Mark's Notebook


	If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of him. - Thomas Carlyle

New Grant System Excludes Mac Users

Washington Post

Monday 13 February 2006, 1:45 pm
Keywords: Computer Topics , News Articles

By Rick Weiss, Washington Post Staff Writer

What if the federal government were about to give away more than $400 billion in grants, but only people whose computers ran on Microsoft software could apply?

That is the predicament that many scientists, scholars and others say they are in as the government enters the final phase of its five-year effort to streamline its grant-application process.

The problem: Although many U.S. scientists and others depend on graphics-friendly Macintosh computers, the software selected by the government is not Mac-compatible. And it is expected to remain so for at least a year.

"Uh, this would be the same government that spent a lot of time and money pursuing Microsoft for its anti-competitive behavior?" one blogger wrote. "And they now offer a government site that mandates monopoly?"

But the promise of making Grants.gov accessible to everyone remains unfulfilled because of a decision by Northrop Grumman and the Health and Human Services Department to give a small Canadian company called PureEdge Solutions the job of creating the electronic forms.

The PureEdge solution, it turns out, works only with the Windows operating system. And that is especially galling, several scientists said, as at least one major grant-making agency, the National Science Foundation, has for many years been using a "platform-independent" system that works seamlessly with all kinds of computers.

Critics note that in contrast to the domination of PCs in the business community, Macs constitute about one-third to one-half of the computers scientists and academicians use.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/12/AR2006021200942.
html