I'm responsible for 2 very, very old games (Jumpman and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein for the PC) to be open sourced and released, but it's reverse engineered source code and not original. I contacted the original authors (although in the case of BCW, Silas Warner had passed away, but his widow gave me permission). These games had passed through so many hands by the time I got around to them that the rights had simply been lost to bigger companies who didn't even know they owned them. Not only were the rights gone, but the original source code was always long lost.
Hopefully someday the original source may materialize in some box of floppy disks in the back of a closet (see jordan mechner's recent discovery of Prince of Persia) but the odds of these things are so incredibly rare.
About all I learned was that this is tough to do, very time consuming, and it's easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission.
I work with a staggering number of engineers who are very religious and it has always boggled my mind. How can anyone with an analytical mind possibly accept things like Noah's ark?
how about jacking up the price of gas to buy insurance as you go? this would have the added side effect of making people think twice about driving 4 blocks to run an errand and buying giant gas guzzler vehicles. yeah, yeah, some issues about lawn mowers and such, but we could work out a system for that I'd think.
article says: We used a Microchip 24AA01-I/P 128byte I2C EEPROM (IC2), rated for 1million write cycles.
Um, SSDs don't use anything like this part as their storage.
I'd always thought it would be a neat idea to roll auto insurance in at the gas pump. No more uninsured drivers, plus it would be an incentive to reduce driving. obviously LOTS of holes in the plan, but it would eliminate the big brother aspect of this proposal.
"There... I've run rings 'round you logically" -- Monty Python's Flying Circus
