Tracy writes:

> Virtual Interex exists right now; it's also known as the HP3000-L, and is
>  well worth the price of admission.  The travel expenses, association dues,
>  and missed office time are also easy to justify (though our Purchasing
>  department has expressed annoyance at my zero-cost requisitions).
>
>  Got a presentation?  post a URL right here.  If you're the first, you get
>  automatic BestPresentationOfAllTime status, at least until another appears,
>  woohoo!

As I've mentioned before, I don't think that this would work. HP3000-L works
extremely well for some things, particularly for such items as calculating how
many stadiums-full of biotoxins Saddam had manufactured before we overthrew
his regime and rid the world of the danger that he proposed, but it doesn't
tend to work nearly as well for detailed, technical discussions, where someone
takes the time to prepare a presentation. My only evidence for that statement is
a count of all of the times in the past that such presentations have
spontaneously appeared.

Nevertheless, from the discussion so far, my sense is that the enthusiasm
level for a technical Virtual Interex is somewhat tepid. Nonetheless, let me try
one last time.

I also belong to a much smaller organization than HP3000-L, the Astronomical
Society of Las Cruces, NM. It has only 80 dues-paying members, approx. 1/8th
the size of HP3000-L. It holds its meetings once a month on the third Friday of
each month, which was this last Friday night. Generally 30 to 40 people
attend. One of the members prepares an hour presentation to be given to the group
each month.

The effort put into the preparation of a talk is not to be taken lightly. As
those of you have done this, you know that you must spend 8 to 12 hours in
preparation for a 30-min to an hour talk.

The speaker this last Friday night was Steve Barkes. Steve has developed some
world-famous freeware called GuideDog. It's a bit of autoguiding software for
amateur telescopes (as a software manufacturer myself, I found it especially
interesting that serious "amateurs" will spend $20,000 to $50,000 on their
telescopes but demand freeware software).

Steve's talk is available at:

     http://aics-research.com/lectures/aslcnm/aslc-barkes/aslc-barkes.qcshow

When you listen to the talk, pretend that you're interested in the subject.
Doing that, you should be able to get some sense of how valuable such a
presentation might be to you if it were instead a recounting of someone's experience
in moving their MPE/IMAGE application to HP-UX/Eloquence, for example.

As always, to view the talks, you will need to download a  (Windows-only)
player from:

     http://aics-research.com/qcshow/

if you haven't already. These keyboard keys control the player:

     ESC = quits the lecture
     ARROW KEYS = search forwards or backards
     SPACE BAR = pause/resume play
     LETTER "I" = information display

Wirt Atmar

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