RE: Stress calculation

>It would be pleasing to see a similar initiative taken to the overpriced
>engineering software houses.

That's been eating on me for years. If you think it's bad in the piping design business you should see the state of general purpose FEA software. Outrageous pricing, wretched support, ever buggier software, feature bloat out the wazoo and just flat out rotten usability. I think the problem is a combination of marketeer take-overs of developers and complete ignorance of engineering practice throughout the entire effort.

There's a huge amount of public domain software around <http://www.engr.usask.ca/~macphed/finite/fe_resources/fe_resources.html> is the primo site for links. <http://sourceforge.net/> is another good site. The problem is that a lot of it requires a fair amount of computer geekery to get it into the average engineering office.

I'm convinced that if I had access to a couple of reasonably solid programmers and could drop about half my practice for a year I could work up a piping analysis package from any of a number of shareware or open source programs. But I'm in the engineering business, not the software business. Probably your problem, too. In addition my programming skills are rusty, dated or both.

As a Machead, I'd go for software to run under freeBSD, since that's the core of the Mac these days. I suspect there's very little difference between freeBSD and Linux as far as the number crunching goes, but the Mac's usability beats all. Plenty of tools around to put a nice Aqua interface to run it with.

The other hooker is that such a project probably wouldn't make it into large organizations, at least for a long while. Neither Macs and Linux are popular with the enterprise IT crowd, which is pretty much Windoze only. If the program turned out to be truly revolutionary (think the WYSIWYG revolution) corporate IT would be forced to come around, but just being more convenient for the engineering staff wouldn't get a turn. Which means either killer app or not-for-profit development. I'd still love to try it, but I don't know how I'd stave off starvation.

Christopher Wright P.E.    |"They couldn't hit an elephant at
chrisw@skypoint.com        | this distance"   (last words of Gen.
___________________________| John Sedgwick, Spotsylvania 1864)