IBM Australia Announces New Global Research Development Lab 68
davidmwilliams writes "Today Prime Minister Julia Gillard and IBM Australia and New Zealand Managing Director Glen Boreham announced a new global research and development lab to be based at the University of Victoria, creating 150 jobs and tackling Australian national concerns. The controversial Labor Government's National Broadband Network has been cited as a major drawcard."
It's not even done yet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course I mean anyone rational.
Australia has been built on developing new tech, on research. CSIRAC (CSIRO) was the worlds fourth digital computer and the CSIRO have done a lot more since then, a lot which has benefited Australia's main export industries (agriculture and mining). Killing this trend will only result in Australia shooting itself in the foot.
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Turnbull/Abbott have to complain. They're in opposition and the NBN is Labor's crowing achievement.
The NBN will incite more tech oriented business in Australia, we have a better education system (overall) then the US and work harder (more hours) they Europe. I think we'll see local data centres form an economy around delivery of con
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We still haven't fixed that, but the NBN is part of doing so.
A lot of the NBN is about the same as what was planned for 2000 back in 1996 before Telstra decided to do the absolute minimim it could get away with.
Telstra for many years was a government owned organisation that pretended to be a private enterprise when it suited - so the worst of both worlds. When a large portion was sold off the mexican bandit running Telstra
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A lot of the NBN is about the same as what was planned for 2000 back in 1996 before Telstra decided to do the absolute minimim it could get away with.
The NBN is exactly what privatising Telstra *should* have produced. A government-owned and -controlled base infrastructure that private entities resell bandwidth from.
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Yeah, because under 200 some jobs is worth the...how much are you guys investing in this again?
$43 billion. But what makes you think that the only benefit will be 200 jobs? This is a massive undertaking, which will have massive consequences.
And isn't this the same country that had a lone ISP that ran your internet for years? Or was it DNS, I forget. Then you had some sorry ass links to the outside world because of this...
You might be thinking of Melbourne IT [wikipedia.org], which was responsible for the .com.au addresses. One person handled the entire registration process for the entire country. This was much more complicated than getting a .com address because you had to provide documentation to prove you had the company name to match the address. Back in the 90s it ended up with a massive back
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There's also stories of high tech IT companies waiting with baited breath for the NBN to be rolled out so they can move manufacturing, datacentres, DR sites, etc, out of the big cities. This is a major chance for Australia to revitalise the bush, but the opposition feels that sabotaging the first major public infrastructure project in decades is a smart idea. Their alternative is wireless. No business worth anything would rely on wireless for high speed data, mainly because of the limitations and security c
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Add to this that the estimate of how many towers would be required is insanely higher than there currently is (some estimates put it at 1 tower per street).
But that sounds perfectly okay to me. Pretty much every intersection in the Melbourne CBD has microcells mounted on traffic signal pylons. Why not do it in the suburbs? Cheaper than pulling cable from the street into houses.
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Go price a cell and then go price a few hundred metres of fibre and a fibre exchange card.
Not only will the cells need fibre to each of them and the card, but the cable will need to be hauled down every street anyway. All you're saving is the cost of a fibre lead in and a fibre splitter for every 32 houses, to spend much more on cells.
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And the labour to pull fibre into the home. Labour is expensive. And you have to maintain it. Thats labour as well. Then you need a network terminator in the home. Thats money. With wireless the consumer pays for the network terminator. Its in their ipad or whatever.
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There's also stories of high tech IT companies waiting with baited breath ...
Maybe they should lay off the damp squid [youtube.com].
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This possibility has intrigued me for a while. We have a lot of very very very cheap land in rural towns that already has roads/water/electricity/sewage and has basically sat idle since the mechanisation of agriculture.
There do exist knowledge workers who don't want to live in a city, or hell just want to be able to afford a house.
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Say your business is in Melbourne and your workers could telecomute from Marysville. At the same time other workers can do the same work for one third the price in Mumbai. Who do you choose?
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The ones who speak perfect english, went to university in Australia and are only a 2 hour drive away.
Having worked with Indian outsourcing for IT projects before I'd say 3x the price for onshore is a no-brainer. But no doubt it's more competitive than that.
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The opposition's (poorly marketed) alternative was fibre for 99% of the population and wireless (satellite) for the remaining 1%, at a fraction of the cost.
Besides, if it were true that the economy would obviously benefit from the NBN as claimed, then wouldn't a CBA be a mere formality? The fact that the government has been so reluctant to have one done speaks volumes about what the most probable outcome of a CBA would be.
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Which Uni? (Score:5, Informative)
TFS and TFA refer to the "University of Victoria" which could be the same as "Victoria University" but the announcement was made at the "University of Melbourne" which leaves me confused.
Then there is this: [techworld.com.au]
Natural disasters, resource management, life sciences and e-health will be keyed as high priorities for a new global research and development lab to be opened at the University of Melbourne by IBM.
So I think its Melbourne Uni.
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Indeed, The University of Victoria is, in fact, in Canada. They are welcome to take PM Gillard off our hands if they would like.
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You are correct, it's in the University of Melbourne.
In fact, it is about two floors directly underneath me as I type this.
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What's two floors beneath you? The announcement or the lab?
On the plus side, maybe CSSE won't have to move yet again...
(I work over the road.)
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Depends. There's some confusion, now. There's a big IBM system being commissioned below me in Queensberry st, but I've just been told that it's for different things, and that this announcement might be for another, different, new IBM installation.
I used to be in CSSE, but I'm seconded to ITS right now. (That should be enough to identify me uniquely to those in the right circles...)
As for CSSE moving... that's been on-again-off-again for years, but last I heard it's definitely on-again. With deadlines and ev
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OK, hands up all you Unimelb peons...
Well I am an ex Unimelb peon if you count stuff from the 1980s. Also my current employer used to occupy 780 Elizabeth.
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OK, hands up all you Unimelb peons...
Hand down in my case. I'm NICTA.
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Hand down in my case. I'm NICTA.
That counts. If Unimelb EngIT does your desktop support, trust me; it counts.
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I would make a joke about that, except that someone from EngIT might be reading this, and I wouldn't want to give a mistaken impression. So I won't.
Almost everyone in EngIT is a delight to work with. And all of those same delightful people know exactly why I just said "almost".
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I happen to be on secondment.
From EngIT. :-)
University of Woolloomooloo (Score:2)
And all the professors are named "Bruce". Otherwise, it would lead to confusion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruces'_Philosophers_Song [wikipedia.org]
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Natural disasters,
Research into aggrivating seismic activity and weather control for the purposes of warfare and other disaster capitalism. [wikipedia.org]
resource management,
Securing the world's dwindling supplies of foodstock, petroleum, minerals, and rare-earth metals...one disaster at a time.
life sciences and e-health
Clandestine psychological and physiological experimentation, eugenics, elimination of transients and the mentally ill.
Careful, there, mate. I think you may have put the shiny side of the tinfoil the wrong way round this morning.
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Thats two people who work directly above this lab. Getting crowded at unimelb.
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I wouldn't be surprised if the AC and I are within twenty meters of each other.
Who would have thought that sysads might read /.
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> Who would have thought that sysads might read /.
No! say it can't be true....not during work hours!
ps: UOM, SoC, about 300m away at a guess.
Great... (Score:2, Interesting)
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I wish I had a job working for imitation peanuts. Right now all I get is packing foam.
You get packing foam? All I get is state labour election promises.
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labor. Labor. LABOR.
But I'm sure, outside of being unable to spell the name of the party that has been running the state for the bulk of the last 30 years, that you are very well informed about victorian state politics.
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All of the "detail" we've got is a couple of newspaper journalists at the
My rights online? (Score:3, Interesting)
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The Bayesian network that now performs all Slashdot editing has come to associate "Australia" with the "Your Rights Online" category, due to what I will call "poor quality training data" from Australian lawmakers.
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The code running this site is a steaming pile of shit.
What Australian National Concerns Are There? (Score:4, Funny)
Not enough stubbies in the fridge? Too many sheep to perve? Bosses spewing because too many folks are chucking a sickie? Automatic translation of Aussie into English?
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We agonise endlessly over the fact that our dollar's about to hit parity with the US dollar.
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"Parity"? Can't you think for yourself? Do some Google searches. "Aussie dollar exceeding US dollar". "Australian dollar exceeding US dollar". Every single result includes the word "parity". If you used the sentence "We agonise endlessly over the fact that our dollar's about to hit parity with the US dollar" talking to me in real life I'd probably punch you in the face.
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Well, Guess I'm lucky you're nowhere near me in real life then.
FIt is not "IBM Research" Lab, it a "IBM R&D (Score:2)
There are only 9 labs which are real IBM Research Laboratories: Almaden, Austin, Brazil, China, India, Haifa, Tokyo, Watson and Zurich
linky: http://www.research.ibm.com/worldwide/index.shtml [ibm.com] which does not list Sao Paolo, Brazil yet though.
This new one in Australia is just a new IBM R&D center, part of IBM, but not part of IBM Research though....
Fascinating List (Score:2)
It's fascinating to see how IBM, an American "global" corporation, identifies all of these centers using different standards.
Why are the American, Swiss, Japanese and Israeli entities listed using city names, while the Chinese and Indian are organized using country names? Does this speak to some American sphere of influence or common knowledge? Tokyo is obviously easily identifiable as Japanese.
I'm only addressing this because it's fascinating in itself. I would understand the American cities being listed u