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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.
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!
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Anyone know what'll happen to omniORB, the good C++ CORBA ORB produced outta bell labs?!
"Old man yells at systemd"
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.
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?
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 ----
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."
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
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 ---