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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?
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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.
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!
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"
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
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.
But how much did you PAY AT&T for VNC? They don't run this lab for your benefit alone ... they run it to make money. If in their cost-benefit analysis the lab is a liability to the corporation, then they have not only the right, but the fiduciary responsibility to shut it down. Just because a lab comes out with neat stuff doesn't mean there is a good reason for the owner to keep it open.
If you are so convinced that it is worth pouring money into, it shouldn't be that hard to find a group of investors willing to give you the cash to buy and run the place as you see fit. That's the way commerce works! The fact that no one is interested in buying the place indicates, to me at least, that it might not be such a valuable property as many comments seem to think it is....
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?
VNC wasn't supposed to be remote control software in the beginning. It was supposed to be the foundation of a thin-client computing environment.
Well, IBM is still producing record numbers of patents every year and doing lots of good research. I've been to a few OOPSLAs, and it seems like the research output from IBM's Watson Labs on object-oriented stuff is nearly equal to the rest of the world's academic facilities combined.
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.
They did that before AT&T bought them.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Whether it was more remote control software or a remote frame buffer or whatever isn't the interesting part.
What is interesting is that VNC could export a windows NT display to a palm pilot, or Amiga to Nokia 9000 or whatever.
I actually used the NT display on a palm pilot setup quite a bit
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.
VNC wasn't supposed to be remote control software in the beginning. It was supposed to be the foundation of a thin-client computing environment.
I swear, some of the best innovations are not carefully planned in advance, but spring forth from where you least expect them.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
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.
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
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.
Yes - see tightvnc.com and my work on RFB 4.x
http://www.evilsecurity.com/vnc/
Andrew van der Stock
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
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.
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 ---
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 :}
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