Minerva Minerva

Minerva has two halves - the universal desktop & integrated communications.

...

• Pieces (like UFS) may be natively accessible from client platforms, but all must be browser-accessible for portability
• take the best parts of Athena and make them cross-platform, OS-neutral services
• find a customer
• build alliances with others who may develop the apps, while we do the backend
• See YouOS (http://youOs.com^{Image Removed}) for an interesting example

...

• thru browser:
• Find  a printer based on name, location, properties (i.e. color, hi-speed, etc)
• print a file from the Universal File System
• what about native platforms? it's been hard so far to get shared protocols
• relevant technologies:
  • ?TBD

Universal Computing

• accessible via browser
• grab a computing resource from the "cloud" and run the app of your choice
• specify a profile/image
• run app from Universal File System
• how do they do UI w/a user?
• vaguely related technologies:
  • amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing service
  • HPC
  • SIPB

• Possible applications:
• departments using web.mit.edu w/o scripting ability (i.e. Chem E)

Integrated Communications

• portable, accessible thru browser
• email (like Google Mail)
• Jabber-based presence
• IM (integrating w/all major clients, like AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google)
• chat
• zephyr-style passive chat
• VOIP (receive & initiate calls)
• pieces detachable from web window (a la Gmail)
• relevant technologies:
• google mail
• Zimbra
• MIT departments are not big IM/chat users, but students are different
  • To do:
  • understand the student users
  • find a customer
  • make it visible