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Submitting Federal Proposals Requires Windows
Petronius Arbiter writes "The US federal government is requiring that proposals for grants etc be submitted using a common system at http://grants.gov/. That's a good idea, except that effectively, you must use Windows and Explorer. See To operate PureEdge Viewer, your computer must meet the following system requirements: Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP... PureEdge on Grants.gov will not run within the Firefox browser. They do have a Citrix substitute for non-Windows users. However the site goes on to say "Note that a limited amount of users can access the Citrix Server at any one time... Finally, you will find the best time to work and submit an application via Citrix is during off-peak hours, usually between 10 p.m. and 10 a.m., EST. Finally, if your organization has more than 10 non-Windows users, they want you to add a dedicated Windows box to handle the traffic.
For National Science Foundation clients, this is a big step backwards. NSF has had an excellent online system, http://fastlane.nsf.gov/ for years. Fastlane has no bias towards MS. However, by federal edict, NSF people must also use grants.gov."
This is certainly a huge oversight/blunder by the government ... and I imagine that with enough outrage by contractors they'll create/implement a Linux/Mac version of the software. In the meantime though, it doesn't seem like such a huge inconvenience to have a single $200 Windows computer sitting around just for this purpose.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Three OSs for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Man doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord in his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them all,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
The PureEdge Viewer is a small, free program which will allow you to access, complete and submit applications electronically and securely on Grants.gov.
I guess those great minds in the federal government have never heard of HTML forms and SSL.
I wonder who got bribed for this crap.
There is a nice mini-howto explaining how to access grants.gov through Linux:
Grants.gov Howto
It's not pretty, but I have a feeling a more streamlined solution will eventually emerge.
Publicly available government sites are required by law to function in more than one browser. I work with government web-sites and if anyone wanted to make a big deal out of this they could.
If you read this: http://www.heise.de/tp/r4/artikel/5/5263/1.html Of course, it you managed to enter your key into an OS, you want to make sure that it is and stays widely used.
Unfortunately, having worked in a biomedical research lab, government funding is crucial in keeping that research going. Sure, you can refuse it but that would be like shooting yourself in the foot. I've seen many brilliant researchers with very promising research topics run out of the facility because of lack of funding, and it's surely one of the most, if not the most, crucial aspects to running a lab.
Refusing to apply on principle is not anything any sane scientist would do. Government-based funding is already difficult to obtain, especially without the proper connections, but not applying in the first place is completely impractical. Even if a lab ran solely on non-Windows based computers, dropping $200 on an old Windows-based PC just for this function would be a no-brainer.
And yes, I think this is a lousy idea on the part of a government that has already concluded that Microsoft has a monopoly.
*golfclap*
Isn't the government mandated to provide access to their internet sites to everyone, regardless of disability? Not saying that using non-Windows products is a disability, but it could affect those who do have them. I'm not knowledgeable of text-to-speech or other input systems, but I bet there are a few systems out there that run on Linux or some other non-Windows system so as to cater to their owner (such as a parapalegic, or someone with muscular problems).
If this is the case, then this means that grants.gov is not in compliance, and must be revamped, right?
Submit a grant proposal for fixing the problem.
Suggestion:
Start with a command-line tool. Make it portable plain C99 or even ANSI C, 64-bit clean of course. Write an interface spec describing the grammer of stdin and stdout.
Write some nice front-end wrapper software for GUIs using GTK and Cocoa. The GUI does socketpair, fork, and execve to control the command-line part. If the command-line part needs to keep running as a co-process, use the select or poll call to control it. Most likely, select or poll is built into the GUI event loop of your toolkit.
For those of us who have to support researchers this is old news. In fact the sumssion fails to mention two important facts: PureEdge (now under a new name since IBM bought the Canadian company) has a beta version of the viewer out for Macs (still nothing for linux), and grants.gov have already announced that they will be replaceing the PureEdge solution within the year.
Can it be run under WINE?
Why not just run it on a Win 9x virtual machine?
Headline: "Submitting Federal Proposals Requires Windows" .They do have a Citrix substitute for non-Windows users. . ."
Blurb: ". .
So. . . you don't actually have to use Windows?
If enough people subscribe to Slashdot, will they hire a real editor?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
The government has recognized this problem and is switching their e-forms client from PureEdge (now owned by IBM and called Workplace Forms) to Adobe Reader. They awarded a new contract to General Dynamics IT late last year (switching from the original integrator, Northrop Grumman) and will be rebuilding the whole thing while maintaining the existing form sets and whatnot. The new Adobe forms are scheduled to be available in early April; see this FAQ for more information.
I wrote about this whole thing on my own site and on my company's blog. It's been a major problem for some research universities in particular, who have a loyal Mac community. But I think Grants.gov's on the road to fixing it.
(Full disclosure: Our company was part of a bid to win the contract that was awarded to General Dynamics. Our team proposed a different approach that would have yielded the same outcomes but we're not part of the GDIT team.)
You use a bloated OS to get money from bloated government. I don't see the problem.
:( We truthsayes have it rough.
Man, here comes another flamebait mod.
CraptiveX is what keeps me from going completely Linux at work on my desktop.. There's a browser-based bug system that only runs CraptiveX and it fails to load under crossover.
:(
Glad to see my tax dollars at work
As someone wrote in another comment, "Who got bribed to use this system?".
/. every other week. It is neither expensive nor technologically difficult to create websites to accept grants (or to accept anything else from the public) while using existing, widely-supported web standards.
In this day and age there should be no excuse for government organizations (fed, state, and local) to implement platform-specific interfaces like this, but it seems that articles like this pop up on
I know that there are watchgroups like Amnesty International who police the actions of governments WRT human rights issues -- is there a need for a watchgroup to monitor the technology/websites of the US government to ensure that they are not off in a corner with a single vendor, wanking off?
Why is this so difficult?
A friend of mine in Washington (state) spent a couple of weeks trying to create an interface between his program and some behemouth-of-an-LMS that cost the feds hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the LMS had just supported a *standard* for interfacing with other programs, he probably could've hacked it together in a couple of days, but as it was, I don't think that he could ever get the interface working properly.
Widely-used, royalty-free/patent-free standards. Is it really that difficult?
coding is life
This is a blessing in disguise, really. Anything that makes it harder for the U.S. government to give away my money is good by me. If only they could remove the online processes entirely, that would be even better!
Of course people will cry "This money is going for important research, and stuff that does good for society". Even if I accept this to be true, and even if I accept that a free-for-all beg-for-money system is more viable than a system where government officials decide who to give money to without being petitioned... then making it easier to apply for a grant just gives the people who have to evaluate grant applications way more work having to evaluate more frivilous grant requests.
I run RedHat 8.0 (with a window manager from RedHat 5.0) on a 4-year-old machine in my office; I use LaTeX to prepare all my grant proposals, and produce PDF output. I can get through most of my proposal submissions to the National Science Foundation via their FastLane system, although my university requires me to fill out an Excel spreadsheet. I suppose I could do it under OpenOffice, although the spreadsheet doesn't really work right in the old version of OO I'm running.
:-)
So I have a copy of VMWare with Windows XP in it, which I use mostly just for doing my grant budget spreadsheets.
FastLane lets me upload my PDF files which make up the bulk of a proposal, and fill out some forms in the web browser (mozilla, since I couldn't get FireFox running on this old version of Linux, it needed some newer C libraries or something). FastLane is really quite platform-independent, it works great for me. Our university built an in-house system for doing the internal side of grant proposals (getting approvals from one's chair, dean, etc. and having the university Sponsored Programs office approve the budget); they basically copied FastLane's style, so it can also be done from a web browser under pretty much any OS people are using around here.
I did submit a proposal to the National Institutes of Health last year, and had to use the stupid PureEdge software. It was a pain, but it did work under VMWare. I still wrote the actual project description in LaTeX under Linux, and just imported the PDF output into PureEdge.
I'll be unhappy if, as some people here have hinted, FastLane goes away and we're all required to go through grants.gov.
As other people have mentioned, yeah it shouldn't be "too easy" to ask for a pile of money from the government. But like other things I deal with (such as fighting for tenure), you expect a certain amount of difficulty, but sometimes people go above and beyond to make sure things are really more difficult than they need to be. I know I do that on many occasions too.
(As for why I run such an old version of Linux, I've customized this old window manager in some ways that I haven't been able to find out how to do under a modern version of Gnome/KDE; when I finally find a way to, I'll likely upgrade. But that's another story.)
I think that that's even worse. I've banned Acrobat from my business, it's so bad. I fail to see how running Adobe Acrobat is any better than running IE.
agreed but a 'stink' should still be made about the requirement. Too many just go on jumping through hoops put up for them instead of screaming abit before jumping.
Oh and it's easier than purchasing a $300 machine with a Microsoft tax for Windows XP. Get and old copy of Windows 98 and install it in a virtual machine via the free VMware GSX server. Then just run the VM image file on any PC using the free VMware player. It's so easy that Microsoft prevents this in their EULA for the two low priced versions of MS Windows Vista.
So if you MUST RUN WINDOWS, put it in a sandbox where it belongs. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
in fact, make a Federal case out of it. apply for funding to eliminate cronyism and favoritism... uh... wait, we have an issue here........
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So if you MUST RUN WINDOWS, put it in a sandbox where it belongs. IMO.
Um, dude, a $200 PC is a sandbox. It has no access to any of your files, and even the most rampant buffer overflow won't affect your real system.
(And if you say "Windows worm", I'd like to remind you that the rest of your network isn't Windows.)
Hopefully Office 2007 is not a requirement.
The GAO is supposed to deal with this issue.
Here is the URL, anyone effected by this (or any concerned citizen) may report this Microshafted again bogusness
http://www.gao.gov/fraudnet/fraudnet.htm
I know I am beyond annoyed with even a single penny of my tax money, federal, state or local going to those convicted liars and thuggish bully boy monopolists. That company has needed to be broken up, corporate charters revoked, and their executives chucked in jail a long time ago. And what about security? How the HELL is forcing people to run WINDOWS supposed to be secure?
Have at it, lads.
Seems to work in Wine for me; I tested with wine-0.9.29+.
a me?app_id=2179
Note that you should install the Windows version
of either IE or Firefox before installing PureEdge Viewer,
since it's mostly a browser plugin.
The PureEdge Viewer installer requires but does not
bundle an msvc runtime library, MSVCP60.dll. To work
around this, download VC6RedistSetup_enu.exe from
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/259403 and run it. This
creates the file vcredist.exe, an installer for msvcp60.dll.
But you probably have to run winecfg and pick "win98"
before running vcredist.exe, else it will think you don't
need that file.
I didn't install Firefox first, and learned about the
plugin by reading the PureEdge Viewer readme in
~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/PureEdge/Viewer\ 6.0/Readme/readme_en_US.txt
so I ran and installed Windows Firefox 1.5.0.8 in Wine, then did
cp ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/PureEdge/Viewer\ 6.0/Plugin/npmfv.dll
~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/plugins/
and restarted Firefox, and verified that the new plugin
showed up in about:plugins. It seemed to work fine, i.e.
when I downloaded an application from grants.gov using
Windows Firefox in Wine, Firefox offered to display
it using the PureEdge plugin, and it seemed to let me
edit the right fields.
But I've never used it before, and I only just barely
tested it, so there are probably problems lurking.
For completeness, Wine's page about PureEdge Viewer is at
http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=2073
Crossover's page about it is at
http://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/n
- Dan Kegel
where are you going to get a $200 Windows PC? Heck, at a minimum, Microsoft might charge $50 for the OS license and the OS is going to be XP Home at the very least. Then, you've got another $50 for the monitor and $10-$15 for keyboard/mouse. That leaves under $100 for the whole box.... memory, cpu, mobo, ps, hd, cd, and case. It's more likely to be $300-$400 minimum and you still have to have it connected to a network for grant submission( ActiveX in MS IE ) and if you think people are going to leave the box alone and use it just for grant submission then you are kidding yourself.
I'll repeat what I said earlier, the cheaper and easier solution is to sandbox Windows in a VM. The only cost is about $40 for a full copy of MS Window 98 and can easily be brought up and down as needed in almost any PC around the office.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
"All because there is no desire either to stick to standards or implement cross-platform solutions, or even to think about the users running scientific workstations on real OSen not having bloody Internet Explorer. (Grr.)"
Internet Explorer 7 on Linux
You're a geek. You'll adapt.
Big eyes in the glasses, caressing the Golden Master CD, saying "My Precious...My Precious"
But we aren't talking about running Adobe Acrobat, are we? We're talking about PDF files. PDF is an open file format, and there are plenty of other viewers and creators out there. My OS of choice even uses it as its native printing/previewing format, and not an Adobe application in sight...
Of course, PDF isn't perfect, and as another poster says it's possible to write PDFs that aren't terribly portable. But it's still a long, long way from having to use IE.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
You missed the point entirely didn't you!
Linux user #349545 (GNU/Linux)iD8DBQBAzWjX+MZAIjBWXGURAmflAKCntuBbuK