[712] in athena10
Re: Here's what I'm saying about Athena 10. Does it seem right to you?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Price)
Mon Dec 8 17:06:04 2008
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 16:49:06 -0500
From: Greg Price <price@MIT.EDU>
To: William Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
Cc: athena10@mit.edu, Robyn Fizz <fizz@mit.edu>
Message-ID: <20081208214905.GR10836@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 03:26:15PM -0500, William Cattey wrote:
> As you know, I've had a long-standing action item to get some more
> publicity about Athena 10 out there. Robyn Fizz and I have cooked up
> an article for the IS&T Insider to Spotlight Athena 10.
>
> I want to share the current draft of the article with you. I think
> I've got it right, but you are welcome to reply to Robyn and me if
> there's something that should change. This article is going to press
> very soon, so if you have a correction, you need to reply NOW.
Good idea, and this piece looks good. Some comments:
- Athena isn't any longer, and hasn't been for a while, a 'tight
integration' of user interface -> applications/tools -> services.
You get that if you sit down to a cluster machine, but people use
AFS from their personal Linux and Mac machines, FTP files into their
Public/ or www/ directories from their Windows machines, X-forward
Mathematica to their machines of all platforms, and send mail from
all platforms to Moira lists that they manage from webmoira.
With Athena 10, the interaction of services, tools, and user
interface will become even more open.
Perhaps 'Athena provides services, applications, and tools, with a
tightly integrated user interface or on users' personal desktops.'
- 'off-the-shelf purchases' is not right. Better is 'off-the-shelf
free software' or 'off-the-shelf open-source software'.
- I'm puzzled at the use of 'customers' in several places to describe
people using Athena; some pay for it, but most don't. I think
'users' would be better.
- freshman -> freshmen
Greg
