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UK Lab Responsible for VNC To Close
NexUK writes "Guardian Online has an article about the imminent closure of the UK based AT&T lab , the place that brought us VNC, the popular desktop remote control system. The article talks about a nice "Toys" budget where the employees could buy gadgets without prior authorization." AT&T Strikes again, I'm surprised they haven't bought PARC and closed it down too.
TightVNC adds variable JPG compression and is optimized for slow connections.
This sig is self referential.
I think that's my biggest question. Luckily I've got a couple UNIX tarballs around, but that's just archival. Is development going to continue?
What is your Slash Rating?
When management shuts them down, will they do it in person or will they just pull up a remote terminal and shut them off that way?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Are there any groups out there who are going to take up the vnc project and expand it any? Or is it basically a dead project that will remain as is due the fact it's been out for a while?
So it should be relatively easy to get the source and start a new project, right?
--SuperBug
It can't die. It may not be as well-supported, but there are several other projects working on the "platform" (notably TightVnc. I hope it isn't in some kind of freakish licensing where they go out of business in a fire sale, get bought by NA (remotely possible) or Symantec(pcanywhere) and locked away forever.
Where's the next PARC, Bell Labs, IBM ?
I know all of these still exist in name at least, but they sure seem to be mere shadows of what they used to be...
And, no, I don't think it's MSFT
Balam
Nothing terribly revolutionary has come out of the UK Research group recently... at least nothing publicly announced. The bulk of useful VNC development in recent years has been done by 3rd parties working with the open VNC sources.
While it's possible they could have come up with another killer product given their obvious talents, the dissolution of the group probably isn't that tragic for our industry.
Other's have already listed URLs pointing to 3rd party VNC products (both freeware and otherwise) so I won't repeat them here but it's definitely worth your while to seek some of them out and support their work.
I used to drive past this place every day on my way to work. I often used to wonder what a magical place it must have been to work in. I always hoped I'd get the chance to work there myself someday. Bang goes that idea. Strangely enough I can see the new Microsoft Research Centre from my flat. I guess that would be a cool place to work too, if it weren't for the owners. Cambridge has long been known for its hotbed of innovation. I'm sad to see us lose a bit of that.
I am still out of breath, my word, this is. . . . horrible. What the hell is AT&T thinking? Just the other day I was thinking to myself how nice it is that there is such a company still around that is willing to support pure research and development, but now. . . . holy shit.
VNC will live on, but what new ideas might have come this lab? What technology, what science, will now never be invented, or at the very least horribly delayed? This is awful, how could any company get pissy over intellectual property rights when there is so much more at stake? For crying out loud, shutting down not only one of the premier research labs in the world, but a (I think?) profitable one at that!
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
>> AT&T Strikes again, I'm surprised they haven't bought PARC and closed it down too.
Or at least buy Microsoft Research Labs and close it down.
AT&T Strikes again, I'm surprised they haven't bought PARC and closed it down too.
Brilliant witticism! What jerks the guys at AT&T are for closing down something it wouldn't have been profitable to maintain. If only one of the slashdot editors had been there, maybe they could have helped save it. Let's have a gander, shall we:
AT&T Exec: Hmmm, looks like the lawyers drilled us, we can't afford to keep open that lab, we'll have to shut it down.
AT&T Employee/Slashdot Editor: No way MAN!! That place is COOL. You can't just like, shut it down, man.
AT&T Exec: You're fired.
6 months go by and the SE has not found another job....
Slashdot Editor's wife at work:
Wife: Hey MyBoss, looking good today, with a job and all.
Boss: Motel 6 at the corner of Cherry and Shamrock, room 35, 7pm.
Wife: You betcha!
SE's kid:
Kid: Mommy, how come you have a lot of meetings at the hotel with your boss?
Mom/Wife: Because your father is a limp-dicked loser and mommy needs some real play.
Kid: Daddy's a loser! Yay!
Later:
SE/Dad: Hey kid, wanna do something fun with me?
Kid: No way, you're a limpdick! I like mommy's new friend more, he gives REAL play mommy said. We're leaving tomorrow. No one likes you, not even your stuffed penguin.
Well folks, there you have it. Put on some shoes, clean the ejaculatory emissions off the keyboard and get a real job in the real world.
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
Another example of corporate idiocy! What these guys could have accomplished left to their own devices will now never be known. VNC is great, I use it for hours a day, and I don't know what I would do without it! AT&T should get their head out of their a$$ and fund this lab _more_, not ditch it altogether.
I bet that a lot of these labs aren't "profitable." The average user, now, has little use for such devices. Most of my friends kind of wow over the x-window system, and that I can use my own computer remotely, or ssh for that matter.
So what happens? Well, 20 years from now, everyone will have keyboards over rf to their tv's with their computer interfaces on them. Today it's useful to me, so I have to rig it myself. None of them will want it for 20 years, because they don't have a "reason."
Take a look at what Telco stocks have been doing over the last year or so. They're looking under couch cushions in the employee lounge for spare change!
Anyone know what'll happen to omniORB, the good C++ CORBA ORB produced outta bell labs?!
"Old man yells at systemd"
Linux is still a very bad oper-ass-ive system.
I myself use VNC extensively for my network. Combined with SSH2 it makes a decent little VPN (plus it works in a browser window!)
OT, has anyone here gotten VNC to run in the Windows CE / PocketPC OS? I like the idea of controlling servers from my wireless PDA at home.
Jesse Wolfe Sr. Manager Systems Integration
Chrisd writes: "AT&T Strikes again, I'm surprised they haven't bought PARC and closed it down too"
/. is now taking subscription fees. How much of that money is going towards general research for the benifit of all mankind? what? none of it? Typical...
Well Chrisd,
Thanks to the folks who decided to use the GPL for VNC.
They deserve a lot of credit for ensuring that their software would continue to be freely available to the world.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
... the fact that it's illegal to use VNC with WindowsXP now? :)
source: WindowsXP License Agreement
It was known colloquially as the 'toys budget' and it was, no doubt, sometimes used for frivolous purchases. But in the main it was not. And it meant that the lab's researchers always had the latest gizmos - and the freedom to take them apart and see how they worked.
My first thoughts were how on earth could management implement and afford a policy like this. But in the end, I thought true innovation requires liberal policies such as these.
The dotCOM era was full of excess, perhaps too much so, but this is proof that there are still companies out there striving to be the best.
"UK Lab Responsible for VNC To Close" is lame.
A better header would be "AT&T Kills Lab that Created VNC".
The "UK Lab" is responsible for VNC, not for its closure. AT&T is responsible for closing the lab.
A lot of this sort of stuff you don't really know what was useful until 5,10 or more years later. Unix was originated around 1970, but it's usefulness didn't become widely aparent until 1978 or so. Engelbart's mouse was invented in 1963/1964, but wasn't patented until 1970, and didn't become widespread until after the PARC stuff in the late 1970s.
AT&T research facilities are wonderful, magical places that shouldn't be allowed to shut down or see their demise. These things should be heavily subsidized by the government. Bell Labs (now Lucent) is going down the shitter, and AT&T is closing the research labs that they still own. AT&T's research facilities (Bell in particular) are the people that brought us things like Unix, the laser, and the transister, not to mention countless other things. It's a real shame that they are closing down these facilities--like the article says, research facilities are delicate organisms, and they can't be reassembled after you've broken them up.
If it's good enough for The Debian project's package maintainers, it's good enough for me. TightVNC is the offical VNC of the Debian project.
Desperation is a stinky cologne
Update Piggly Wiggly is real! It's a grocery chain with 600 outlets in 16 states and there's even a Web site at PigglyWiggly.com.
Does this suprise you?
Ever Onward, Forward Bound
We do not just owe them the VNS stuff, but also things like omnyORB, one of the free CORBA implementations available. And moreover, have you ever looked at such fine projects as PEN or CLAN over at their site? Less of practical use for the meek of us, but really interesting and insightful. A shame they will get shut down...
I've never used VNC, but was planning to use it in a current project-- thought I'd download it and start experimenting with it next week sometime. When I saw this, I went to the site and downloaded all the files I'd need. When I first got there, the downloads were quick, but just in the time it took me to download 4-8 files, the response time slowed quite a bit.
Things that have come out of AT&T Labs Cambridge recently:
The Active Bat system, which can locate in 3D better than any other deployed system. They are using Bat transmitters as mice in the air, on 50 inch plasma screens. Now that's a cool interface.
A broadband phone, rolled out across the entire staff, which lets then see train timetables, share a doodling screen during phone calls, have active directories so that they can call the nearest phone to someone (c.f. Bat above)
At least visit their website before you start trolling. You might even learn something.
Does anyone else have a toy budget - surely the /. crew do?
We have a CD budget at work - idea being that we all listen to CDs all the time and if anyone takes on in it gets assimilated into the office collection so we ended up buying replacements all the time.
By having a 'CD a week' thing anyone can order up a new CD on the Amazon account whenever they like. Beats being able to take money out of petty cash for milk!
Costs what - 50 x £20 a year and keeps us happier than a bunch of pigs in poop!
One reason that companies are reluctant to provide ongoing public services is that when they discontinue them, instead of getting kudos for all they contributed, they get negative reaction for pulling support.
The Linux and Windows Source and binaries plus docs
http://free.house.cx/~adam/vnc
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Remote control software is a really, really old idea. There are at least a dozen commercial products for Windows that do the same thing and many of them are well over 10 years old. VNC is a nice program, and since it's GPL it will live on, but it was never revolutionary at anything. In fact, it's hard to see why AT&T spent any effort on it.
intel wanted to buy it you idiot. didnt you even read the friggin article ?
I don't think there'a ny need for AT&T to buy out and close down PARC - Xerox seems to be doing a good enough job of that. They've been trying to sell it to venture capitalists for a while, with a notable lack of success. I don't think that PARC will last another 12 months, which is very sad.
Xerox also has (had?) a research lab in Cambridge, colloquially known as EuroPARC. I visited there a few times and saw some quite neat stuff.
ATT only bought them and changed the source to reflect ownership. they *created* nothing.. barely even a bug fix since the buyout..
Thats why groupls like tightVNC ( gpl ) or TridiaVNC ( commercial ) came about.. and will continue it far into the future..
Its not going anywhere.. do some homework people.
Still sad, though anyone could see it coming...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
thanks for letting them create and Release VNC as a GPL'd item.
it was a great ride... and thanks for the freebies.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If anyone stops and looks around to see where innovation is happening they will surely see the Open Source community cranking! I bet if you look real close you'll see all the top names spying on the Open Source comm. and trying to "out patent" them:)
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
They did that before AT&T bought them.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
The broadband phone:
http://www.uk.research.att.com/bphone/
This was one of my favorite projects, something our company would buy today,,,I had asked them about a month ago if they had any expected release date, no was the answer guess the closing of the lab had something to do with it.
Hopefully AT&T will license the rights to some company to produce them.
An AOL type network (Great GUI, lots of content and downloads).
AT&T bought it just before it was released and killed it a
few months later. I was a beta tester; I had such high
hopes for Interchange.
1000 SlashDot sigs
Hopefully it will find a new home on Sourceforge.
Sure, because we all know SourceForge will continue running and providing free services to OSS projects after VA Linux^H^H^H^H^HSoftware runs out of money in a year or two.
Its already happening at http://www.tightvnc.com
When AT&T bought out the labs, I was cringing, waiting for VNC to drop out of sight. Thanks, AT&T, for keeping it around as long as you did!!
Restrictions are prohibited. Be well, get better.
There will always be a place for independent or academic research institutions that aren't subjected to the vicissitudes of corporate politics and moneygrubbing (insofar as it was intellectual property anxieties that killed a sale of the lab to Intel, I think it's fair to say that moneygrubbing and the corporate fuck-you instinct was at work here). The Santa Fe Institutes, MIT * Labs, Berkeley Labs, and the like couldn't be replaced by corporate entities. While it makes sense, then, that there's cooperation between those entities and the private sector, I think it needs to be emphasized how important it is that the ethic of sharing of scientific knowledge and open research be maintained.
I was curious what the lab was working on and found a variety of multimedia materials on their anonymous FTP site here:
/
ftp://ftp.uk.research.att.com/pub/videos/qsif-200
What I've seen so far is interesting though not earth-shattering. Take a look.
-David
We're on the road to Tycho.
Oooh, you didn't even bother to write your own. "Re: Lame header" doesn't even have a verb. People in Ass Houses ....
I, being the paranoid vnc junkie that I am, just cruised over to the ATT - VNC website, to get copies for each OS, and found the downloads are gone beyond the forms.
Hopefully someone out there has them all for download at their website. Anyone know any sites?
Being GPL, I imagine that there are several. I need to feel assured that the source is untouched as well.
Thanks be to any who finds this info.
And screw "The Man" for making another horribly morbid decision.
I wonder if every lab has that kind of budget to buy odds and ends just to take apart and see how they work? I think there should be more labs like this in more places around the world.
if common sense was common, wouldn't everyone have it?
Anyone wanting to offer lucrative contracts to AT&T people after the closedown can find more information at www.xorl.org :-)
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~midgley/wince/vnc.html
I LMAO when I saw this. It worked fine for me on a iPaq running Pocket PC 2002.
Do these guys have ANY CREDIBILITY left at all after the dot com implosion? I don't think so.
Find your favourite distribution's source archive, and grab 'em from there. (Debian would be my first port of call, seeing as I *know* they've packaged VNC before now.)
I'm thinking, in this day & age of open-source, it's slightly weird that projects can be "removed" from public distribution - cf ?Blender?, the Net::DNS CPAN module, and/or that nice movie editor thing - when so many distributions have used the sources in the past, it can very rapidly become quite hard to find something once it *is* removed; reason being, freshmeat refers people only to the project's listed homepage, it doesn't copy stuff locally.
Seems to me that within the "bazaar" that is open-source development, there's quite a lot of "one package, one home site" going on.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
Any mirrors for Mac users? I'm sure I'd liek to have the source as long as they're going away...
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
apple costs too much! sun costs too much! microsoft is relatively cheap, for now, but it lacks ethics! save a few bucks, employ a few children... voila, profit! wake up, pleazzzze!
Whilst 'reading' the article, did you happen to note this? And I quote: "...the word on the street is that negotiations foundered because the lawyers on both sides couldn't agree about intellectual property issues.
This eleventh-hour failure is a disaster because it shatters something magical. ..."
Sure, Intel wanted to buy AT&T, but...They didn't!!! The question remains then, why doesn't AT&T keep it?
If your answer is, "uhh, 'cause they wasn't makein no money." I respond with, "So what?"
The point to my post, (obviously lost to you) is that the lab has had a fine track record, so why not hold on to it, if only for the fact that they will come up with something else revolutionary.
I am responsible for closing VNC every time I am done with my remote console session.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Small businesses fuel the (U.S) economy to a greater extent than large. Small businesses do best with laissez-faire management and motivated workers. As they grow, managers replace founders and innovators. Inertia sets in. By the time the company is "big" and/or (dog forbid) publicly traded "innovation" is a slogan and business plan as well as a practice. Then, some managerial genius notices that the time-to-market cycle of brilliant, innovative technology doesn't line up the the metronome-on-speed quarterly-financial-reporting cycle that American investors know in their heart of hearts is cocked up, but can't seem to leave behind (yes, you, little Maisie-in-the-home-getting-a-dividend-check) and presto - the genius manager gets promoted for shuttering that nasty, inefficient lab. This is not capitalism, or market forces - it is a the triumph of myopic beancounters over producers, and it does suck. This I know - I am an accountant, and I have seen the beast with my own eyes. The only comfort I find is that those who "do" can "do" faster than the Trogs in Suits can screw up. The lab is dead - long live the lab.
Incidentally hopper is a pretty interesting character too. Having worked on the Cambridge ring which was for a while superior to ethernet, he then became involved with the Acorn computers that every Brit of my generation knew and loved at school. He established the then olivetti lab in the mid 80's and is involved with 2 of the three big startups in Cambridge, ARM and Virata. Oh, he also flies planes, is worth a packet and lectures in scruffy jeans.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
The VNC development community is healthy, despite nearly no activity from the authors at the Cambridge Labs for some time.
I'm working on RFB 4.x which is attempting to fix the authentication and security issues, whilst adding clipboard, drag and drop, multiple desktops, file transfers, encryption, channels, etc
http://www.evilsecurity.com/vnc/
TightVNC is the preferred VNC now - don't think that with one lab closure the world is coming to and end.
http://www.tightvnc.com
There's even a commercial version of VNC out there, TridiaVNC as well as literally tens of clients and servers for all sorts of platforms.
VNC is far from dead.
Andrew van der Stock
Yeah, isn't thet the guys that claimed that MS IIS5 was insecure?
Clueless bastards! My IIS has always been rock soli... bzzzrt...
*
*
*
Buffer Overflow...
This page has been hacked by the Chinese!
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
The absolute classic case for this was outside the computer arena. For many years (decades?) Nabisco donated cookies to the Red Cross. After a blood donation, the donor got led over to a refreshment area, where Lorna Doones and Oreo's were served to the dizzy. Sometime in the eighties, Ol' Nabisco was going through some very hard times, with plant closings and layoffs. Some exec looked at the books and said they had to cut the Red Cross cookies. Maybe this was a smart decision, probably not, but in any case, after giving away many millions of dollars worth of product to a charitable organization, they decided to do what every other cookie manufacturer had been doing all along: nothing. Did anyone say, "heck, we will miss the Lorna Doones, but it sure was nice of Nabisco to supply us all those years, I'm sorry they are in financial trouble, I wish them well and hope some other cookie manufacturer will take over the load"? Of course not. They were crucified in the press. There were calls to boycott Nabisco for "putting the screws to the Red Cross". I learned a lesson then: if I am ever in a position to do anything charitable on the corporate level, make sure it is a one-off, because once people expect something, they will turn on you if you take it away.
Why is everybody like "AT&T killed the lab!" oh no! Look, AT&T bought the lab, and when they didn't have enough money to keep it running, they closed it. It's produced some wonderful stuff, but this is the way capitalism works. And Chris, *come* *on*. "uhh, I'm surprised AT&T hasn't bought out PARC and closed it down..." What kind of a comment is that? AT&T has had a good history of funding R&D, and now they're in some financial trouble. Cut them a break.
And the post towards the bottom of the page that says AT&T is tanking and the Internet age is getting rid of the Telco, that's ridiculous. AT&T is a big Internet player. Yeah they're a long distance company, but they also provide a lot of Internet connectivity. AT&T is in some financial trouble, but they're by no means out of it. They've taken some hits from the dot com crash and the 9/11 slump, but they'll be back.
This whole idea on Slashdot that AT&T was a big bad evil company and still is, is hilarious. They brought you Unix for crying out loud!
Sheepdot: Open Source good, Closed Source baaaaaaad!
Funny, but Bell Labs thinks it still belongs to Lucent . . . Bell Labs' own site has a rather prominent Lucent logo on it, and the Avaya Labs site states that "It's a brand new research lab, but it can boast of a rich, 75-year-old heritage from Bell Labs". It's a spin off . . .
I was looking ahead to the Broadband Phone too! They even had a wireless version running. Sigh.
Who ever reads them, and if 100million people copy windows for free, i dont think they give a rats ass on the EULA
1) AT&T Labs has not released a significant version of VNC for a little while now, yet VNC development continues on many fronts. These efforts will therefore not cease just because the AT&T Lab goes away. Examples of non-AT&T projects involving VNC:
ChromiVNC (MacOS 7.5/9.x server) - maintained by myself, Jonathan Morton.
VNCThing (MacOS Carbon viewer) - maintained by Dair Grant.
OSXVNC (MacOS X server)
TightVNC (ultra-efficient Win32 and UNIX servers and viewers) - maintained by Constantin Kaplinsky.
TridiaVNC (semi-commercial Win32 and UNIX servers and viewers) - maintained by Tridia Corporation.
A large number of independent viewers, as well as a few servers, for minority and hand-held platforms are also available.
Each of the above is independent of the AT&T Labs, although most use at least some of the AT&T code.
2) Most people who use VNC seriously, use the independent versions because they are noticeably further advanced than the AT&T versions. In fact, generally progress on the AT&T versions has been limited to occasional bugfixes for some years.
3) Support for most versions of VNC (but not normally TridiaVNC, for which commercial support from Tridia is available) is primarily conducted on a central mailing list, currently operated from an AT&T server. The posting rate from AT&T representatives or developers is very low. As a group, VNC developers are currently discussing where to move the support list to ensure it's continued operation.
This is all made possible by the GPL.
--- The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it ---
TridiaVNC is GPL too, as you can read at TridiaVNC Developer Zone.
A large number of people use the weather station on their roof - I use a little app written by a friend that displays the outside temperature next to my CPU monitor on my taskbar. They have fairly comprehensive archives for the last few years, so it would be a shame if this service stopped as well.
Now for the good news - VNC lives on!
First, the current version of VNC will continue to be available at the original web address, which will soon be re-hosted at Cambridge University where AT&T continues to sponsor research.
Second, the creators of VNC are planning a venture to independently support and develop VNC as an ongoing open source project. You haven't heard much from us recently because we've been busy with other projects such as the Broadband Phone, but now that we have the opportunity :) we're back on the case.
Watch the VNC website, the mailing list, or slashdot for an announcement "real soon"
The VNC Team
I remember them demonstrating some of their technology at a careers fair at Cambridge University. It was pretty spectacular. For example, take a look at some of the applications of their Sentient Computing Project.
If they start selling VNC t-shirts and caps, I might buy one :}
What is your Slash Rating?
The best thing about VNC is the multitude of supported OS's, in my opinion. Mac, Palm, WinCE... you name it. When I'm on the go slow connection support is nice, but if I can't use it, well...
Brilliantly insane, perhaps. Unfortunately, this Dr. Paley is dead serious. In case you've never had the misfortune to be involved with a fundie church, I'm here to tell you that this sort of thing is pretty typical of the "everyone that isn't with us is against us" paranoia many of this type espouse on a daily basis.
Which accounts for the success of Landover Baptist: it's damned difficult to tell them apart from the real fundies. Though they are admittedly more over-the-top, they're (frightenly enough) not too far from those they parody.
(My first exposure to Landover: Jar Jar Sexdolls?)
Gautama, doing the bad-Karma avoidance shuffle...