Book Reviews
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Friday, November 11, 2005
![[Item Permalink]](http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/images/ur_bullet.gif){kind=small} Reinventing the wheel - or reinventing the world? -- Comment()
The PITAC computational science report saw that U.S. leadership in science and technology is being challenged: "[T]his country has not yet awakened to the central role played by computational science and high-end computing in advanced scientific, social science, biomedical, and engineering research; defense and national security; and industrial innovation." The report noted the benefits of open source: "The open source model [...] effectively supports the rise of collaborative projects that require the free exchange of software components as part of a shared infrastructure." The success of Linux has shown that competitive software can be produced with a community effort. However, there isn't that much interest in developing open source research-level software. Modeling software which can be tailored to new problems by researchers is all too rare. Counterexamples such as the recently GPL'd Elmer multiphysical modeling software suffer from usability issues in the same way as Linux. How to raise interest in scientific software development in the open source community?
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-- Comment()
The amorality of Web 2.0: "From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing. And why not? For those seeking to transcend the physical world, the Web presents a readymade Promised Land. On the Internet, we're all bodiless, symbols speaking to symbols in symbols."
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