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."

Comments

"PurEdge Viewer" and Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is old news

[larkost]

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.

Re:This is old news

[je ne sais quoi]

The beta crashes if you try to use it. http://www.macresearch.org/grants_gov_macviewer_in staller_for_intel_based_macs They were promising to deliver alternate platforms since its inception and so far all we've gotten is lip service.

Re:This is old news

[je ne sais quoi]

Sorry I dorked up the link. http://www.macresearch.org/grants_gov_macviewer_in staller_for_intel_based_macs

Re:Oops ... but is it really so bad?

[je ne sais quoi]

I am a researcher that falls under this, my labs are mac/linux wherever possible. I scrounged a surplus PC to run this software. It sure is annoying that my tax dollars went to pay for such a thing though. This is not the real travesty though... the real travesty is that the National Science Foundation already has a much better system than grants.gov for submitting grants called fastlane, its all webforms and no extra program necessary. If even automagically creates pdfs for you if you wish. Their web-site works with Safari and Firefox too. The rumor is that NSF will have to ditch its easy to use and well designed grant submission software for the POS that grants.gov is.

Re:Actually this is illegal.

[Fujisawa Sensei]

The website is multi-browser functional.

The file viewer which is a separate application, however is not cross platform.

Not 'Even worse' by a long shot.

[gidds]

I fail to see how running Adobe Acrobat is any better than running IE.

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.