From: jpc@tauon.ph.unimelb.edu.au (John Costella)
Subject: INDUSTRY: Australian: don't count on enthusiasm
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 93 22:29:08 EST


This article in the latest _Engineers_Australia_ does not talk
about VR per se, but should be a warning for any VR vendor
thinking about trying to convince Australian industry to take
up their latest goodies, since the general attitude will likely be 
very similar. In a sense, supercomputing is now at the stage that
VR will be in 3 or 5 years. One might also want to be careful about 
planning VR conferences here (despite the 100 F weather ... sorry 
Bob, hope you didn't get flooded!).

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>From _Engineers_Australia_, 22 January 1993, p. 14-15:

A supercomputing setback
========================

"A push for industry to take up supercomputing has suffered a 
setback following a dismal turnout at the industry day of the 
Fifth Australian Supercomputing Conference in December. The
middle day of the three-day conference held in Melbourne was
devoted entirely to expounding the benefits of high performance
computing to industry. The only hitch was that industry failed
to turn up.

"Almost all of the 150 delegates were academics, vendors of
supercomputing hardware or from government institutions. Of
the handful of industry representatives present most were
speakers at the conference or belonged to the same company as 
a speaker. 

[... rest omitted ]"

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A good rule of thumb is that when you tell an Australian of
a great new idea that will save/make them money, they'll say, 
``sounds like bullshit to me''. :-) Plan to visit a country
of cynics if you're coming down under to peddle your wares!
(As if you hadn't figured that out already ;-)

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John P. Costella              School of Physics, The University of Melbourne
jpc@tauon.ph.unimelb.edu.au         Tel: +61 3 543-7795, Fax: +61 3 347-4783
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