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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."
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.
You've obviously never bought computers for a large organisation. Try multiplying by at least a factor of 5.
Secondly, anything that makes people get up from their desk and workstation and move to another computer on another desk, log in and start working there - away from their files, email and dead-tree data - costs time and money for no good reason. Taxpayers' money.
Then factor in the support costs associated with a whole different OS. And the time lost near deadline days when several people want to submit proposals at the same time. And ensuing arguments which have potential to reduce productivity over weeks and months to come and generally make the workplace that little bit suckier.
All for no reason.
If you like, factor in that 3 of the allegedly required OSes are unpatchable (Windows 98, ME, NT 4.0) and therefore a security risk and add in arguments between the irate scientist digging out their old crufty Windows box because the damn goverment's damn stupid web site is broken and the network support people who won't let it on to their network.
And then the arguments that start because some bright spark (possibly with grant money and clout) demands a dual boot (i.e. impossible to remotely support in any large organisation) workstation because they now need both Linux and Windows to do their work: Linux to do the actual work and Windows to get the funding.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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