet switch connects four-way processing nodes at 80 megabytes/sec.
Digital Government
EPA will open AIRS on Web
The Environmental Protection Agency's 10-year-old air pollution data retrieval system will soon have browser access, even though the Web is still in some respects "a pretty scary place," EPA's Tom Link said. "We don't know if we'll have 200 or 10,000 simultaneous users, but we'll find out this fall when we go into production," said Link, senior EPA manager for advanced data delivery systems in the Office of Air and Radiation.
Digital Government
Candle introduces a platform for integrating apps
Extending its middleware expertise, Candle Corp. has developed a set of products to integrate applications. The Santa Monica, Calif., company claims to have one of the first integrated platforms for business component computing, or what GartnerGroup Inc. calls service-oriented architectures. Candle's Roma integration platform does for applications what relational technology did for databases, said Steve Craggs, the company's vice president of application solutions. "It works like relational joins, except it's for applications," he said.
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Digital Government
Navy pushes back arrival time for personnel system
The Navy missed the boat trying to complete the Navy Standard Integrated Personnel System in 18 months, according to NSIPS deputy program manager Dennis Pigg. "Eighteen months was not a realistic date," Pigg said. Navy program managers now expect to have the $470 million personnel information system ready by next April.
Digital Government
Lawyer doubts law will have effect on 2000 disputes
How much impact will the Year 2000 Information Readiness and Disclosure Act have on legal disputes between the federal government and contractors over year 2000-related systems failures? Very little, one Washington lawyer predicts. Although most civil proceedings are covered under PL 105-271, contract enforcement actions brought by a government agency are not, said Michael Aisenberg, who represented industry interests in drafting key provisions of the law.
Digital Government
Treasury installs tool to show both sides of the financial coin
Thanks to its complex financial reporting systems, the federal government reported a $70 billion budget surplus in fiscal 1998, the same year it recorded a $60 billion spending deficit. Believe it or not, both financial statements were accurate, said Steven App, deputy chief financial officer at the Treasury Department. Federal budgeting is based on cash, whereas the government's financial systems use accrual accounting.
Digital Government
Xerox integrates document sharing, summaries
Summarization is finally getting respect from users of document-sharing software, according to product managers for Xerox Corp. The company's Visual Recall document management software automatically generates one-page summaries or 20 key excerpts from documents. "We had summarization three years ago, but folks didn't see a value in it at the time," said Jay Ganesh, Xerox product marketing manager for Visual Recall.
Digital Government
Enterprise Computing
The government last month added two more financial management packages to its schedule of approved general ledger accounting software. Financial management packages from PeopleSoft Inc. and SAP America Public Sector and Education Inc. earned places on the General Services Administration's Financial Management System Software Schedule. That brings to 11 the number of vendors offering financial management packages approved for federal use in core accounting systems.
Digital Government
BLS applies tough-love policy for Web posting
Twice burned by premature Web postings in recent months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics no longer trusts software scripts or people working alone to publish time-sensitive economic data on the Web. Until the bureau comes up with better automated processes, it will adhere to interim procedures adopted after the premature postings, said Thomas Zuromskis, director of technology and computing services.
Digital Government
Data General designs rackmounted, single-app server
The rackmounted design of the AV 3704R server from Data General Corp. matches what the company sees as a growing user preference for multiple servers running a single Microsoft Windows NT application apiece. The trend away from multiple NT applications on a single box coincides with user desires "to avoid a single point of failure," said Lisa Robinson Schoeller, manager of product marketing for Data General of Westborough, Mass.
Digital Government
DOD set to test travel system
About 200,000 Defense Department employees in 11 midwestern states will start planning their trips through a new uniform temporary duty system, once it finishes operational tests this year. "We'll go to Whiteman Air Force Base, Mo., in April or May to test it live with airmen on TDY before we turn the switch on," said Army Col. Albert Arnold III, the project manager.
Digital Government