Slashdot Mirror
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.
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*
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.
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.
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.
This contains the implicit statement that this does make it harder to give your money away. I don't think this is true. Grants usually get plenty of submissions. This does two things, it changes who gets the money excluding mac and Linux using researchers and it motivates organizations to buy Windows so as not to be left out. Neither benefits me.
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.)
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.