Information Technology News Archive

1996 - 2017

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Software License Information

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Many software applications are of sufficient popularity that the University can benefit from economies of scale. NACS for many years has negotiated and managed such bulk and site licenses on behalf of UCI, and as a participant in a UC-wide licensing effort.

Recently, NACS has improved the Web site devoted to communicating to faculty and staff the software packages which can be acquired at a discount or on other special terms.

The web site (http://www.nacs.uci.edu/licenses/) includes general-purpose software licensing information (FAQs, a glossary, and links to UCI servers which distribute licensed software) as well as a new software license database. The database can be browsed by software category, manufacturer, title, and other characteristics, and also provides a free-form search function.

We are very interested in fine-tuning this service to meet the needs of UCI faculty and staff. Please send us your feedback.

Mathematica

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During Spring quarter, faculty, research staff, and graduate students from a number of schools and departments attended a training workshop on the use of Mathematica, a comprehensive symbolic and numerical mathematics software package. The workshop was hosted by NACS and presented by Dr. Hooshang Tahsiri of California State University, Long Beach. With Mathematica, users can perform a single task — like analyzing data or solving a tricky differential equation — or develop an entire solution, prototype, or application.

The workshop coincided with the new, two-year license agreement with Wolfram Research, Inc. for the use of Mathematica at UCI. The software can be installed in computer labs, as well as desktop systems. Faculty who purchase a Mathematica license for their campus computer can, at no additional charge, acquire a license to use Mathematica on their home computer.

Under this agreement, Mathematica can be licensed for any computer owned or leased by the University and installed in a University-owned facility at the UCI campus. There is no distinction between usage for instruction or research. Automatic upgrades, free faculty home-use access, and expanded technical support make this program a good value for UCI. To request more workshops or obtain pricing and information about the latest version of Mathematica, please contact NACS.

Powerful new SGI Origin in Mathematics

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Professor Alexander Figotin of the UCI Mathematics Department has recently acquired a new SGI Origin2000 computer to provide the main computing resource for his research. The machine has been named “krein.math.uci.edu” after one of the most eminent mathematicians of our time, Mark Grigorievich Krein, who made many fundamental contributions in functional analysis and its applications. The system currently has 24 MIPS R10000 CPUs (soon to be upgraded to SGI’s latest and most powerful CPU, the MIPS R12000), 6 GBytes of memory and 54 GBytes of disk space. The Origin2000 scalable shared memory architecture has been optimized for parallel programs using either shared memory or the message-passing model. Extensive software development tools, including the C/C++ and Fortran90 compilers, are available with special features for developing efficient parallel programs.

The acquisition of this powerful new computer was funded from a Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) grant, along with campus and School of Physical Sciences matching funds. It is being jointly supported by the school and NACS. Professor Figotin’s research involves the calculation of electromagnetic spectral properties of photonic crystals.

Contact Don Frederick (Frederik@UCI.EDU) or Professor Figotin (Figotin@UCI.EDU) for more information about this acquisition.

Microsoft Office 97

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If you are considering the move to Microsoft’s Office 97 suite of products, there are some features that you should be aware of.

Some Good News:

Office 97 makes Web publishing easier. All Office applications can generate HTML files, and allow you to directly “save” to your Web site via FTP. Microsoft Word 97 can also read HTML files and serve as an HTML editor.

Word 97 can disable autoexecute macros, which is an effective safeguard against Word macro viruses like “Concept”, one of the most prevalent viruses on campus.

Some Cautions:

The Office 97 products save in a different format than their 95 counterparts. To go back to an older version of the software, you must do a “Save As” and select the right format. There is NO GOING BACK with Microsoft Access. Once you convert a database to Access 97 you cannot return to Access 95 at all.

There is a filter to allow Word 97 documents to be read by PC users with Word 95 or 6.0. There is a similar filter for Macintosh Word users with versions 5.1 or 6.0. Both of these filters are available on Microsoft’s web site, and also on the UCI Mac and PC archives:

http://mac-archive.oac.uci.edu/ -or- http://pc-archive.oac.uci.edu/

There have been many bugs in Office 97; Microsoft has released over 8 Mb of patches in a file called “Service Release 1” (SR-1). We recommend that all Office 97 users download and install these patches. For more information, contact your local computing supporter, see the UCI PC archive, or Microsoft’s Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/Office/Office97/ServiceRelease/

More information about Microsoft Office can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/Office/ –and– http://www.microsoft.com/OfficeFreeStuff/

UC-Wide Software Licensing

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In order to take advantage of the collective acumen, knowledge, and bargaining power represented by all campuses of the University of California, the Office of the President (UCOP) sponsors a university-wide Advisory Group on “Technical Acquisition Support” (TAS). This group includes representatives of all 9 campuses, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and UCOP. It communicates regularly by a mailing list hosted at UCI, with monthly conference calls. There are also occasional face-to-face meetings, often linked with events such as the annual UC Computing Services Conference (held this past week at UCSD).

The range of computer products and vendors on which the group consults is broad: Apple, Claris, Cisco, Digital, Eudora, Maple,Microsoft, Netscape, Oracle, SAS, Sun, and Sybase, to name a representative sample. There is no special funding for TAS-based acquisitions; rather TAS serves as a forum for determining whether there is adequate interest and funding available on various campuses to make a system-wide agreement feasible for a particular product or with a particular vendor.

News about products currently covered or under consideration for coverage is communicated through the channels most appropriate for the particular product. In many cases, this is via the UCICSCG@UCI.EDU or UCICSCG-INTERNAL@UCI.EDUComputer Support Coordinator mailing lists. Other mailing lists (e.g., UCI-SUN, MS-SELECT, UCI-STAT-SOFTWARE, UCI-SYBASE, etc.) are also used as appropriate. These mailing lists also represent a good way to bring acquisition issues up for discussion at UCI and in the UC TAS process.