Letter from the Editor

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Letter from the Editor

I take the opportunity of this "Letter from the Editor" to welcome the two new groups coming from the old ECP division, and which are part of IT since January 1st 1998. Both groups will continue with their former missions:

The CO (COntrols) group mission is to provide and maintain controls systems (also known as Slow Control, Industrial Control) to users in the Research Sector.
The IPT (Information and Programming Technology) group was formed to help the teams that produce software for and within CERN experiments to improve software development productivity and quality, by providing tools and methods. CNL readers are already familiar with this group which has provided, almost from its creation, a regular article for the CNL on "Software Development Tools Service". This article always appears at the end of the "Desktop Computing" chapter.

As you will see, this first Computer NewsLetter of the Year 1998 contains lots of information, and all of the main chapters have been filled with some contributions.

One important item in this CNL is that the central computing facilities provided by the CERNSP service have been upgraded, at the beginning of March, to the new RSPLUS Public Login Service, based on PowerPC workstations.

The chapter on "Mail and News Issues" is now a regular section of the CNL, and will probably remain so for some time. The article on "Netscape 4 Mail", which gives a series of practical tips and useful information, will probably interest many users, as there are already 700 users of this mail agent at CERN.

Regarding "Desktop Computing", you will see ("Changements des Droits d'Accès aux Répertoires "Home" de NICE" / "Changes of the Default Access Rights to NICE Home Directories"), that there will be (end of March) a change of policy concerning public access to files in home directories on the NICE servers. You should also read the article "ASIS News" to see the recent changes in the ASIS software repository, and send your feedback to the ASIS team.

In a long article on "Computer Networking at CERN" the "Communications Systems" group is asking users to help them improving the network performance, and explain what users should do (or should not do).

Finally, all of you who are interested in Web technology, and especially editing on the Web, should read the very detailed article on "HTML4 and Extensible Languages: the Web Prepares for the Future" in the "Text Processing" chapter.

I hope you enjoy the reading all of this NewsLetter no 230,

Nicole Crémel
CNL editor, IT/User Support

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Letter from the Editor