Yes. Success means being removed from the gene pool. Procreation biasses towards procreation. Our fundamental purpose from the biological point of view is to create children. Also, the average person lives approximately 3800 days after infection, and infection is almost 95% likely to have been due to sexual activity. 3800 fear filled days to get drunk and make a single mistake that ends a tree of lives. 3800 desperate, terrified days where having someone to cling to would soothe just a few hours.
Two people are sitting on a couch. They just ate lunch. There're two candy bars on the table in front of those people. One person is on a diet, and "cannot" have the candy; the other is not. Who do you think wants the candy more?
We've had a cure for tuberculosis for quite some time
What? No we haven't. Why do you believe this?
as well as polio, yet they are still around
There were less than eight hundred cases of polio globally last year. In 1988, just 20 years ago, there were 350,000. It takes time to eliminate a disease. Dropping it by 99.7% in 20 years, globally, is pretty fucking good. Be less cynical.
Now, the optimistic among us would have hopped that those on drug regimen knew they could spread the disease and modify their behavior accordingly.
Yeah, if you knew what you were talking about, you'd know that in excess of 95% of sexual transmission of AIDS is due to the carrier being unaware of their status. Getting all preachy and acting like it's just a question of someone Doing The Right Thing is ignorance at its finest: turning a blind eye to what's going on after labelling it with a social stigma and trying to dust it under the rug. The disease is spreading; your rationalization counts fuck all about what's going on, and getting clueless on a soapbox like that is what allows diseases to keep spreading.
Have you been tested? No? Then shut the hell up, statistics say there's a one in three hundred seventy odd chance that you're one of the people spreading the disease. Maybe more like one in five hundred, given that you're a slashdotter.
But seriously, the only thing more dangerous in a pandemic than ignorance is misinformation, meaning you're taking a bad situation and making it worse. Staple your lips together and count yourself as having improved mankind's lot in life.
How can someone think a rate is 20-60%? That's one to three out of five. It doesn't make any sense. Of course, the source you cite is Wikipedia, which you should know better than, except of course that it says 30-35%, not 20-60% like you claim; at that point it's probably more of a question of measurement differences or other fundamental quality of standard measurements between sample populations.
Smallpox was still active in the 1960s; why you think it was "eradicated in an effort that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries" is beyond me. Maybe you're misreading the "after successful vaccination campaigns" bit in the wikipedia article; this is one of many reasons why reading an encyclopedia article does not match actual knowledge, since what they're talking about are local, single-city eradications. The actual global eradication effort was begun in the early 1950s by PAHO, which Wikipedia incorrectly cites as 1950 (it started in 1952.) The bulk of Smallpox was driven out of the states around the turn of this century, but the last known US case of non-weaponized Smallpox outbreak was in New York State in 1947, and there were isolated rural cases as late as 1965. The actual eradication wasn't certified by WHO until 1980; cases were found in nature in southern Africa until 1977.
Incidentally, HIV, like Vareola, doesn't have a mortality rate; it's syndromes like AIDS and Smallpox, not diseases like HIV and Vareola, which have mortality rates. If you understood disease you'd know this. Many people with HIV never develop AIDS at all, and live healthy lives until they die from a car accident or cancer or a bolt of lightning or bad heroin or getting mugged. Now, mortality rates aren't just percentages; they're rates. That's why the correct way to say it is "Smallpox has a thirty eight percent chance of mortality per week." This makes a big difference, but what makes a bigger difference is that AIDS itself doesn't actually cause death. Associated infection does. The AIDS mortality rate is ZERO.
Why does that matter? Because when you start knowing what you're talking about, you find out that the AIDS associated disease mortality rate is widely different between economic, ethnic and social groups. Why? Because that's not one hundred percent either. Hell, there are two known people who have sero-converted so far (meaning their immune system fought back and won, and they're not even carriers anymore.) We have no idea how they did it, but they did. About five percent of people with HIV do not develop AIDS by the twenty year mark, and show no symptoms whatsoever. The median time between infection and symptoms even displaying is now over ten years. There are known human mutations that create HIV resistance, such as CCR5 delta 32.
You're just rambling about shit you heard. Get off the soapbox. You're full of crap. No disease has a 100 percent mortality rate over any time frame. You're not even measuring using the right kind of units. The AIDS associated opportunistic infection mortality rate in the United States has been 2.21 per 100 per year since 1998, as accepted by the AMA, the WHO and the CDC.
Two point two percent per year. One hundred? Go read a book, kid, you're lying through your teeth.
Re:I thought those things were already broken
on
Yahoo CAPTCHA Hacked
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· Score: 1
Yeah, or you could go to any place that sells cheap unmetered (like my ISP) and get as much as you can eat for about 20 bucks a month. Nearly Free Speech isn't as nearly free as their name suggests.
Unfortunately whoever invented these timestamps chose to make them use signed numbers, with negative numbers being allowed on some systems (representing dates before 1970) and being errors on other systems (e.g. Windows)...
Whoever invented these timestamps did so before Microsoft was formed. According to The History of Computing Project, the earliest known reference to Microsoft is an announcement of the partnership as Micro-Soft in a Nov 29 1975 personal letter. The UNIX time date stamping system was in use in V1 in 1971 (though not in UNICS). I have it on suspicious authority that the mechanism may be inherited from a Multics mechanism with a different epoch date, but I cannot find proof.
It's got less than nothing to do with Windows, and it's not about system compatibility. The choice of a signed number was simple: at the time, timespans were encoded as negative numbers. That was removed by v2 because it caused a lot of problems in naively written code. You're presenting guesswork as fact: that's a particularly pernicious form of lying, because other people start to repeat it, thinking it's true. Quit being such a kneejerk jerk. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Fortunately 64-bit numbers can now be handled by pcs
Mechanisms for handling 64 bit numbers have been in every edition of UNIX sold or distributed for more than 20 years, since the POSIX consortium was called in 1985 to standardize the existing differing mechanisms between Ultrix, SunOS, MIPS/BSD/Mach, V8, Xenix and so on. Stop making things up to seem smart.
Whoever marked that informative should contact me for bill of sale in re: Brooklyn Bridge.
Why doesn't anyone know about Google anymore? (sigh) The CA state get-a-clue page. Generally speaking, all you have to do is call a local installer - they make a point to know about all the rebate programs applicable in your area, and will often even fill out the paperwork for you, and then their bills seem eminently reasonable, since they're basically being paid by the state. Some counties - Marin and San Diego for example - have incentives above and beyond the state incentives, too. Talk to a pro installer.
You aren't getting 100% from a single rebate. You're getting 100% from a stack of them.
Also, what is the difference between encrypted and encoded?
Encoded just means that there's a formal mechanism for annotating contents. Morse code is encoded. FM is encoded. ASCII is encoded. Printed letters are encoded. In fact, basically any data-thing you do through a machine is encoded. Mrs. Tam is just a numbskull trying to sound smart by padding out her statements with what she believes incorrectly are synonyms.
The problem is that the price of action is well beyond the means of the poor, who are the people most vulnerable in weather situations. The free market is great for most things, but you can't sic it on life giving fundamentals like the food or energy supplies.
Why aren't they screaming to get more power plants built?
They are. It's NIMBY syndrome. Everyone wants the voltage, but nobody wants to live near a power plant. The coal fumes or the nuclear risk or the whatever's wrong with gas are all too scary. That's why the state has its solar programs: after state-run rebates, you can get solar basically for free. Why? Because people will actually do it. Don't get me wrong, I hate SDG&E with a passion. But, the infrstructure problem isn't their fault. They'd be selling more power if they could; it'd make their pockets fatter, don't forget. The problem is that you get four Californians together, and they can't agree on a set of three options. They get hit with all sorts of power problems, so they get amateur-activist and learn a quarter of the story. They won't fucking compromise with each other on energy, because each of them knows a different quarter - this guy wants solar, that guy wants nuclear, this other guy wants sugar beet ethanol, someone else wants wind and geothermal, none of them know a damn thing about the options they didn't choose, and none of them are willing to budge an inch.
My across the hall neighbor in my San Diego condominium was convinced that nuclear power contributed to global warming, so he was certain we all had to build big wind farms on all our buildings, like that'd even provide enough juice to clean up all the bird corpses.
The major problem with California's energy situation is that for this topic, its activism level is significantly above its education level. Therefore, it's pulling in eight directions at once, and getting nowhere.
Note that this of course does also need a temperature gradient to work. This is no magic electricity creating cooling device.
Maybe you weren't aware, but the human body runs at a significantly higher temperature than the world around it. You'd have a hard time finding a place that that temperature gradient didn't exist. All this means is there has to be a large air-access radiating surface. No more phones the size of a stick of gum, since your hand would cover the cold spot. We don't need a magic cold creating device. We have a magic heat creating device, and its name is tummy. Temperature gradients can go either direction from ambient average, and you don't need a whole lot of power to run a modern phone.
What are you talking about? 95% of the people reading that blog still think it's legit. Besides, you'd never know whether internet fronts worked or not, as the only ones you'd ever find out about were the few that failed. From that sample set, of course you think they all fail. What you're forgetting is that by definition the ones that succeed will forever be ghost to you.
For every one on the floor, there are ten in the walls. Slashdot is actually owned by Hormel Foods. You didn't think about spam that much in the 80s.
You're not entirely correct. You've taken one correct meaning and split it into two incorrect halves, then ratified the second half by confusing conjugations.
The verb "[to] moot [something]" is to raise an issue for the specific purpose of displaying it to be unimportant; this is the sense in which the article uses the word. Mooting something is an active and target-specific process whose intent is to weed out irrelevancies. If you have done either 1 or 2, but not the other, you have not mooted something. There is only one meaning, and it is not internally inconsistant at all.
Meaning number two is also the way the past tense adjective is spelled/pronounced. However, it is common in English to have an action and its result adjective be the same, despite that the result adjective represents only the end state of the action: I shot him, he was shot; what you've suggested is to point out that shot has two meanings, one to engage in the act of shooting someone, and also two, to be in the state representing having been hit by a bullet. The verb and its past tense correlated adjective are simply frequently structured thusly.
It's interesting, though, that this divide should seem apparent.
Can you name even one case of any game which has been built from the released source of a bad game, and nailed success? Just one will do.
Fair enough, I can't. It's not clear to me that that's 100% relevant.
Oh, of course not. Why, if you're talking down to professionals about proving what is possible, why would it be relevant that your basis for believing that is going to arise from this project is a path which has never, ever been taken? Surely, despite the literally hundreds of opportunities for such, that it's never ever happened couldn't possibly be a sign.
I'm in the silicon design industry
I don't believe you.
Shrug. Can't prove it can I?
You can't. Someone actually in that industry could quite easily. It'd take about thirty seconds for me to prove my affiliation in the game industry. Why isn't it surprising that you can't imagine how someone would do that?
Oh yeah, and an rc extractor, which as far as I can tell doesn't exist even a little bit.
Yes, and as far as you can tell, no open source game engine has ever been created, either. I reiterate: do your damn research.
high capacity tools that just don't exist outside vendor land.
Repeating the mistake doesn't make it less incorrect. It's time for you to stop saying something doesn't exist, because you're now zero for four.
Only the very largest firms (maybe top 2 or 3) can afford to roll their own everything.// Which is, more or less the point.
Hi. Open source? This is pretend ASIC designer. Pretend ASIC designer? This is open source. I can tell you haven't been introduced, because you're mistaking open source for commercial applications, where the cost of rolling such a suite is a germane issue.
These guys (and I don't claim that they're not misguided, I just claim they're not irrevocably stupid) just want to create a game platform that works, is accessible to more developers and creates a consulting business around it.
That's funny, you seem to have changed your tune. Last time, it was because they wanted to prove how open source can achieve goals in gaming. This time, it's about creating a platform and making money off of it. This is funny, of course, because Torque failed, and Torque had a bunch of money and a huge pre-installed developerbase.
Which, again, you'd know if you had the faintest clue anything about the history of gaming tools, which is what you seem to not understand that you're not in a position to talk about. There are in fact dozens of these kits, commercial and open source, and they all share one thing in common: nobody pays money for any of them. All you can make with a kit is more cookie cutter crap, and given that they're starting from an uninspired engine and gameplay that people would have considered trite in 1996, I don't know why the hell you think anyone would even want to build a game on their engine.
Look, dude, Quake2's engine is free for commercial use now. Why the hell would anyone use this instead? Do you really believe that this engine will compete with Quake2? And, if you do, would you be interested in buying a bridge?
You're right, but if they can provide a coherent platform that any joe schmo can download and create a decent game out of, that's kind of a nice thing isn't it?
Not really: many such tools already exist, and nobody uses them. Seriously, how many clones do you want to play? Why do you think facilitating bad games does anyone any good? How many versions of Tux Racer do you need? If there was another Doom 2, but with shittier graphics, lower quality gameplay, no network prediction, no support, and by the way, you don't know anyone else who plays it, nobody runs a server and
Maybe you should have read the post. I named several.
I think we predate most of the still existing Open Source *and* commercial engines that are still in use these days.
That's right, these things have been around for so long that several have fallen out of use already. You seem to be missing my point: none of this is proving anything. It's old ground. It doesn't matter how old the engine is, or what your new one does, or whether you want to work on upgrading the technology; none of that has anything to do with what I was saying. What I was saying was that the huff and puff that grandparent put together about how people would be proving that OSS could do stuff is nonsense, since it's all already been done. I see nothing wrong with reusing Crystal Space; I just want the grandparent poster to quit going on about how groundbreaking this stuff is, when it's several decades behind proving anything about what OSS can do.
It seems to me that you (and just about all of slashdot) are missing the point.
What a surprise, one random guy on slashdot who's never published a game thinks he sees something that nobody else, including the people who successfully do this for a living, sees. Why do people like you never know about Occam's Razor? Is it more likely that everyone on SlashDot, including people who do this for a living, are the people missing the point? Or is it more likely to be you?
From what I see, the point of this game is to demonstrate that an OSS toolchain is a viable solution for game design.
That was demonstrated two decades ago, something you'd probably know if you were half as familiar with gaming as you thought you are. Indeed, it can be argued that the very first game to sell a million copies - Toy and Wichman's Rogue, once published and ported by Epyx - was an open source game, built in the 60s and released in the 70s. Before you waste time saying that you meant first person shooter, or 3d, neither of which you meant, try doing a little research. There are quite a few first person shooters with commercial success that started open source. This isn't anything new, and there isn't anything here to prove.
although the game isn't vey good, the platform seems to work well enough to use as a foundation.
Can you name even one case of any game which has been built from the released source of a bad game, and nailed success? Just one will do.
If they can create a game that works mostly and has reasonable gameplay, they will have accomplished the goal.
You forgot the time machine. Or do I get to prove that heavier than air flying machines are possible too? Please stop preaching until you're at least familiar with work already done. It's offensive.
I'm surprised that as a gaming professional, you don't see the possibilities here.
What possibilities? They're going to do a bad job of reinventing engines which are already released to open source by commercial concerns? They're going to demonstrate the viability of an open source 3d game, something that was done back when we were still getting our games off of diskmags?
I'm surprised that as an amateur, you think you get to see "the possibilities here" to someone who makes money on this stuff, and then not actually name them.
The reality is that vendor tools are a serious pain an the ass. They are usually broken and support is mostly useless.
You don't know what you're talking about. Come back when you've had to write a video game for an operating system that doesn't provide device drivers, or a game for the bare metal. Come back, in fact, when you've worked with anything other than the spectacularly nebulous "vendor tools." Microsoft ships three DVDs full of help with the current 360 kit. The current Wii kit comes with more than a thousand pages of printed documentation, and access to a developer board which gets you the chance to talk directly to the kit developers. If that's mostly useless support, then I'd love to know who you thought was doing it right.
The reason you think vendor tools aren't supported is that the vendors don't recognize you. Don't pretend to yourself that the kit you found on usenet is anything like what real developers get. It isn't, and you've got no idea what real vendor tools are like. Of course, you'll probably pretend you meant chip design vendor tools:
I'm in the silicon design industry
I don't believe you.
and if someone wanted to demonstrate chip design using OSS tools
And this would be why. Y'see, if you really did lay lines for a living, you'd know that there are a broad plethora of such tools in circulation, and that there are dozens of chip designs, including successful commercial designs, which have been released to the public.
I assure you, passion is something that they are _not_ lacking.
Yeah, well, I've actually looked at the work being done. You can assure all you want, but I'm a gaming industry professional, and my opinion doesn't change because some random person on SlashDot saw some other random thing that might maybe be somehow similar. This work doesn't have one drop of emotion in it.
Slashdot Mirror
Two people are sitting on a couch. They just ate lunch. There're two candy bars on the table in front of those people. One person is on a diet, and "cannot" have the candy; the other is not. Who do you think wants the candy more?
Yes, it's very hard.
Have you been tested? No? Then shut the hell up, statistics say there's a one in three hundred seventy odd chance that you're one of the people spreading the disease. Maybe more like one in five hundred, given that you're a slashdotter.
But seriously, the only thing more dangerous in a pandemic than ignorance is misinformation, meaning you're taking a bad situation and making it worse. Staple your lips together and count yourself as having improved mankind's lot in life.
Wow. So much misinformation in one post.
How can someone think a rate is 20-60%? That's one to three out of five. It doesn't make any sense. Of course, the source you cite is Wikipedia, which you should know better than, except of course that it says 30-35%, not 20-60% like you claim; at that point it's probably more of a question of measurement differences or other fundamental quality of standard measurements between sample populations.
Smallpox was still active in the 1960s; why you think it was "eradicated in an effort that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries" is beyond me. Maybe you're misreading the "after successful vaccination campaigns" bit in the wikipedia article; this is one of many reasons why reading an encyclopedia article does not match actual knowledge, since what they're talking about are local, single-city eradications. The actual global eradication effort was begun in the early 1950s by PAHO, which Wikipedia incorrectly cites as 1950 (it started in 1952.) The bulk of Smallpox was driven out of the states around the turn of this century, but the last known US case of non-weaponized Smallpox outbreak was in New York State in 1947, and there were isolated rural cases as late as 1965. The actual eradication wasn't certified by WHO until 1980; cases were found in nature in southern Africa until 1977.
Incidentally, HIV, like Vareola, doesn't have a mortality rate; it's syndromes like AIDS and Smallpox, not diseases like HIV and Vareola, which have mortality rates. If you understood disease you'd know this. Many people with HIV never develop AIDS at all, and live healthy lives until they die from a car accident or cancer or a bolt of lightning or bad heroin or getting mugged. Now, mortality rates aren't just percentages; they're rates. That's why the correct way to say it is "Smallpox has a thirty eight percent chance of mortality per week." This makes a big difference, but what makes a bigger difference is that AIDS itself doesn't actually cause death. Associated infection does. The AIDS mortality rate is ZERO.
Why does that matter? Because when you start knowing what you're talking about, you find out that the AIDS associated disease mortality rate is widely different between economic, ethnic and social groups. Why? Because that's not one hundred percent either. Hell, there are two known people who have sero-converted so far (meaning their immune system fought back and won, and they're not even carriers anymore.) We have no idea how they did it, but they did. About five percent of people with HIV do not develop AIDS by the twenty year mark, and show no symptoms whatsoever. The median time between infection and symptoms even displaying is now over ten years. There are known human mutations that create HIV resistance, such as CCR5 delta 32.
You're just rambling about shit you heard. Get off the soapbox. You're full of crap. No disease has a 100 percent mortality rate over any time frame. You're not even measuring using the right kind of units. The AIDS associated opportunistic infection mortality rate in the United States has been 2.21 per 100 per year since 1998, as accepted by the AMA, the WHO and the CDC.
Two point two percent per year. One hundred? Go read a book, kid, you're lying through your teeth.
Yeah, or you could go to any place that sells cheap unmetered (like my ISP) and get as much as you can eat for about 20 bucks a month. Nearly Free Speech isn't as nearly free as their name suggests.
There's always casual sex (cue masturbation joke in 3, 2...)
It's got less than nothing to do with Windows, and it's not about system compatibility. The choice of a signed number was simple: at the time, timespans were encoded as negative numbers. That was removed by v2 because it caused a lot of problems in naively written code. You're presenting guesswork as fact: that's a particularly pernicious form of lying, because other people start to repeat it, thinking it's true. Quit being such a kneejerk jerk. You have no idea what you're talking about.Mechanisms for handling 64 bit numbers have been in every edition of UNIX sold or distributed for more than 20 years, since the POSIX consortium was called in 1985 to standardize the existing differing mechanisms between Ultrix, SunOS, MIPS/BSD/Mach, V8, Xenix and so on. Stop making things up to seem smart.
Whoever marked that informative should contact me for bill of sale in re: Brooklyn Bridge.
Epoch is seconds since Jan 1, 1970. That's why it's 2038, not 2048. Go on, you know you want to count out 32 bits of seconds.
Why doesn't anyone know about Google anymore? (sigh) The CA state get-a-clue page. Generally speaking, all you have to do is call a local installer - they make a point to know about all the rebate programs applicable in your area, and will often even fill out the paperwork for you, and then their bills seem eminently reasonable, since they're basically being paid by the state. Some counties - Marin and San Diego for example - have incentives above and beyond the state incentives, too. Talk to a pro installer.
You aren't getting 100% from a single rebate. You're getting 100% from a stack of them.
The problem is that the price of action is well beyond the means of the poor, who are the people most vulnerable in weather situations. The free market is great for most things, but you can't sic it on life giving fundamentals like the food or energy supplies.
My across the hall neighbor in my San Diego condominium was convinced that nuclear power contributed to global warming, so he was certain we all had to build big wind farms on all our buildings, like that'd even provide enough juice to clean up all the bird corpses.
The major problem with California's energy situation is that for this topic, its activism level is significantly above its education level. Therefore, it's pulling in eight directions at once, and getting nowhere.
Uh, why wouldn't you just hold the PDA up to the fire?
What are you talking about? 95% of the people reading that blog still think it's legit. Besides, you'd never know whether internet fronts worked or not, as the only ones you'd ever find out about were the few that failed. From that sample set, of course you think they all fail. What you're forgetting is that by definition the ones that succeed will forever be ghost to you.
For every one on the floor, there are ten in the walls. Slashdot is actually owned by Hormel Foods. You didn't think about spam that much in the 80s.
You're not entirely correct. You've taken one correct meaning and split it into two incorrect halves, then ratified the second half by confusing conjugations.
The verb "[to] moot [something]" is to raise an issue for the specific purpose of displaying it to be unimportant; this is the sense in which the article uses the word. Mooting something is an active and target-specific process whose intent is to weed out irrelevancies. If you have done either 1 or 2, but not the other, you have not mooted something. There is only one meaning, and it is not internally inconsistant at all.
Meaning number two is also the way the past tense adjective is spelled/pronounced. However, it is common in English to have an action and its result adjective be the same, despite that the result adjective represents only the end state of the action: I shot him, he was shot; what you've suggested is to point out that shot has two meanings, one to engage in the act of shooting someone, and also two, to be in the state representing having been hit by a bullet. The verb and its past tense correlated adjective are simply frequently structured thusly.
It's interesting, though, that this divide should seem apparent.
So did CD, 3.5" discs, DAT and a bunch of computer tape formats.
Oh, of course not. Why, if you're talking down to professionals about proving what is possible, why would it be relevant that your basis for believing that is going to arise from this project is a path which has never, ever been taken? Surely, despite the literally hundreds of opportunities for such, that it's never ever happened couldn't possibly be a sign.
You can't. Someone actually in that industry could quite easily. It'd take about thirty seconds for me to prove my affiliation in the game industry. Why isn't it surprising that you can't imagine how someone would do that?
Yes, and as far as you can tell, no open source game engine has ever been created, either. I reiterate: do your damn research.
Repeating the mistake doesn't make it less incorrect. It's time for you to stop saying something doesn't exist, because you're now zero for four.
Hi. Open source? This is pretend ASIC designer. Pretend ASIC designer? This is open source. I can tell you haven't been introduced, because you're mistaking open source for commercial applications, where the cost of rolling such a suite is a germane issue.
That's funny, you seem to have changed your tune. Last time, it was because they wanted to prove how open source can achieve goals in gaming. This time, it's about creating a platform and making money off of it. This is funny, of course, because Torque failed, and Torque had a bunch of money and a huge pre-installed developerbase.
Which, again, you'd know if you had the faintest clue anything about the history of gaming tools, which is what you seem to not understand that you're not in a position to talk about. There are in fact dozens of these kits, commercial and open source, and they all share one thing in common: nobody pays money for any of them. All you can make with a kit is more cookie cutter crap, and given that they're starting from an uninspired engine and gameplay that people would have considered trite in 1996, I don't know why the hell you think anyone would even want to build a game on their engine.
Look, dude, Quake2's engine is free for commercial use now. Why the hell would anyone use this instead? Do you really believe that this engine will compete with Quake2? And, if you do, would you be interested in buying a bridge?
Not really: many such tools already exist, and nobody uses them. Seriously, how many clones do you want to play? Why do you think facilitating bad games does anyone any good? How many versions of Tux Racer do you need? If there was another Doom 2, but with shittier graphics, lower quality gameplay, no network prediction, no support, and by the way, you don't know anyone else who plays it, nobody runs a server and
Incidentally, your sig is broken.
What a surprise, one random guy on slashdot who's never published a game thinks he sees something that nobody else, including the people who successfully do this for a living, sees. Why do people like you never know about Occam's Razor? Is it more likely that everyone on SlashDot, including people who do this for a living, are the people missing the point? Or is it more likely to be you?
That was demonstrated two decades ago, something you'd probably know if you were half as familiar with gaming as you thought you are. Indeed, it can be argued that the very first game to sell a million copies - Toy and Wichman's Rogue, once published and ported by Epyx - was an open source game, built in the 60s and released in the 70s. Before you waste time saying that you meant first person shooter, or 3d, neither of which you meant, try doing a little research. There are quite a few first person shooters with commercial success that started open source. This isn't anything new, and there isn't anything here to prove.
Can you name even one case of any game which has been built from the released source of a bad game, and nailed success? Just one will do.
You forgot the time machine. Or do I get to prove that heavier than air flying machines are possible too? Please stop preaching until you're at least familiar with work already done. It's offensive.
What possibilities? They're going to do a bad job of reinventing engines which are already released to open source by commercial concerns? They're going to demonstrate the viability of an open source 3d game, something that was done back when we were still getting our games off of diskmags?
I'm surprised that as an amateur, you think you get to see "the possibilities here" to someone who makes money on this stuff, and then not actually name them.
You don't know what you're talking about. Come back when you've had to write a video game for an operating system that doesn't provide device drivers, or a game for the bare metal. Come back, in fact, when you've worked with anything other than the spectacularly nebulous "vendor tools." Microsoft ships three DVDs full of help with the current 360 kit. The current Wii kit comes with more than a thousand pages of printed documentation, and access to a developer board which gets you the chance to talk directly to the kit developers. If that's mostly useless support, then I'd love to know who you thought was doing it right.
The reason you think vendor tools aren't supported is that the vendors don't recognize you. Don't pretend to yourself that the kit you found on usenet is anything like what real developers get. It isn't, and you've got no idea what real vendor tools are like. Of course, you'll probably pretend you meant chip design vendor tools:
I don't believe you.
And this would be why. Y'see, if you really did lay lines for a living, you'd know that there are a broad plethora of such tools in circulation, and that there are dozens of chip designs, including successful commercial designs, which have been released to the public.