There are however, some projects out there to bring other filesystems to windows. The problem is the relative immaturity of them. You'd think that at least a portion of linux enthusiasts would appreciate being able to view ext2 from win32. But I guess its considered fratenizing with the enemy. Even if it would make installing linux from a running system that much easier.
Two things plagued ICO. First, a lack of promotion. The only reason I heard about it was Penny Arcade. Although they were talking about the ICO version on a demo disk, so there wasn't a total failure of advertising.
This wouldn't nessecarily doom a game. If a game is compelling and robust enough, word of mouth might be able to carry it along. The problem is that the game is too short. The action is somewhat clunky compared to Zelda. And those damn birds haul Yorda off so fast if you're not near the portal they pull her to, its probably game over. The audio is very subdued. The main characters have no personality; they're both exhude a victom aura. Thats what the game buying public sees.
I see that there's plenty of redeeming value, some of which the latest Zelda appears to have borrowed. Some people speak an ancient language which you cannot understand unless you play the game through a second time. You can now go through select dungeons with a partner you can coerce.
But ICO wasn't a total market failure, either. The game did well enough that somebody decided a sequal would be doable. If the people behind it (I believe its Sony) are wise, a little bit more marketing would go a long ways. Re-release ICO under a directors cut style, with all the features that the European edition had, a month or two before ICO 2 comes out. Maybe get a magazine cover or two. Buy some TV time. And continue to make ICO an incredibly abosrbing game.
What I feel is the most important concept for people designing edutainment games is the hierarchy fo learning. This hierarchy is also called "Bloom's Cognative Taxonomy." Rote memorization and drilling are good for immediate responses, but of very little value in the real world. If I remember correctly, its been theorized that knowledge is held longer as it is used in higher and higher level learning.
In the current edutainment area, there are two fields of game design. The first is a quiz and reward system. The student is presented with a quizing system and the actual game. The learning is supposed to come from the quiz. Depending on how well the student does, permission is given to play the game part for a little while, rewarding the player for doing well. It's a basic operant conditioning design. Learning here is very basic rote; trial and error learning.
The second common design is basic skills drilling. Number munchers, math blaster and that little spelling game where words marched down the castle wall and you had to type them before they got to you are all included in this area. Basically the game is timed drilling. The computer is used to encourage and engage the student, as well as to time them. Again the learning here is by trial and error. These sorts of games serve best as a reinforcement/recollection activity. If you know how to multiply numbers then they can help you instantly recall facts.
What I'd like to see more of these days is problem solving game design. This type merges the learning with the gameplay. It encourages experimentation, and extrapolation. Most REAL games operate in this manner these days; edutainment games should focus on making sure the lessons learned reflect reality accurately (or at least as best we know;)). MIT's games-to-teach project is such a group of people working on edutainment games. If my friend Kurt is reading this, I'm sure he'll post more about their success stories. I'd just like to mention Hephaestus, a game based on engineering robots (I'm guessing remote controlled rather than AI)from lego like parts, although it looks like they've jumped on the current trends marketing bandwagon and its now an MMORPG of some sort, with energy as currency.
Or give a group of people an A if you want to include yourself for some stupid reason. And since any evil genius worth his doomsday device allready knows who's been in a tight situation before (or if none exists, protcol is to frame one), most of the heat should be off you. But don't be stupid about it, after all you don't want them to think you got caught. Maybe instead of altering the overall grades you give your targets microhelp on given assignments, sort of like the rounding error in Office Space. Without the federal pound-me-in-the ass screw up, naturally.
Theres plenty of fucking exploits, because of JNI, the Java Native Interface. Big surpise there. But there's plenty of ways to get 0wnzered without resorting to stack smashing. Web interfaces tend to be another big vulnerability; a language can't to much to force user input checks. While java's version of SQL is largely immune to 1=1 type password attacks, I doubt corporations are shelling out large bucks for something rocksolid like Oracle. Hell, they're probably running their own dinky DB because its "good enough," or possibly a Microsoft technology.
but the mere existance of levels themselves. Personal enhancement can only affect your physical ability to a certain degree, and probably leaves other faculties lacking. Lifting weights all day doesn't make me signifcantly wiser, or smarter. In fact, I'm not sure what does make a person smarter. And practicing military drills all day might make me a better fighter, but the psychological impact is likely more profound. This sort of trait should be emulated by the Role Player, but the notion of RPGs as an acting exercise left long ago.
RPGs come with a buttload of predefined genre baggage. Designers are all too eager to accept them all. Numbers dictate actions, rather than the other way around. There needs be change, but god help us all should our Savior be The Sims Online!
If Iraq wasn't in the name of terrorism (which I agree), then what exactly was the catalyst for Iraq? What heinous event triggered America's assault from two years of inaction under Bush Sr., eight years under President Clinton and two additional years with W?
An interseting statistic: something like 73 percent of our troops (or brigades or some such) are deployed right now, according to some TV general I saw on a cable news channel. I donno how we count that number, maybe people stationed overseas are considered deployed. But if this number is anywhere near accurate, I wonder why I haven't heard much about spreading the Department of Defense (formerly the Department of War) thinly? They say that the most important factor in today's military action is mobilization. As in it doesn't matter how many men you bring in to save an allready demolished town.
If you actually take the time to look at the charts, you won't see any "cannibilization." No game takes its subscribers from another game. Instead you'll find that a game grows logarithmically; fast at first but then towards a plateau. If you look at the total subscribership, you'll notice that its growing, not stabilizing. And the market itself is growing, as each new game takes off faster and faster. Its still too early to tell, but SWG may or may not beat Ragnorok in growth speed.
Both have grown very very rapidly, perhaps because of extensive betas. Once you have an investment in the game it can be hard to leave it. You know the game, and you know the people around it. In fact, as a beta tester you've probably got some reputation in line when the full release comes out. This investment in bits on a remote computer mentality is what keeps subscribers around even after new people show up en masse, even after new games have shown up en masse.
Your second grade teacher may have taught you that water is H20, but she neglected to mention that water is in an equilbrium between H20 and H + OH. Its typically thought that the coefficient of seperation of water is pretty insigifnicant, along the lines of 10^-14.
Meaning that if the water has a pH of 7 then we should be expecting something closer H1.999O. If the difference is flawed experimentation, I would expect proper scientific reserarch to explain this, just as I'd expect it to explain the reasons that even the rudimentary equalibrium analysis is wrong for the timeframe of a attosecend.
I'm just going by what I've seen in Wal-Mart and in the news. EA recently announced (and has since shipped) a new packaging format, slightly larger but close to dimension as a VHS box. There are some discount titles that only provide a jewel case, however.
Theres a few deeper reasons why the PS2 represents the larger market. The Sims might be the best selling game of all time, but all time implies a long time. Plus, expansion packs for it sell at a substantially lower cost. Thats not to say that the Sims and the PC market don't matter; the PC market is the second largest for EA.
But EA's real bread and butter is sports games. Sports games appeal to a wide audience that want to enjoy playing video games, but don't nessecarily have the time to learn and play a more original and involved game. People know the rules, and they can all sit on their couch and play with or against eachother. Their signature game Madden is practically a liscence to mint money by selling roster updates and bug fixes as sequals.
The other reason that PS2 gains on PC is lower costs. PC games still suffer from double packaging, and heavy promotional packaging considerations. Packaging on ps2 games, on the other hand, are smaller DVD cases. They weigh less, they use less material. And since the packaging is standard, economies of scale begin to appear. All you need to come up with is a cover slip design, a manual, and the game disc.
The nail in the coffin as to why PC games aren't doing well is their overenthusiasm for online gaming. The Sims online was a PC game and hasn't been doing nearly as well as executives had been predicting. I believe (but have not confirmed) that so far its been a net detriment to the PC side of EA.
The ps2 really is a large segment. Its also somewhat self fullfilling; when one sector owns a large enough portion of the market, developers start seeing less returns for porting games to other systems. The increasing lack of availablity and console exclusives beckons more gamers to the platform, causing a vicious circle.
Why not just invest in a mutual terror fund? Then just strike at the cheapest target, and watch the rest of your holdings skyrocket?
Seriously, the idea was about as bad as the celebrity market that hollywood created. Not to mention, we allready have an oil futures market, so its not like we need a secondary terrorism future.
I agree that this device is getting enourmous featurewise. I wonder if this is truely a handheld device as the media (and headline) says, or if its simply a portable ps2 just like the psOne, as the PlayStation Portable title suggests.
Given that, the psOne had a negligiable impact on the sales of the GBC or GBA. Very few people bought the psOne for its portability. But perhaps Sony is amending the mistakes that made this so by including a fliptop screen that was a popular bundle with the psOne.
To consider one of the many alternatives to the alternative, like BSD, QNX, and whatnot. Beneath the journalism headlines praising Linux and bashing Windows lies a stream of unnoticed software.
Perhaps the barrier to mainstream entry in all of these OS's is drivers. They say that an Operating System is the interface between programs and the hardware, but drivers are really the interface between the Operating System and the hardware. QNX is a nice beast if you have a riva based video card, but if all you have is the top of the line ATI you get to use the old VESA interface.
You know, thats not really a "law." GTA did allright in its day, and GTA2 did do noticably worse. However, GTA3 as I'm sure you know did far better, and Vice City is well on its way to outpacing that.
Its not exactly hilly like a costal California city might be, but most of it isn't too flat. I live in the Kansas City area; there's plenty of hills around. And when I'm not in KC I'm attending school at KSU, where it is also not flat. The region is called the Flint Hills. Not the Flint Plains, nor the Flint Flatter-than-Pancakes. Hills.
Of course, do be warned, I've never lived on a pancake, so my anecdotal evidence might be flawed =).
The number one utility of emulation as far as Sony's concerned is software development. If I recall correctly, the devkit Advance contained an emulator (tied to a hardware dongle). This can be especially useful when the hardware isn't fully available, tested, or produced. Its simple to write a correct emulator; whats difficult is writing one thats fast and efficient. But for locating serious bugs an emulator can often suffice during early testing.
Re:Excellent article: Open Source Economics
on
Funding Open Source?
·
· Score: 1
Do I know more economics than Ganesh Prasad? Tough question. Is he supposed to be some sort of economics guru? The bottom line is that he failed to address how a group of developers can take OSS from a hobby into a stream of wealth one can feed oneself and one's family with.
Look at the section under "Open Source is not economically viable." He says that everyone's focusing on the supply side too much to see that demand will inevitably force suppliers into adopting OSS. The problem is that if you start selling GPL'd software, anyone can jump in. He calls this commitization, but doesn't make the connection that if anyone can distribute the software then you won't be able to make money in the long run distributing the software.
The idea of expensing software development doesn't negate the opportunity costs of the investment.
Unfortunately, software has befallen an uncorrected market failure that dominates nearly the entire business. Because the Justice Department has elected not to punish and correct Microsoft, the market for Operating Systems is through the roof, and the barrier to entry is even higher. In this situation, economic models of competition break down, as vendors who should be trying to reduce costs and diversify their product are essentially locked in.
Open source is not an viable economical model to sell software. Period. End of story. Thats not to say that open source doesn't have a home, which it clearly does. The author fails to mention a single way that OSS can survive, and instead gives us a nice rant about capilistic views of property
What are those ways? Well, I believe ESR himself has a piece discussing the various ways in which one can earn a living writing OSS. Probably one of the most long lived methods is writing software to sell hardware. ESR mentions others and you should give it a read, and maybe a simple economics textbook, available at a number of collegiate textbook retailers online.
Re:Excellent article: Open Source Economics
on
Funding Open Source?
·
· Score: 1
I think I've seen that article before, but just to be sure I read it again.
I have to question the description of this article as "excellent." Rather than describing how open source can and does participate in economics, every question is answered with a dismissal. The conclusion itself is a dismissial:
Is it possible to make money off Open Source? In the light of all that we have discussed, this now seems a rather petty and inconsequential question to ask.
The payoff is experience. Undergraduates get real world experience designing, building and testing cars. With the growing need for alternative power cars, and the testing of the market, "regenerative braking experience" might be something to put on a resume for the budding mechanical engineer.
You're absolutely correct, these engineering students aren't researching new manufacturing techniques. Of course, they're also undergraduate students, typically in mechanical or electrical engineering, from a public university. Of interesting note is that occasionally students get Master's by tackling something like a power tracker system. The design goes into lots of realistic engineering methods. Quite simply, there's a challenge in simply selecting a body shape; one must balance aerodynamics with power generating surface area and weight.
Quite frankly, you'll never see untested technology being used in these sorts of endevors. Its far more profitable to start a company to research, develop, promote, produce and sell these sorts of technologies. And really, you don't need to race a car in order to test out your newfangled gallium-arcenide solar cells.
That said, I believe that the well funded Michigan team brought in a researcher from germany for his new process that created mircopyramids or some such, increasing surface area over simple flat surfaces. Of course its incredibly expensive, but being sponsored by half the big motor companies in the area helps out.
Of course they don't generate code as fast as C. Why? LISP, Haskell and OCaml are very high level languages with their full featured closure and program representation. As a consequence, the run time performance is hurt. C is fast in part because it doesn't use these features. It types things as best it can (well, we'll ignore the void loophole for now) and compiles under the assumption that the types are all correct.
Now, there are features within C that allow you to do these sorts of things. You can (ab?)use the preprocessor to do inline expansions for stuff, like the wxWindows library does. You can also use void pointers to the function you'd like to pass. The type inferrence is interesting, but I wonder what the need for the auto keyword would be in that situation. It appears to be a flag that the following assignment is intended to create a new variable, but I can't imagine a scenario offhand in which you wouldn't be able to recognize this without the auto keyword.
What's interesting is that despite all those handicaps, ML based languages can achieve and sometimes defeat C based program's speed. Very difficult. But one of the key areas that these functional languages lose out on is array manipulation. For whatever reasons, C just kicks the pants off of the competition. Of course, array manipulation and memory operations are among the most important tools in embedded programming, alongside synchronization.
Slashdot Mirror
There are however, some projects out there to bring other filesystems to windows. The problem is the relative immaturity of them. You'd think that at least a portion of linux enthusiasts would appreciate being able to view ext2 from win32. But I guess its considered fratenizing with the enemy. Even if it would make installing linux from a running system that much easier.
Two things plagued ICO. First, a lack of promotion. The only reason I heard about it was Penny Arcade. Although they were talking about the ICO version on a demo disk, so there wasn't a total failure of advertising.
This wouldn't nessecarily doom a game. If a game is compelling and robust enough, word of mouth might be able to carry it along. The problem is that the game is too short. The action is somewhat clunky compared to Zelda. And those damn birds haul Yorda off so fast if you're not near the portal they pull her to, its probably game over. The audio is very subdued. The main characters have no personality; they're both exhude a victom aura. Thats what the game buying public sees.
I see that there's plenty of redeeming value, some of which the latest Zelda appears to have borrowed. Some people speak an ancient language which you cannot understand unless you play the game through a second time. You can now go through select dungeons with a partner you can coerce.
But ICO wasn't a total market failure, either. The game did well enough that somebody decided a sequal would be doable. If the people behind it (I believe its Sony) are wise, a little bit more marketing would go a long ways. Re-release ICO under a directors cut style, with all the features that the European edition had, a month or two before ICO 2 comes out. Maybe get a magazine cover or two. Buy some TV time. And continue to make ICO an incredibly abosrbing game.
What I feel is the most important concept for people designing edutainment games is the hierarchy fo learning. This hierarchy is also called "Bloom's Cognative Taxonomy." Rote memorization and drilling are good for immediate responses, but of very little value in the real world. If I remember correctly, its been theorized that knowledge is held longer as it is used in higher and higher level learning.
;)). MIT's games-to-teach project is such a group of people working on edutainment games. If my friend Kurt is reading this, I'm sure he'll post more about their success stories. I'd just like to mention Hephaestus, a game based on engineering robots (I'm guessing remote controlled rather than AI)from lego like parts, although it looks like they've jumped on the current trends marketing bandwagon and its now an MMORPG of some sort, with energy as currency.
In the current edutainment area, there are two fields of game design. The first is a quiz and reward system. The student is presented with a quizing system and the actual game. The learning is supposed to come from the quiz. Depending on how well the student does, permission is given to play the game part for a little while, rewarding the player for doing well. It's a basic operant conditioning design. Learning here is very basic rote; trial and error learning.
The second common design is basic skills drilling. Number munchers, math blaster and that little spelling game where words marched down the castle wall and you had to type them before they got to you are all included in this area. Basically the game is timed drilling. The computer is used to encourage and engage the student, as well as to time them. Again the learning here is by trial and error. These sorts of games serve best as a reinforcement/recollection activity. If you know how to multiply numbers then they can help you instantly recall facts.
What I'd like to see more of these days is problem solving game design. This type merges the learning with the gameplay. It encourages experimentation, and extrapolation. Most REAL games operate in this manner these days; edutainment games should focus on making sure the lessons learned reflect reality accurately (or at least as best we know
Or give a group of people an A if you want to include yourself for some stupid reason. And since any evil genius worth his doomsday device allready knows who's been in a tight situation before (or if none exists, protcol is to frame one), most of the heat should be off you. But don't be stupid about it, after all you don't want them to think you got caught. Maybe instead of altering the overall grades you give your targets microhelp on given assignments, sort of like the rounding error in Office Space. Without the federal pound-me-in-the ass screw up, naturally.
Theres plenty of fucking exploits, because of JNI, the Java Native Interface. Big surpise there. But there's plenty of ways to get 0wnzered without resorting to stack smashing. Web interfaces tend to be another big vulnerability; a language can't to much to force user input checks. While java's version of SQL is largely immune to 1=1 type password attacks, I doubt corporations are shelling out large bucks for something rocksolid like Oracle. Hell, they're probably running their own dinky DB because its "good enough," or possibly a Microsoft technology.
but the mere existance of levels themselves. Personal enhancement can only affect your physical ability to a certain degree, and probably leaves other faculties lacking. Lifting weights all day doesn't make me signifcantly wiser, or smarter. In fact, I'm not sure what does make a person smarter. And practicing military drills all day might make me a better fighter, but the psychological impact is likely more profound. This sort of trait should be emulated by the Role Player, but the notion of RPGs as an acting exercise left long ago.
RPGs come with a buttload of predefined genre baggage. Designers are all too eager to accept them all. Numbers dictate actions, rather than the other way around. There needs be change, but god help us all should our Savior be The Sims Online!
If Iraq wasn't in the name of terrorism (which I agree), then what exactly was the catalyst for Iraq? What heinous event triggered America's assault from two years of inaction under Bush Sr., eight years under President Clinton and two additional years with W?
An interseting statistic: something like 73 percent of our troops (or brigades or some such) are deployed right now, according to some TV general I saw on a cable news channel. I donno how we count that number, maybe people stationed overseas are considered deployed. But if this number is anywhere near accurate, I wonder why I haven't heard much about spreading the Department of Defense (formerly the Department of War) thinly? They say that the most important factor in today's military action is mobilization. As in it doesn't matter how many men you bring in to save an allready demolished town.
I donno, maybe its not true.
If you actually take the time to look at the charts, you won't see any "cannibilization." No game takes its subscribers from another game. Instead you'll find that a game grows logarithmically; fast at first but then towards a plateau. If you look at the total subscribership, you'll notice that its growing, not stabilizing. And the market itself is growing, as each new game takes off faster and faster. Its still too early to tell, but SWG may or may not beat Ragnorok in growth speed.
Both have grown very very rapidly, perhaps because of extensive betas. Once you have an investment in the game it can be hard to leave it. You know the game, and you know the people around it. In fact, as a beta tester you've probably got some reputation in line when the full release comes out. This investment in bits on a remote computer mentality is what keeps subscribers around even after new people show up en masse, even after new games have shown up en masse.
Your second grade teacher may have taught you that water is H20, but she neglected to mention that water is in an equilbrium between H20 and H + OH. Its typically thought that the coefficient of seperation of water is pretty insigifnicant, along the lines of 10^-14.
Meaning that if the water has a pH of 7 then we should be expecting something closer H1.999O. If the difference is flawed experimentation, I would expect proper scientific reserarch to explain this, just as I'd expect it to explain the reasons that even the rudimentary equalibrium analysis is wrong for the timeframe of a attosecend.
I'm just going by what I've seen in Wal-Mart and in the news. EA recently announced (and has since shipped) a new packaging format, slightly larger but close to dimension as a VHS box. There are some discount titles that only provide a jewel case, however.
Theres a few deeper reasons why the PS2 represents the larger market. The Sims might be the best selling game of all time, but all time implies a long time. Plus, expansion packs for it sell at a substantially lower cost. Thats not to say that the Sims and the PC market don't matter; the PC market is the second largest for EA.
But EA's real bread and butter is sports games. Sports games appeal to a wide audience that want to enjoy playing video games, but don't nessecarily have the time to learn and play a more original and involved game. People know the rules, and they can all sit on their couch and play with or against eachother. Their signature game Madden is practically a liscence to mint money by selling roster updates and bug fixes as sequals.
The other reason that PS2 gains on PC is lower costs. PC games still suffer from double packaging, and heavy promotional packaging considerations. Packaging on ps2 games, on the other hand, are smaller DVD cases. They weigh less, they use less material. And since the packaging is standard, economies of scale begin to appear. All you need to come up with is a cover slip design, a manual, and the game disc.
The nail in the coffin as to why PC games aren't doing well is their overenthusiasm for online gaming. The Sims online was a PC game and hasn't been doing nearly as well as executives had been predicting. I believe (but have not confirmed) that so far its been a net detriment to the PC side of EA.
The ps2 really is a large segment. Its also somewhat self fullfilling; when one sector owns a large enough portion of the market, developers start seeing less returns for porting games to other systems. The increasing lack of availablity and console exclusives beckons more gamers to the platform, causing a vicious circle.
Why not just invest in a mutual terror fund? Then just strike at the cheapest target, and watch the rest of your holdings skyrocket?
Seriously, the idea was about as bad as the celebrity market that hollywood created. Not to mention, we allready have an oil futures market, so its not like we need a secondary terrorism future.
I agree that this device is getting enourmous featurewise. I wonder if this is truely a handheld device as the media (and headline) says, or if its simply a portable ps2 just like the psOne, as the PlayStation Portable title suggests.
Given that, the psOne had a negligiable impact on the sales of the GBC or GBA. Very few people bought the psOne for its portability. But perhaps Sony is amending the mistakes that made this so by including a fliptop screen that was a popular bundle with the psOne.
To consider one of the many alternatives to the alternative, like BSD, QNX, and whatnot. Beneath the journalism headlines praising Linux and bashing Windows lies a stream of unnoticed software.
Perhaps the barrier to mainstream entry in all of these OS's is drivers. They say that an Operating System is the interface between programs and the hardware, but drivers are really the interface between the Operating System and the hardware. QNX is a nice beast if you have a riva based video card, but if all you have is the top of the line ATI you get to use the old VESA interface.
You know, thats not really a "law." GTA did allright in its day, and GTA2 did do noticably worse. However, GTA3 as I'm sure you know did far better, and Vice City is well on its way to outpacing that.
You can't download an illegally made copy legally. Even if it would be legal for you to possess such a copy.
OK, clearly you CAN, but good luck using fair use if you don't even have an mp3 encoder on your computer that was just confinscated.
Its not exactly hilly like a costal California city might be, but most of it isn't too flat. I live in the Kansas City area; there's plenty of hills around. And when I'm not in KC I'm attending school at KSU, where it is also not flat. The region is called the Flint Hills. Not the Flint Plains, nor the Flint Flatter-than-Pancakes. Hills.
Of course, do be warned, I've never lived on a pancake, so my anecdotal evidence might be flawed =).
If you're worried about the Germans infiltrating your data stream, might I suggest an appropriate joke?
Q:Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer?
A:Ja!...Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
The number one utility of emulation as far as Sony's concerned is software development. If I recall correctly, the devkit Advance contained an emulator (tied to a hardware dongle). This can be especially useful when the hardware isn't fully available, tested, or produced. Its simple to write a correct emulator; whats difficult is writing one thats fast and efficient. But for locating serious bugs an emulator can often suffice during early testing.
Do I know more economics than Ganesh Prasad? Tough question. Is he supposed to be some sort of economics guru? The bottom line is that he failed to address how a group of developers can take OSS from a hobby into a stream of wealth one can feed oneself and one's family with.
Look at the section under "Open Source is not economically viable." He says that everyone's focusing on the supply side too much to see that demand will inevitably force suppliers into adopting OSS. The problem is that if you start selling GPL'd software, anyone can jump in. He calls this commitization, but doesn't make the connection that if anyone can distribute the software then you won't be able to make money in the long run distributing the software.
The idea of expensing software development doesn't negate the opportunity costs of the investment.
Unfortunately, software has befallen an uncorrected market failure that dominates nearly the entire business. Because the Justice Department has elected not to punish and correct Microsoft, the market for Operating Systems is through the roof, and the barrier to entry is even higher. In this situation, economic models of competition break down, as vendors who should be trying to reduce costs and diversify their product are essentially locked in.
Open source is not an viable economical model to sell software. Period. End of story. Thats not to say that open source doesn't have a home, which it clearly does. The author fails to mention a single way that OSS can survive, and instead gives us a nice rant about capilistic views of property
What are those ways? Well, I believe ESR himself has a piece discussing the various ways in which one can earn a living writing OSS. Probably one of the most long lived methods is writing software to sell hardware. ESR mentions others and you should give it a read, and maybe a simple economics textbook, available at a number of collegiate textbook retailers online.
I have to question the description of this article as "excellent." Rather than describing how open source can and does participate in economics, every question is answered with a dismissal. The conclusion itself is a dismissial:
Because I'm tired of having yet another username/password combination, and my viewership depends on it?
The payoff is experience. Undergraduates get real world experience designing, building and testing cars. With the growing need for alternative power cars, and the testing of the market, "regenerative braking experience" might be something to put on a resume for the budding mechanical engineer.
You're absolutely correct, these engineering students aren't researching new manufacturing techniques. Of course, they're also undergraduate students, typically in mechanical or electrical engineering, from a public university. Of interesting note is that occasionally students get Master's by tackling something like a power tracker system. The design goes into lots of realistic engineering methods. Quite simply, there's a challenge in simply selecting a body shape; one must balance aerodynamics with power generating surface area and weight.
Quite frankly, you'll never see untested technology being used in these sorts of endevors. Its far more profitable to start a company to research, develop, promote, produce and sell these sorts of technologies. And really, you don't need to race a car in order to test out your newfangled gallium-arcenide solar cells.
That said, I believe that the well funded Michigan team brought in a researcher from germany for his new process that created mircopyramids or some such, increasing surface area over simple flat surfaces. Of course its incredibly expensive, but being sponsored by half the big motor companies in the area helps out.
Of course they don't generate code as fast as C. Why? LISP, Haskell and OCaml are very high level languages with their full featured closure and program representation. As a consequence, the run time performance is hurt. C is fast in part because it doesn't use these features. It types things as best it can (well, we'll ignore the void loophole for now) and compiles under the assumption that the types are all correct.
Now, there are features within C that allow you to do these sorts of things. You can (ab?)use the preprocessor to do inline expansions for stuff, like the wxWindows library does. You can also use void pointers to the function you'd like to pass. The type inferrence is interesting, but I wonder what the need for the auto keyword would be in that situation. It appears to be a flag that the following assignment is intended to create a new variable, but I can't imagine a scenario offhand in which you wouldn't be able to recognize this without the auto keyword.
What's interesting is that despite all those handicaps, ML based languages can achieve and sometimes defeat C based program's speed. Very difficult. But one of the key areas that these functional languages lose out on is array manipulation. For whatever reasons, C just kicks the pants off of the competition. Of course, array manipulation and memory operations are among the most important tools in embedded programming, alongside synchronization.