Not to derail your point, which is well taken, but they're probably just sending them off to be resurfaced. DVD resurfacing is a well-known trade, and professional no-risk resurfacing can cost 5 - 10 dollars. I'm guessing GameFly would have volume discount relationships with resurfacing vendors to drive that down a bit, or has bought their own professional resurfacing machine for 2 - 20k and has figured out how to use it.
I seriously doubt that the scratching gets bad enough to penetrate to the data layer, so they shouldn't need to re-buy.
powered human flight without the use of an airplane
Technically, those old rocket pack suits used at airshows counts for this. As does, well, balloons.
While it isn't the most technically advanced feat, it is a damn cool trick, and the video is awesome. They really sound like a 747 taking off while strapped to your ankles. Kudos for the fun hack, and I can't wait to try it out.
You're looking at it from a consumer perspective, not from a producer perspective. As a consumer you should be able to import from another region and it should be completely legal. However, as a producer, faced with that type of worldwide market you would simply not sell in regions where you couldn't maintain your most profitable price. It isn't a question of you being able to buy a lower-cost disk in another country: that disk just wouldn't be available there or Walmart would be using that country as their supplier.
As a movie distributer, you really don't care where your money comes from so long as you get as much of it as possible. The 1st world regions are where they make the bulk of their money, and they keep prices relatively consistent there. They also sell to 2nd and 3rd world nations to make a little more on top. If they were facing a unified worldwide price structure, they would just drop 2nd and 3rd world support, selling instead at full price in the 1st world. They may make 20% of their cash from the nations to be dropped, but better that than cannabalize the 80% sales you get from the west.
And of course they're trying to maximize profits: all companies try to maximize profits. Your health insurance company is trying to maximize profits. Your landlord is trying to maximize profits. The club where you dance on friday nights is trying to maximize profits. Google is trying to maximize profits. If they have shareholders they are legally bound (in the US) to maximize profits. The problem is not the goal, but the means. The MPAA has been particularly bad on this front. But complaining that those companies are trying to maximize profits is like complaining that water is trying to run to a local minima.
Again, none of this should involve laws at all. I wholeheartedly disagree with that part.
I'm not saying they're not evil. I'm saying the situation is more complicated than that.
I use what came with the DVD player: Intervideo WinDVD 4. It does a good job of speeding up the audio imperceptibly, and it pretty full featured viewer besides. Unfortunately, it doesn't speed up anything other than DVD's.
If anyone knows anything which will speed up / slow down arbitrary video files, Divx / Xvid, please post.
I was in Thailand the other day. Apparently there is a two-track system: VCD's and DVD's. VCD's are cheap because the average lower-class person has a VCD player. They can be as little as 3 dollars for a new release. DVD's are more expensive because only high-class people have DVD players. They're roughly 30 bucks. These are the same movies encoded using the same codec. If there was one price for everything, the companies would probably be charging 20 bucks... less than the average DVD currently sells for, but a lot higher than the average person is willing to pay.
But, of course, money in Thailand is worth about 1/5th to 1/10th what it is here in the US. You can get lunch for 50 cents, but you only earn a few dollars a day. So while a movie may be 3$ there, it is the income-adjusted equivalent of 20 dollars here. If they sold movies there at that price people would import them to the US, and due to the differences between actual and relative monetary values that would mean that a movie which is about 20$ worth of income in either country would actually sell in the US for 10 or so, almost none of which the producer would see.
Without dual-tracking like this, inexpensive versions of movies would never be sold in 3rd world countries. It isn't financially viable to canabalize your most profitable sales while chasing the lower-income dollars.
I'm not saying that I agree with having region encoding, or the current cartel surrounding it. Region-free alterations to players should be a viable option for those of us who love media from all countries, and the justice system should not at all be involved. But I am saying that the issue is more complicated than it is made out to be. Region-coding isn't there to make high prices higher, but to make low price sales in low income regions possible.
Oddly enough, I have the tendency to watch movies at 1.1x. Really bad Hollywood schlock gets 1.4x. You wouldn't believe how many pacing problems this can solve.
An additional external fan could be quite helpful. The loudest part of the old PS2 design was the fan on the back of the unit... a larger, slower moving fan that stopped the internal fan from spinning could provide a lot more cooling at a much lower noise level. Even without stopping the internal fan, most of the noise from high-speed fans comes from the intake not getting air quickly enough to feed the blades. Adding a larger, slower, less noisy external fan would greatly increase the amount of air available to the fan, and thereby greatly reduce volume.
Opera has gone through several different primary funding sources, from direct PC sales to cellphone sales to advertising banners to referrer ID's. Can you comment on how the specific monetizations have effected the development process? How does this contrast with the politically funded development process that Mozilla / Firefox undergoes?
I'm not trolling. I've used Opera since version 2.
However, the company has always taken a negative stance on editing search query strings, and the long-needed systematization of editing said strings has never materialized. I'm wondering how the specific monetization of Opera effects the development process.
As a software developer myself, albeit in games, we face similar issues every day. I was just interested in finding out how they deal with those issues.
In a related question, Opera has always been a tweaker's dream browser, with a high degree of exposed configurability. Yet recently the browser has moved to an affiliate-supported model driven by sending people to specific sites. How do you strike a balance between end-user control and affiliate dollars? Have there been any features cut or added in support of this bottom line?
For small claims courts, at least in MA and CA, the grandparent is correct. You have to send the initial claim certified for the judge to consider the case valid.
On the other hand, jury duty is normal mail. Which lead to an amusing situation a few years ago where the state wanted me arrested for dodging jury duty in northern CA, even though I had moved out of that address to southern CA three years prior. The only reason I found out about this was because the person who was recieving the mail finally decided it was a bit serious, tracked me down, and let me know that they had just done what the state wasn't capable of doing. The state dropped the charges when it found out that the new address was the one on my license, and the one that I was receiving other state mailings at.
My car is also computer free... not for any moral reasons, just because computers add additional expense and frailty to the car. I don't even have power steering. I've just seen too many people invest in nice cars in the hopes that will keep them from major repair bills, only to have to plunk down a grand to fix an electric window that won't open.
That having been said, I'd much rather the car take care of the driving. Sure, the automatic transmission could be shifting more intelligently, but when you're stuck in traffic on your morning commute does it actually matter? It would take 10 minutes to make a lego mindstorm robot that can follow the car in front of it during bump-n-go traffic, so why have cars taken 20 years?
I want to enjoy the driving that I do, which usually means not being the one driving through the crappy parts.
But if every time someone believed as this man, more people would die than be saved.
Not if they were going to die anyway.
If you are in the later stages of a serious brain degenerative disease, and have 6 months to live, if a treatment has a 10% chance of success and providing you with another 40 years of life and a 90% chance of killing you in 6 months, it's still worth doing.
Testing and clinical trials are a necessary system, and many of the major medical screw-ups in recent memory have come from not enough of the above, rather than too many. However, when you're talking about people who have basically no chance of survival, you should take greater risks to try and help them. The cost of a failed treatment is death, but the cost of not treating is also death.
There are several big differences. For one, Sony doesn't have a monopoly on the console market the way that Microsoft does on the OS market. Consoles churn by nature, and there is no guarantee that the PS3 will even be a contender. By comparison, Windows Vista's success is as sure as death and taxes.
Second, Sony isn't forcing other people to include Blue-Ray in their devices. Microsoft has the muscle to throw around promotions and bundle discounts. That's a nice way of saying that they're going to charge you a lot more if you don't do their bidding. Sony may throw memory sticks into every device they make, but so far nobody else supports that standard.
Assuming the car could be subtle about it, it would be nice to have a slightly sticky road steer, maybe 2 or 3 degrees to keep the car in the lane under most driving conditions. If the driver is actually steering, don't use the system. If they would have to steer a lot, don't use the system. If it can't find the line markers, don't use the system. But with those caveats, the system sounds like it could work.
And while we're at it, can we get a photosensor on the bottom of the cars to auto-correct for alignment problems? Lane-Departure prevention wouldn't really be an issue if that brand new $23,000 Honda didn't require a mechanic every time you drove up a driveway at an angle.
There are many other ways that today's cars are automated. At one point, there was this thing called "manual transmission." There was also just one setting for the suspension... none of this "leaning into the turns" or "lowering at high speeds." They also didn't have speed-sensitive steering (new cars increase turning sensitivity at lower speeds.) Or, for that matter, cruise control. They briefly mention BMW's hazard system, but they don't mention the coolest part: that upon loss of traction it selectively applies single-wheel breaking to cause the car to skid in the direction that it thinks the driver wants to go. That isn't fundamentally different than Anti-Lock Brakes.
It takes a couple of generations of games for the full potential to be unlocked, but first-gen titles are considered "showcases" for what is to come. The PS2 launched with SSX, Ridge Racer V, and a bunch of other titles that made people lust after the little machine. The Xbox ping pong videos were completely lickable. Mario 64 was light years ahead of the 16 bit era, as was Ridge Racer 1. NFL and NBA 2K on the Dreamcast were shocking. Panzeer Dragoon on the Saturn was light years ahead of the Genesis. Super Mario World on the SNES and Altered Beast on the Genesis both blew away the 8-bit offerings of the time.
This is the first system launch that I've ever heard of where people are seriously questioning whether or not this is any better than the previous generation. Microsoft has the unfortunate position of both having the last-released current generation system and the earliest-released next one, so that the inevitable comparisons won't find much gulf. But still... wow us now!
Even Fantavision on the PS2 showed off the system's power. Remember being stunned by the realistic water in Wave Racer? It looks like there was a rush to get the X360 into people's hands, and none of the potential of the system have been tapped. At least, I hope that is what happened. There just isn't much to get excited about currently besides potential, and potential as a satisfying gameplay experience doesn't last very long.
You also don't get to teach it in public school on the government dime. However, this is Kansas we're talking about here, a state which has defined theology as within the realm of science for educational purposes.
This was an action taken in response to the ID religious conservatives having their religion defined and taught as a science. However, opening it up to science opens it up to rebuttal, which can be thorough and at times brutal. I'm sad that this course didn't make it through, as I see no reason why it shouldn't exist in kansas.
Rest of the world, please stop snickering at us. You wouldn't laugh at a person with alzheimers, would you?
Why would high production budgets be the anthesis of gaming? By their very nature of being basically fixed development, free reproduction, hudge budgets are to be expected. Besides, a year's worth of Star Trek TNG cost in the 8 figures, why would a year's worth of game development be any different?
BTW, with very specific exceptions when you put your game out to the worldwide development community you get crap. Even Art and music resources will need to be edited the heck out to get them to fit with your game in a way that a local artist would just know. Sure, you might find a cohesive, great group in the middle of nowhere ready to create an awesome interactive experience, but then you haven't moved to the Bazaar, you're just moved the Cathedral. Aesthetic experiences are difficult to create and require high team cohesion, great forward planning, and lots of focused revisions. Generally, outsourced software does not provide a great aesthetic experience.
And freed from the shackles of megabuck production costs and the time-to-market issues that they create, I have no doubt that novelty in games will start to flourish again.
There is nothing stopping what you describe now, and in fact shareware developers have been doing just that for years. Many people do independent game development, and some of them hit it big. Some of them do it overseas. Some of them make a living from it, or facilitating others. It hasn't torn down the cathedral, because some people really just want to play a football game with super realism. Or the year's most massive RPG. And yet the little guys have been surviving for years in this market.
I don't think time-to-market is as big a deal as people make it out to be. The world, and the market, won't be that different in two years. It certainly wasn't that different two years ago.
Actually, while most developers use their own engine, they are generally re-used many times and in many titles. You may not be able to see it, but very rarely does a core 3D renderer get thrown out and replaced.
There are a lot of problems with using an off-the-shelf engine for anything other than what it was originally intended to do. On any engine, to get the kind of performance and RAM optimizations you need, you are going to tweak the living hell out of it. "Oh, we need these objects to be sprites above a certain range, the LOD system needs to support alpha channel on the ghosts, we need to render the character hair before the particle effects because in this game the character has an effect on his back. Oh, and the camera needs to be decoupled from the character as this is a quiz show game not UT2003." And that's just the stuff that makes any sense. When you get into cache optimizations, draw tree pruning, etc etc it gets downright ugly. You'll quickly find that by the end of the project you will be able to re-write your engine from scratch, and probably have done so a few times.
A lot of PC games don't have such stringent pressures, and so do use external engines. Most engine re-use isn't advertised, for obvious reasons. But if it is heavily extensible, why not make the next Alice on it?
You'll also find that general-purpose engines do not great games make. They're just kludgy and slow. While you may want the game to be focusing in on calculating its next move, it's busy making sure that none of the pieces on the board are experiencing collisions and if they are what sort of repulsion forces do they undergo. Make your engine broad enough, and all you have is a C compiler and some graphics libraries that you may or may not want to use.
Game development really has to be a one-shot deal. You have your shot at making a mindblowingly great game, and you either do or you don't. Admittedly, we all get about two dozen shots in our careers, but if you don't go at it like this is the last game you ever make, you're never going to create something that resonates.
Opera recently added "fit to window width" under the view tab, which intelligently downsizes pages to avoid horizontal scrolling on smaller windows, but keeps everything as-is if there is sufficient width. As a last resort on very, very small screens it degrades to a custom CSS file. It's really quite nifty.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to derail your point, which is well taken, but they're probably just sending them off to be resurfaced. DVD resurfacing is a well-known trade, and professional no-risk resurfacing can cost 5 - 10 dollars. I'm guessing GameFly would have volume discount relationships with resurfacing vendors to drive that down a bit, or has bought their own professional resurfacing machine for 2 - 20k and has figured out how to use it.
I seriously doubt that the scratching gets bad enough to penetrate to the data layer, so they shouldn't need to re-buy.
powered human flight without the use of an airplane
Technically, those old rocket pack suits used at airshows counts for this. As does, well, balloons.
While it isn't the most technically advanced feat, it is a damn cool trick, and the video is awesome. They really sound like a 747 taking off while strapped to your ankles. Kudos for the fun hack, and I can't wait to try it out.
You're looking at it from a consumer perspective, not from a producer perspective. As a consumer you should be able to import from another region and it should be completely legal. However, as a producer, faced with that type of worldwide market you would simply not sell in regions where you couldn't maintain your most profitable price. It isn't a question of you being able to buy a lower-cost disk in another country: that disk just wouldn't be available there or Walmart would be using that country as their supplier.
As a movie distributer, you really don't care where your money comes from so long as you get as much of it as possible. The 1st world regions are where they make the bulk of their money, and they keep prices relatively consistent there. They also sell to 2nd and 3rd world nations to make a little more on top. If they were facing a unified worldwide price structure, they would just drop 2nd and 3rd world support, selling instead at full price in the 1st world. They may make 20% of their cash from the nations to be dropped, but better that than cannabalize the 80% sales you get from the west.
And of course they're trying to maximize profits: all companies try to maximize profits. Your health insurance company is trying to maximize profits. Your landlord is trying to maximize profits. The club where you dance on friday nights is trying to maximize profits. Google is trying to maximize profits. If they have shareholders they are legally bound (in the US) to maximize profits. The problem is not the goal, but the means. The MPAA has been particularly bad on this front. But complaining that those companies are trying to maximize profits is like complaining that water is trying to run to a local minima.
Again, none of this should involve laws at all. I wholeheartedly disagree with that part.
I'm not saying they're not evil. I'm saying the situation is more complicated than that.
I use what came with the DVD player: Intervideo WinDVD 4. It does a good job of speeding up the audio imperceptibly, and it pretty full featured viewer besides. Unfortunately, it doesn't speed up anything other than DVD's.
If anyone knows anything which will speed up / slow down arbitrary video files, Divx / Xvid, please post.
Unless it was on top of the intake fan, or was feeding through additional circulation holes.
I was in Thailand the other day. Apparently there is a two-track system: VCD's and DVD's. VCD's are cheap because the average lower-class person has a VCD player. They can be as little as 3 dollars for a new release. DVD's are more expensive because only high-class people have DVD players. They're roughly 30 bucks. These are the same movies encoded using the same codec. If there was one price for everything, the companies would probably be charging 20 bucks... less than the average DVD currently sells for, but a lot higher than the average person is willing to pay.
But, of course, money in Thailand is worth about 1/5th to 1/10th what it is here in the US. You can get lunch for 50 cents, but you only earn a few dollars a day. So while a movie may be 3$ there, it is the income-adjusted equivalent of 20 dollars here. If they sold movies there at that price people would import them to the US, and due to the differences between actual and relative monetary values that would mean that a movie which is about 20$ worth of income in either country would actually sell in the US for 10 or so, almost none of which the producer would see.
Without dual-tracking like this, inexpensive versions of movies would never be sold in 3rd world countries. It isn't financially viable to canabalize your most profitable sales while chasing the lower-income dollars.
I'm not saying that I agree with having region encoding, or the current cartel surrounding it. Region-free alterations to players should be a viable option for those of us who love media from all countries, and the justice system should not at all be involved. But I am saying that the issue is more complicated than it is made out to be. Region-coding isn't there to make high prices higher, but to make low price sales in low income regions possible.
Oddly enough, I have the tendency to watch movies at 1.1x. Really bad Hollywood schlock gets 1.4x. You wouldn't believe how many pacing problems this can solve.
An additional external fan could be quite helpful. The loudest part of the old PS2 design was the fan on the back of the unit... a larger, slower moving fan that stopped the internal fan from spinning could provide a lot more cooling at a much lower noise level. Even without stopping the internal fan, most of the noise from high-speed fans comes from the intake not getting air quickly enough to feed the blades. Adding a larger, slower, less noisy external fan would greatly increase the amount of air available to the fan, and thereby greatly reduce volume.
Maybe I should rephrase the question.
Opera has gone through several different primary funding sources, from direct PC sales to cellphone sales to advertising banners to referrer ID's. Can you comment on how the specific monetizations have effected the development process? How does this contrast with the politically funded development process that Mozilla / Firefox undergoes?
I'm not trolling. I've used Opera since version 2.
However, the company has always taken a negative stance on editing search query strings, and the long-needed systematization of editing said strings has never materialized. I'm wondering how the specific monetization of Opera effects the development process.
As a software developer myself, albeit in games, we face similar issues every day. I was just interested in finding out how they deal with those issues.
In a related question, Opera has always been a tweaker's dream browser, with a high degree of exposed configurability. Yet recently the browser has moved to an affiliate-supported model driven by sending people to specific sites. How do you strike a balance between end-user control and affiliate dollars? Have there been any features cut or added in support of this bottom line?
For small claims courts, at least in MA and CA, the grandparent is correct. You have to send the initial claim certified for the judge to consider the case valid.
On the other hand, jury duty is normal mail. Which lead to an amusing situation a few years ago where the state wanted me arrested for dodging jury duty in northern CA, even though I had moved out of that address to southern CA three years prior. The only reason I found out about this was because the person who was recieving the mail finally decided it was a bit serious, tracked me down, and let me know that they had just done what the state wasn't capable of doing. The state dropped the charges when it found out that the new address was the one on my license, and the one that I was receiving other state mailings at.
The safety feature is that this is a drive-by-wire system,
The safety feature is that this is an Xbox 360: there isn't enough juice to both play the system and power the car.
My car is also computer free... not for any moral reasons, just because computers add additional expense and frailty to the car. I don't even have power steering. I've just seen too many people invest in nice cars in the hopes that will keep them from major repair bills, only to have to plunk down a grand to fix an electric window that won't open.
That having been said, I'd much rather the car take care of the driving. Sure, the automatic transmission could be shifting more intelligently, but when you're stuck in traffic on your morning commute does it actually matter? It would take 10 minutes to make a lego mindstorm robot that can follow the car in front of it during bump-n-go traffic, so why have cars taken 20 years?
I want to enjoy the driving that I do, which usually means not being the one driving through the crappy parts.
But if every time someone believed as this man, more people would die than be saved.
Not if they were going to die anyway.
If you are in the later stages of a serious brain degenerative disease, and have 6 months to live, if a treatment has a 10% chance of success and providing you with another 40 years of life and a 90% chance of killing you in 6 months, it's still worth doing.
Testing and clinical trials are a necessary system, and many of the major medical screw-ups in recent memory have come from not enough of the above, rather than too many. However, when you're talking about people who have basically no chance of survival, you should take greater risks to try and help them. The cost of a failed treatment is death, but the cost of not treating is also death.
There are several big differences. For one, Sony doesn't have a monopoly on the console market the way that Microsoft does on the OS market. Consoles churn by nature, and there is no guarantee that the PS3 will even be a contender. By comparison, Windows Vista's success is as sure as death and taxes.
Second, Sony isn't forcing other people to include Blue-Ray in their devices. Microsoft has the muscle to throw around promotions and bundle discounts. That's a nice way of saying that they're going to charge you a lot more if you don't do their bidding. Sony may throw memory sticks into every device they make, but so far nobody else supports that standard.
Assuming the car could be subtle about it, it would be nice to have a slightly sticky road steer, maybe 2 or 3 degrees to keep the car in the lane under most driving conditions. If the driver is actually steering, don't use the system. If they would have to steer a lot, don't use the system. If it can't find the line markers, don't use the system. But with those caveats, the system sounds like it could work.
And while we're at it, can we get a photosensor on the bottom of the cars to auto-correct for alignment problems? Lane-Departure prevention wouldn't really be an issue if that brand new $23,000 Honda didn't require a mechanic every time you drove up a driveway at an angle.
There are many other ways that today's cars are automated. At one point, there was this thing called "manual transmission." There was also just one setting for the suspension... none of this "leaning into the turns" or "lowering at high speeds." They also didn't have speed-sensitive steering (new cars increase turning sensitivity at lower speeds.) Or, for that matter, cruise control. They briefly mention BMW's hazard system, but they don't mention the coolest part: that upon loss of traction it selectively applies single-wheel breaking to cause the car to skid in the direction that it thinks the driver wants to go. That isn't fundamentally different than Anti-Lock Brakes.
All energy turns to heat in the end.
No, all energy turns into a superdense, supermassive black hole where the concept of molecular movement is not just wrong, it is no longer applicable.
All energy becomes gravity in the end. That is just one of many ways this PSU makes its users heavier.
A game is not just the sum of its systems, but an aesthetic experience.
Power should help with that experience.
Battlefield 2 would be a much less satisfying experience on the PSX.
It takes a couple of generations of games for the full potential to be unlocked, but first-gen titles are considered "showcases" for what is to come. The PS2 launched with SSX, Ridge Racer V, and a bunch of other titles that made people lust after the little machine. The Xbox ping pong videos were completely lickable. Mario 64 was light years ahead of the 16 bit era, as was Ridge Racer 1. NFL and NBA 2K on the Dreamcast were shocking. Panzeer Dragoon on the Saturn was light years ahead of the Genesis. Super Mario World on the SNES and Altered Beast on the Genesis both blew away the 8-bit offerings of the time.
This is the first system launch that I've ever heard of where people are seriously questioning whether or not this is any better than the previous generation. Microsoft has the unfortunate position of both having the last-released current generation system and the earliest-released next one, so that the inevitable comparisons won't find much gulf. But still... wow us now!
Even Fantavision on the PS2 showed off the system's power. Remember being stunned by the realistic water in Wave Racer? It looks like there was a rush to get the X360 into people's hands, and none of the potential of the system have been tapped. At least, I hope that is what happened. There just isn't much to get excited about currently besides potential, and potential as a satisfying gameplay experience doesn't last very long.
You also don't get to teach it in public school on the government dime. However, this is Kansas we're talking about here, a state which has defined theology as within the realm of science for educational purposes.
This was an action taken in response to the ID religious conservatives having their religion defined and taught as a science. However, opening it up to science opens it up to rebuttal, which can be thorough and at times brutal. I'm sad that this course didn't make it through, as I see no reason why it shouldn't exist in kansas.
Rest of the world, please stop snickering at us. You wouldn't laugh at a person with alzheimers, would you?
Would this be an increase in noise?
Why would high production budgets be the anthesis of gaming? By their very nature of being basically fixed development, free reproduction, hudge budgets are to be expected. Besides, a year's worth of Star Trek TNG cost in the 8 figures, why would a year's worth of game development be any different?
BTW, with very specific exceptions when you put your game out to the worldwide development community you get crap. Even Art and music resources will need to be edited the heck out to get them to fit with your game in a way that a local artist would just know. Sure, you might find a cohesive, great group in the middle of nowhere ready to create an awesome interactive experience, but then you haven't moved to the Bazaar, you're just moved the Cathedral. Aesthetic experiences are difficult to create and require high team cohesion, great forward planning, and lots of focused revisions. Generally, outsourced software does not provide a great aesthetic experience.
And freed from the shackles of megabuck production costs and the time-to-market issues that they create, I have no doubt that novelty in games will start to flourish again.
There is nothing stopping what you describe now, and in fact shareware developers have been doing just that for years. Many people do independent game development, and some of them hit it big. Some of them do it overseas. Some of them make a living from it, or facilitating others. It hasn't torn down the cathedral, because some people really just want to play a football game with super realism. Or the year's most massive RPG. And yet the little guys have been surviving for years in this market.
I don't think time-to-market is as big a deal as people make it out to be. The world, and the market, won't be that different in two years. It certainly wasn't that different two years ago.
Nice imagery in your post though.
Actually, while most developers use their own engine, they are generally re-used many times and in many titles. You may not be able to see it, but very rarely does a core 3D renderer get thrown out and replaced.
There are a lot of problems with using an off-the-shelf engine for anything other than what it was originally intended to do. On any engine, to get the kind of performance and RAM optimizations you need, you are going to tweak the living hell out of it. "Oh, we need these objects to be sprites above a certain range, the LOD system needs to support alpha channel on the ghosts, we need to render the character hair before the particle effects because in this game the character has an effect on his back. Oh, and the camera needs to be decoupled from the character as this is a quiz show game not UT2003." And that's just the stuff that makes any sense. When you get into cache optimizations, draw tree pruning, etc etc it gets downright ugly. You'll quickly find that by the end of the project you will be able to re-write your engine from scratch, and probably have done so a few times.
A lot of PC games don't have such stringent pressures, and so do use external engines. Most engine re-use isn't advertised, for obvious reasons. But if it is heavily extensible, why not make the next Alice on it?
You'll also find that general-purpose engines do not great games make. They're just kludgy and slow. While you may want the game to be focusing in on calculating its next move, it's busy making sure that none of the pieces on the board are experiencing collisions and if they are what sort of repulsion forces do they undergo. Make your engine broad enough, and all you have is a C compiler and some graphics libraries that you may or may not want to use.
Game development really has to be a one-shot deal. You have your shot at making a mindblowingly great game, and you either do or you don't. Admittedly, we all get about two dozen shots in our careers, but if you don't go at it like this is the last game you ever make, you're never going to create something that resonates.
Opera recently added "fit to window width" under the view tab, which intelligently downsizes pages to avoid horizontal scrolling on smaller windows, but keeps everything as-is if there is sufficient width. As a last resort on very, very small screens it degrades to a custom CSS file. It's really quite nifty.