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.

Comments

TightVNC is Good Version

[elucidus]

TightVNC adds variable JPG compression and is optimized for slow connections.

This stinks

[Psiren]

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.

Holy shit. . . .

[Com2Kid]

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!

Re:Holy shit. . . .

[sagneta]

What they think is that they are going out of business in the not-to-distant future.

The Gartner group claims that within 5 years AT&T will be purchased by another corporation and will cease to exist as a serpate corporate entity. The time frame might be optimistic, 5 years seems a bit soon, but the conclustion is indisputable. AT&T just began a 5-1 stock reverse split. First time in its history and the first for a DOW component. That's something that soon-to-be-delisted dot-coms do. Not DOW components.

How the mightly hast fallen.

I'm not sure if those outside the United States realize that MA-Bell is on her deathbed. In fact, amoungst the possible purchasers of the AT&T franchise are any number of the baby-bells such as Verizon or PacBell.

Thus the closing of the lab is just a
sign of AT&T's time. Telco in general is cratering within the United States. The internet is crushing the old to make way for the new.

I have to tell you that, honestly, AT&T had it coming for some time. I am sorry that many good people are getting squashed but the corporation as a while has done much to harm customers and prevent the movement towards the Internet in recent years.

In any event, so goes AT&T and so goes the lab.

Sorry guys.

Re:Holy shit. . . .

[Nexx]

The Gartner group claims that within 5 years AT&T will be purchased by another corporation and will cease to exist as a serpate corporate entity. The time frame might be optimistic, 5 years seems a bit soon, but the conclustion is indisputable. AT&T just began a 5-1 stock reverse split. First time in its history and the first for a DOW component. That's something that soon-to-be-delisted dot-coms do. Not DOW components

Exactly. AT&T said that they're doing the reverse 5-1 split to buoy their share price to above $10, so that institutional investors will be more interested in their stocks. However, most companies would've created a plan for buoying their share price to above $10/share instead of hatching this hare-brained idea.

It's sad to see a company like AT&T go, because of its history with the research labs, but you're right, they're hurting for money, and that's the real reason behind the closing of these labs (Bell Labs is now owned, in most part, by Lucent).

No surprises here

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

VNC development should continue

[compugeek007]

I bet the ATT lab FTP servers are going to be slammed for quite some time as source is being leeched by every sysadmin in the world.

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.

Re:Tragic? Maybe.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Nothing terribly revolutionary has come out of the UK Research group recently...

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.

Toys Budgets Anyone?

[squaretorus]

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!

Buying out and closing down PARC

[wjr]

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.

Bazaar

[PigleT]

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.