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SURFPUNK Technical Journal 054
Date: Wed, 10 Feb 93 19:43:27 PST
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From: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (plorefcnprpbzchgvatpelcgbvzzbegnyvglargjbexfynvffrmsnver)
To: surfpunk@osc.versant.com (SURFPUNK Technical Journal)
Subject: [surfpunk-0054] clinton@white-house.gov.NOT, industry news
Keywords: surfpunk, Jock Gill, spring project, Scott McNealy, NeXT
| It's not that we're postmodernists;
| it's that there is no more modern.
| -- hakim
When the virus went around that a Compu$erve account was being
used to handle email for the White House, I decided to wait it out.
I cannot vouch for the following either, but it seems far more plausible.
Then a couple of articles from tabloids follow.
--strick
-- Important Information RE: E-Mail to the White House
-- Sun Spring "has no AT&T code"
-- McNealy "seeks Noorda'S support to @#!% NT and return USL to its roots"
-- Job's Workstation Company Getting Out of Hardware, Will Focus On Software
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
Source: cypherpunks and other places
From: gordon linoff <gordon@Think.COM>
Date: Mon, 8 Feb 93 19:22:14 EST
Subject: more about email to Clinton
January 31, 1993
Important Information RE: E-Mail to the White House
Yesterday, I saw several postings related to the E-mail address
for the White House. Along with a good number of others, I worked
throughout the campaign as part of a network of E-mail volunteers
for the Clinton campaign, so I can pass along some important
information about that E-mail account. The account is actually the
personal compuserve account of Jock Gill. Jock worked hard (along
with a handful of programming volunteers, BBS operators, listserver
maintainers, and computer sophisticates at places such as Marist
College, MIT, San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere) during the
campaign to put together an E-mail system for national campaigning.
The system was later expanded to accommodate all three major
Presidential campaigns. It was an innovative, highly successful
effort and it played a huge role in getting campaign position
statements out to a wide public. Things posted from that address
found their way into the virtual reality as the messages got passed
along many networks from their original posting. Several weeks
before the Inauguration of President Clinton, Jeff Eller was
appointed by the President-Elect to have overall charge of
establishing something which has never existed--an interactive
public access E-mail system into the White House and into other
offices of the administration. Jock Gill was then hired by the
administration to work under Jeff Eller. Currently, Jock Gill is
working in an office located in the Old Executive Office Building
across the street from the White House. At this point, he is
working alone, without a staff. His current assignment is to use
the E-mail system (as during the campaign) to issue official copies
of White House statements, the texts of press briefings and press
conferences, copies of Executive Orders and Presidential Memos, and
the like to the virtual world of E-mail. Since the compuserve box
is a regular personal mail box, it gets filled quickly, especially
given the high volume of mail now beginning to arrive with the broad
dissemination of his address. Those of you who have sent E-mail to
that address may well have received an error message stating that
the box is full. That's another way of saying it has been
overwhelmed. Jock has asked those of us who have been part of the
volunteer E-mail team to help him out while he works to get a good
interactive system up and running. Basically, he has asked that
everyone cooperate and not begin sending a barrage of E-mail to that
compuserve address. The White House itself employs a large staff to
handle snail mail. Actually, at this point in the development of
the White House E-mail system, you will probably get your message
through to the administration quicker through ordinary snail mail
and telephone. Later, once the administration's E-mail team
develops the system they want and need, E-mail contacts should
became the easier route. All things in their time. Once the E-mail
address was circulated together with the heading the "White House",
everyone understandably believed a real system was up and running.
Not quite yet.
SUGGESTION: Use the compuserve address you have judiciously,
reserving it for absolutely vital contacts. Until such time that a
real public access White house E-mail system is operational,
consider relying on the traditional means of contacting the
administration. Given what they had to start with from the previous
administration (scratch), I have every reason to expect that Jeff
Eller and Jock Gill will work well--and as quickly as possible--to
get an interactive system up and running. But it will take time and
patience. We can all help them achieve that effort best if we
refrain from acting as if that non-existent system were already in
place. PLEASE HELP RELAY THIS CONTEXT AND SUGGESTION TO OTHER
NETWORKS AND INDIVIDUALS. Thanks.
Snail Mail Address and Phone Numbers -- White House
White House Numbers:
The President (202) 456-1414
White House Comment Line (202) 456-1111
(To register your opinion on an issue)
When bill signed or vetoed (202) 456-2226
Vice President (202) 456-2326
(202) 456-7125
Mailing Address:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington DC 20500
------
Jon Darling
PITT/Johnstown -- January 31, 1993
________________________________________________________________________
Sun Spring "has no AT&T code"
A source tells us that one of the reasons SunSoft Inc has been so
discreet about Spring and Project DOE (Distributed Objects Everywhere)
object-oriented stuff, is that it doesn't want Microsoft Corp to know
too much. Be that as it may, our source notes that Spring has been
written from scratch, is not Unix and owes nothing to AT&T's code.
Therefore it would be royalty-free (UX No 421). (Which brings to mind
notions of whether Sun will ever offer a cross-licence to Unix System
Labs for some reason or another.) We're told it's good at garbage
collecting, has builtin exception handling and strong type checking.
It supposedly has a "real" remote procedure call system, "much better
than Open Network Computing RPC," and can communicate within a machine
or between machines. We're also told to say that it has "strong
separation of the interface from the implementation." Sun's first
problem will probably be getting Sun people themselves to use the
stuff, the transition from C or even C++ to objects not being without
its hazards as object people know.
________________________________________________________________________
McNealy "seeks Noorda'S support to @#!% NT and return USL to its roots"
Sun Microsystems Inc president, Scott McNealy, has been talking to and
having lunch with Ray Noorda lately, chewing over what's to become of
Unix System Labs under Novell Inc. McNealy has a menu of things he'd
like Noorda to do once he takes over. He says he told him: "fire
everyone except one marketing guy, one order administrator and 200
engineers. Stop all their silly marketing programmes. Focus on
producing better and better source code. Cut source code prices to $5.
Stay out of the binary business. Bundle NetWare into Unix." McNealy
says this is also a "scenario to @#!% NT." He says Noorda's reply is "I
don't own it yet." Asked about Sun's continued support of USL, McNealy
said, "Sun is the only company that can engineer its way out of any
operating system royalty in a year or two. HP can't. NCR can't. IBM
can't. Nobody can. Ray understands that." The ideal time to make that
kind of break would be as Sun shifts over to an object-oriented
operating system, its next operating systems move, McNealy said. He
allows, however, that it'll take six to nine months after the
acquisition is complete to see which way the wind is blowing. "If we're
not getting what we pay for with our royalties," he said, "then we'll
make the make/buy decision." McNealy's henchman, Ed Zander, president
of SunSoft, the Sun unit most jeopardised by the Novell/USL takeover,
was acting more of the good cop last week when Unigram spoke with him.
He uses words like "empathise" (because he did the Interactive deal),
"supportive" and "optimistic" when talking about Novell or the USL
deal. He says he has high hopes for unity finally and apparently
thinks the industry might start coming together at the Unix
International members meeting in New Orleans February 11-12 where some
100 companies and 200 people will assemble. Zander seems to think it's
going to close to an old-fashioned love-in.
________________________________________________________________________
Job's Workstation Company Getting Out of Hardware, Will Focus On Software
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) _ Steve Jobs' Next Computer Inc., after several
years of lukewarm response to its workstations, will stop making
hardware and focus on its highly acclaimed software, according to a
report published today.
The company is negotiating to sell its hardware business to Canon Inc.,
the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Canon, which has invested $165
million in Next, owns 17.9 percent of the company and sells Next
machines in Japan.
As a result of the sale, Next will lay off about 300 of its 540
employees, the Chronicle said.
The move comes less than a month after privately-held Next announced
that it achieved its first quarterly operating profit. Sales grew to
$140 million last year from $127 million in 1991.
The company, based in Redwood City, Calif., has said that it wants to
go public. Analysts, however, said that given the latest developments,
an initial public offering appears to be at least 18 months away.
Jobs, who co-founded Apple Computer Inc. and started Next in 1985, was
unavailable for comment, and a Next spokeswoman would neither confirm
nor deny the company's plans, the Chronicle said.
But sources close to Next said that Jobs will announce the move
formally next Tuesday, the newspaper said.
Canon would not comment yesterday. Another investor is former
presidential candidate H. Ross Perot, who invested $20 million and
holds 11 percent of Next. Perot was unavailable for comment yesterday,
the Chronicle said. Jobs, who reportedly invested $200 million in Next,
holds 46 percent of the company.
Next got off to a rocky start with its workstations, introduced in
October 1988. Industry analysts called the sleek black machines
underpowered and overpriced.
The company later introduced faster and less expensive models. But the
machines still are more costly than competitors' models and are not
compatible with personal computers or workstations from such companies
as Apple, IBM and Sun Microsystems.
Next shipped an estimated 69,300 workstations last year _
compared with 217,000 by market leader Sun Microsystems _ according
to International Data Corp., a market research concern in
Framingham, Mass.
But Next has been praised for its built-in NextStep software,
considered technically superior to other programs on the market. With
NextStep, makers of applications software _ programs that perform
specific tasks like word processing _ can produce programs in less time
than for other workstations or PCs.
Many Next customers have bought the company's hardware because they
want to take advantage of the company's software, which can be operated
only on Next machines.
The company has tried to use the strength of NextStep to sell its
machines to companies that want to develop custom programs.
Next, however, also has been working on software that will work on
IBM-compatible personal computers. The company is expected to finish
work on the program, NextStep 486, this summer, nearly a year after
Jobs first promised it would be done.
The company also is trying to negotiate an arrangement with
Hewlett-Packard Co. in which it would modify NextStep to work with HP's
workstations, the Chronicle said.
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
The SURFPUNK Technical Journal is a dangerous multinational hacker zine
originating near BARRNET in the fashionable western arm of the northern
California matrix. Quantum Californians appear in one of two states,
spin surf or spin punk. Undetected, we are both, or might be neither.
________________________________________________________________________
Send postings to <surfpunk@osc.versant.com>, subscription requests
to <surfpunk-request@osc.versant.com>. MIME encouraged.
Xanalogical archive access soon. CLINTON PZ on America Online???
________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________
# From autopia@wixer.cactus.org Thu Feb 4 05:12:08 1993
# Subject: white house email (fwd)
# >From somewhere in the matrix, johnjmedway emananted the following:
# I thought most foles would be at least vaguely interested in
# this. A friend of mine sent me the info... could be useful at some
# > From jmedway@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu Wed Feb 3 20:24:33 1993
# > Subject: white house email
# > To: jagwire@wixer.cactus.org (Dan Zappone),
# > resmith@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Rob Smith)
# >
# > One of my coworkers passed this out to all of us @ work.
# >
# > Spread el verbum.
# >
# >
# > >> Subject: White House email address
# > >>
# > >> I thought you might find this interesting...
# > >>
# > >>
# > >> ================= { Begin included text } ===============
# > >>
# > >> >
# > >> > How's this for interesting?
# > >> > We just got wind of it down here... :) Barbie
# > >> > - --------
# > >> >
# > >> > President Clinton (The White House) = 75300.3115@Compuserve
# > >> >
# > >> > : Here's something you might find useful... President Clin
# > >> > : address. (Obviously, he has people to screen it for him!
# > >> > : just emailed this to me.
# > >> > :
# > >> > : >Posted-Date: 27 Jan 93 20:19:51 EST
# > >> > : >Date: 27 Jan 93 20:19:51 EST
# > >> > : >From: The White House <75300.3115@compuserve.com>
# > >> > : >Subject: Re: Press Briefing, January 27, 1993
# > >> > : >
# > >> > : > Thank you for your recent electronic mail message to th
# > >> > : > House. As soon as practicable it will be sent to the a
# > >> > : > office for consideration. You should receive a written
# > >> > : > course. Unfortunately, we are not yet ready to respond
# > >> > : > to your message by electronic mail. We appreciate your
# > >> we
# > >> > : > implement our new electronic systems.
# > >> > : >
# > >> > : > As you know, this is the first time in history that the
# > >> > : > White House has been connected to the public through el
# > >> > : > mail. We welcome your comments and suggestions for way
# > >> improve
# > >> > : > your Public Access E-mail program.
# > >> > : >
# > >> > : > Regards,
# > >> > : > Jock Gill
# > >> > : > Electronic Publishing
# > >> > : > Public Access E-mail
# > >> > : > The White House
# > >> > : > Washington, D.C.
# > >> > : >
# > >> > : > 75300.3115@Compuserve.com
# > >> > : > CLINTON PZ on America Online
# > >> > : >
# > >> > : > PS: If you did not include your U.S. mail return addres
# > >> > : > message and you want a reply, please send your message
# > >> > : > include that information.
# > >> >
# > >> > ------- End of Forwarded Message
# > >> >
# > >> >
# > >>
# >
# >
# > ----------------------------------------------------------------
# --
# __________________________________________________________________
