I guess Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Musashi got it all wrong then.
Pesky Turks preventing your Dardanelles invasion? Needs more gay sex. Can't fight both the Russians and their winters? You guessed right: Not enough gay sex involved. Roadside bombs in Iraq continually blowing up your troops? Guess what? I've got a fever! And the only prescription...
So, yeah.....if you are an idiot, ending a century of cheap oil prices was a good thing.
For several thousand years of recorded history, humans somehow managed to make it through life without an infinite supply of cheap oil. Basing a whole civilization's infrastructure on endless cheap oil when oil isn't endless - that was the primary act of idiocy. The secondary act of idiocy is basing your own lifestyle around infinite oil.
Aside from searching Amazon.com for highly rated books, I often try to fins the more popular authors and then find their more popular works:
Oh god, some sense! Here's my algorithm. Go to Amazon, search sci-fi, arrange in list of highly rated. Click on any unread book, ignore candidates with less than 5-10 stars as likely candidates for astroturf. Read the reviews in order of most helpful (several pages at least). This serves two purposes; it helps you decide whether you'd like it (because the reviews may say "If you loved X, you will love this book", and from that you will have an idea whether you will like it or not), and it also gives you ideas for OTHER books and authors you may not have read. In fact this is as or more useful as Amazon's list. As someone else has said on here, the key is to find people who share similar tastes. It is much easier to find a review out of the millions on Amazon written by someone with your taste than someone in random meatspace. You can also look through their reviews as well, if you find a spot on match. If they love all the same exact books you love, chances are good that the books they love that you haven't read will also be good books.
In addition to this, drill down into your favorite authors and see what else they have written, judge by Amazon review whether you will buy the individual book or not.
Once you have selected your list, order it the cheapest way possible, either Amazon, ebay, or a walk through your local used book store. If you are not prone to misplacing things, you can use the library, otherwise it is less hassle and more expensive to just buy the books used/cheap. Of course, this process is a lot more work but it will save you spending your money and time on reading dud books.
The more all these distros converge and provide nearly identical desktops, the clearer it will be that most of them don't actually need to exist in the first place.
That's an emergent property of FOSS. It's basically evolution by intelligent design AND natural selection, if that makes any sense. You've got a bunch of different codes. The best become the most popular in their niche, the rest don't. That's the "natural selection" bit.
Instead of sexual reproduction/mutation enabling variation among different competing codes, you have programmers of various abilities intelligently designing what they imagine to be improvements. Well, it works enough that most people eventually upgrade whatever it is they are using more than using an older version. And this has the advantage over the biological analogue in that the process is both faster and has the possibility of bypassing local maxima in favor of shooting for absolute max (the code rewrite).
Since those are the main differences, you are going to see a lot of the same phenomena as with evolution of species. This is what you allude to, i.e. "most distros don't need to exist". In the biological world, this plays out in either extinction or niche differentiation. Once you get something that works, it dominates, at least for a while.
The danger of this is that once a large niche is dominated, especially by something that is very complex and would require an immense amount of time to fully rewrite, stagnation can set in. In a lot of ways, organisms shape the environment to suit and entrench themselves (with software, it's "mindshare"). If you look at FOSS as a way of obtaining something good and cheap (at the expense of fast), that seems to be a problem. However, a decadent FOSS distro has a much larger chance of being successfully outcompeted than the closed source alternative, since closed source never has to compete with a fork.
No. Matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only dream, and we're the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.
Sounds like you should start acting like 99.9% of other computer users, and focus on the application(s) you're interested in.
Yup. That makes converting infinitely easier. Research an alternative to a given application that runs on both MS and Linux, learn how to use it properly. Rinse, lather, repeat. When you have run out of applications you are now ready to change OS. If there is an application that doesn't have an alternative, either learn to live without it, try WINE, virtualization, or give up.
It also pays to buy another hard drive to do a clean install on. It puts up enough of an extra barrier to running Windows that in most instances you won't do it. You wouldn't give up smoking by keeping a full packet of cigarettes in your shirt pocket, why do a similar thing with an OS?
DNA is a program. It is a program that has features (and bugs) that vary in different regions. These features cluster together, and those larger clusters we call "race".
You are basically saying that if you take notepad.exe and stick it in a xeon, suddenly it is going to grow all sorts of features beyond "find and replace". The converse holds, because if you take vim and put it into a system with not enough memory to run it, sure, it probably won't run, or maybe a few features won't work. It would still probably be more featureful than notepad.exe though.
Either that or you are making an argument that intellectual capacity is something not coded for in DNA (why are humans more intelligent than slugs if not for DNA?), or that the different clusters of people all have the exact same average potential intellect (seeing how every other aspect varies by race, why would this aspect be an exception?). While unsound, the argument is certain to garner you +5 insightful from the PC faithful.
Very likely, there will be some sort of minimum mass required to start a self-sufficient colony. Even something that can mine a planet or moon to create solar panels to power further mining, robots to repair themselves and create more robots... I suspect that this is going to take some sort of minimum tonnage to work.
We are dealing with physical constraints here, and also man-hours of research constraints.
Remember, the mayflower wasn't an open boat - it was a cargo ship. It carried about 100 people. At the bare minimum, it needed to house farm animals, tools, seeds, humans, a crew, etc. in order to create a self-sufficient colony in America. In the first year, half the people died.
If the minimum mass for a self-sufficient offworld colony requires Project Orion, then that's what we'll have to use. Some people may die as well.
At least the fleshing out of such a plan ought to be done now. Research takes time, and breakthroughs can't be scheduled. The Manhattan project wasn't completed until several years after the US entered WWII. If that is the quickest "big engineering" can operate... if an asteroid comes along we are probably fscked. Best to get started now.
Perhaps part of the trouble of modern war is that it preferentially kills the brave (and foolish). The more modern wars you have, the less people left who are happy to accept conscription.
So for having these "great" wars in the first place, we are left with all the cautious people, all the rear echelon/ draft dodgers who thought that copping a bullet storming some beach in Europe or Asia for the sake of someone you've never met, or worse, an ideology - was a generally bad idea. Maybe that's not a bad thing.
An energy crisis is liable to bring a more callous attitude towards life and death. It might even select for longer-term, sustainable thinking. Here's hoping.
I'd like to see some questions asked, and some answers. I think that humans need some form of contingency plan that does not consist purely of holes drilled in mountains. As such, we should be moving in this direction in a long-term fashion - the end goal being a self-sufficient and growing colony somewhere that is not earth. So here are some questions.
Given budgets of different sizes, what can realistically be achieved? Hence, what brings us the best bang for buck? What are the most likely approaches?
Is it possible to turn space exploration, colonization and the like into a positive feedback loop that generates more of the same? (i.e. is there a valid business model somewhere? What are the best chances for building some sort of self-sufficient colony up there somewhere, even if populated by self-replicating robots?)
What type of government is most likely to fund this for as long as it takes? If not, what sort is necessary? As much as possible should be open-sourced to prevent research being wasted forever.
What necessary technologies can we anticipate that make it much cheaper to just wait a while longer (e.g. computer hardware, robotics, solar panels, etc)?
Is there any utility in being able to put something city-sized into space via Project Orion? Ten people dead due to cancer is nothing compared to most yearly road deaths. But again, only if there is utility in that approach. Maybe self-replicating robots can do the same thing for less cost but just taking longer to ramp up.
In the end, I think that there are two issues: 1. How do we build a self-sufficient system (at first, probably sans humans) capable of growing - i.e. net energy positive, net resource positive, growing at some sort of exponential rate, even if slowly? 2. What are the minimum requirements in terms of energy/unit time and resources/human, radiation shielding etc for humans to survive and reproduce in some sort of closed-loop system bar energy?
The key is the self-sufficiency. We have finite energy on this earth, but a lot of time and brainpower to do basic research. If we can set something up such that we only have to get it working once and after that it takes care of itself, we have won. If we can figure out how to do everything completely closed-loop bar energy (which can be gotten from solar), we have won. (Water and oxygen should be able to be transported in one big shot via Project Orion provided that it is fully recycled after it arrives.)
Somewhere there needs to be a checklist and someone going down the list until all those bugs are squashed. I suspect that with a lot of it, we don't even need to go to space, it can be done cheaply on earth. Not too glamorous, extremely hard, but all necessary. It probably needs a good movie or two to convince the public though.
Look around. Fuels get more expensive (yet the actuall costs involved don't), foodprices have increased +20%, and this is with a lot of products and services EXCEPT computers.
There is a difference. Both fuel and food rely on cheap energy. Since supply of energy is limited, the price is rising to what the market will bear. The main limits of computer software and hardware are not energy or resources. They are the engineering required to engineer the new technology in the first place, and the expense of building a fab. As these are amortized over large numbers of units, prices drop.
I can think of a lot of other companies that have tried to limit the capabilities of products in one market segment so that they don't compete with those in another (IBM with the PC, SGI with low-end graphics hardware) but I can't think of a single company where the approach has resulted in anything other than them losing the market to a competitor. Maybe the MS monopoly is so strong that they can do this, but I doubt it somehow.
It's a good point you bring up. At some point MS will probably be forced to see what is coming and ride the wave of cheap computers with increased volume and lower prices. What are their other options?
1) Prevent low power, low cost, adequately performant CPUs coming into being at the source.
2) Prevent them being used without an MS OS at the OEM level.
1. Is going to happen regardless with the Atom. Intel smells blood in the water with such CPUs bringing in more revenue than expected. And they need to. Their old business model that was reliant upon MS bringing out a bloated OS so that they can in turn release a faster CPU. With speed limits and lack of suitability of multiple cores to consumer applications, there was really nowhere else to turn. This new business model does not rely on Microsoft. It relies on volume achieved through low cost. Future obsolescence (and hence, new sales) will come from two things:
A. Improvements to performance per watt wthin a given watt and cost constraint. (i.e. we have the speed, making it low power and cheap is the difficult part.)
B. Cheap computers being cheap enough that they are throwaway. Buy one for work, one for home, one for each of your kids, one for your HTPC.
The best thing about this development for FOSS is that there is no natural symbiotic relationship for a CPU maker with MS. MS starts looking like a parasite sucking off Intel's profits no matter what happens. Kind of like say, how certain software makers looked to Microsoft at one time (e.g. Winsock, WP, Netscape, Lotus etc.)
So, can MS prevent CPUs like the Atom being used with Linux? I think the most they might be able to do is some sort of drawback system such that if an OEM is to buy an MS OS at a good price (which is advantageous of course), MS is paid for on a per/CPU sold basis, i.e. MS takes their cut whether Linux or XP is provided. I don't think they will be able to afford to yield market share to Linux under any circumstance, and like you, I doubt that they will be able to limit the capabilities of these ultraportables as per the article (i.e. 80GB HDD, 1GB RAM, 10.2 inch screen which can't be a touchscreen, 1GHz Intel CPU or equivalent VIA, 2 cores.) Because as soon as they do this at a good price, some OEM is going to come out with something significantly better running Linux and they will gain big market share.
If the device-makers really want e-books to catch on, they need to find a way to push a business model where they can give away (or seriously cut the price of) the device and make the money back on the book sales.
The inkjet printer/disposable razor model? Yes it works, and works well, provided what they compete with is reasonably expensive or unavailable. Laser printers are also an established market and don't tend to rely on toner sales to make a profit. Razor sales rely on razors being an inexpensive purchase both initially and as a fraction of the family budget.
The question is really, what price will it cost to manufacture e-books in a couple years? If they are near to the cost of a typical bookshop purchase (i.e. $100-$200), a DRM-only e-book reader doesn't have much of a hope. Which is basically the only way you can subsidize the purchase, by crippling the hardware to make it only read DRM crippled information. I don't see why this technology should ultimately cost any more than say a budget mobile phone. This is first generation after all.
I had been considering buying one to play with until I saw the price. For crying out loud, I can buy quite a few books for $400!
For how much? At say, $10 a book, that's 40 books. If you get your books from project Gutenberg, you'll have hit the payback period at 40 books and still have some 24960 books to go.
Hop onto various P2P networks and I'm sure you can find a few more. Couple that with web pages and documents you'd like to print out to read, that's a bit more cost savings. It all depends on what you want to read and how much reading you will do. It's probably already a good deal for a lot of people but I'm content to wait for the time being and let the early adopters deal with the bugs.
I think System Shock (1&2) is a the best example of how to scare someone without having to resort to lots of dark areas with things jumping out at you...
I'm trying to think what made them so freaky. I stopped playing SS2 because it was too scary. Ditto Heretic (full version), I wouldn't even try Doom3. Yeah, I don't have much tolerance for really scary games or movies. I finished SS1 though. What made that scary?
For one thing, the monsters maintain some forward momentum such that even if you kill them they collapse on you. That was scary. Humanoid, but not quite human (appearance or voice). That's always scary. Monsters that do melee damage, rush forward and you KNOW will take some damage before you dispatch them, that's always scary (mimics human fear of dogs, wolves, lions etc).
Building a sense of foreboding, that's scary. Doom3 did that with the emails between people etc. The key is to say how horrible things are, but not to describe everything, to leave some mystery. Can be done with monsters you can't see but know they are their somehow (tracks, dark hole, sounds, CCTV).
There also has to be dynamics, light and shade. You have to be allowed some areas for your pulse to return to normal so that you don't get used to the constant adrenaline. This also starts the dread of having to confront a scary area, which makes the monsters that much worse when you do confront them.
Slow but high HP monsters (or monsters you don't have the appropriate weapon for) are great for inducing a sense of panic, evoking that dream of being able to run but not never fast enough. Indeed, anything to make you hurry, either a damage limit (e.g. the virus areas in the groves, I think they were called) or some sort of time limit, while you have to find something. Or maybe you don't have enough ammo and have to run through them all.
Another thing SS1 used was close proximity to sleeping monsters. You can see them, they might be able to kill you, so you have to be careful. And then they all wake up at once to get you.
All technology is designed to gather dust... eventually. It's called 'functional obsolescence'. The breakthrough development that separates this technology from previous technologies (such as the C64 in your attic and the 64MB thumb drive lodged somewhere behind your monitor) is that this gathers dust right away. Since this gathers dust virtually immediately, you can theoretically sell dust gatherers to consumers at a vastly increased rate.
I don't need my hammer to be user friendly, either. I just want to drive a nail and no backtalk from the damned hammer. Like Linux, it is user-obediant.
The great thing about Linux these days is the community. It only takes one "genius" (i.e. anyone who can read a man page) to figure out how to do something via CLI and post the howto on ubuntuforums. He ups his "thanked x times in y posts" count, and the rest of the proles have an easy recipe they can search for.
This is oftentimes superior to the closed source model of the developer trying to brainstorm all the possible uses that users can come up with and coding it all into a GUI. The community gives the CLI both power AND ease of use.
Is that we haven't come close to theoretical storage densities yet. Seagate expects to achieve 50TB/inch^2 by the next decade. Currently we are at around 200GB/inch^2. So that's around 250* what we have now. A 250TB drive would contain 41k 6GB DVDs, or 5k 50GB Blu-ray discs.
For comparison purposes, the number of movies/year on IMDB is about 20-25k in recent years. If each movie is 2 hours long, that means that if you spent 12 hours per day every day watching movies, you would only get through 2190 movies per year.
Another comparison: If you wanted to record every waking hour of your life and you lived until age 75, that's 438000 hours. If you had one 250TB drive, you'd fit it all if encoded to something like XVid.
The continuing unimpeded exponential growth of storage media just blows my mind.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli and Musashi got it all wrong then.
Pesky Turks preventing your Dardanelles invasion? Needs more gay sex.
Can't fight both the Russians and their winters? You guessed right: Not enough gay sex involved.
Roadside bombs in Iraq continually blowing up your troops? Guess what? I've got a fever! And the only prescription...
In addition to this, drill down into your favorite authors and see what else they have written, judge by Amazon review whether you will buy the individual book or not.
Once you have selected your list, order it the cheapest way possible, either Amazon, ebay, or a walk through your local used book store. If you are not prone to misplacing things, you can use the library, otherwise it is less hassle and more expensive to just buy the books used/cheap. Of course, this process is a lot more work but it will save you spending your money and time on reading dud books.
Instead of sexual reproduction/mutation enabling variation among different competing codes, you have programmers of various abilities intelligently designing what they imagine to be improvements. Well, it works enough that most people eventually upgrade whatever it is they are using more than using an older version. And this has the advantage over the biological analogue in that the process is both faster and has the possibility of bypassing local maxima in favor of shooting for absolute max (the code rewrite).
Since those are the main differences, you are going to see a lot of the same phenomena as with evolution of species. This is what you allude to, i.e. "most distros don't need to exist". In the biological world, this plays out in either extinction or niche differentiation. Once you get something that works, it dominates, at least for a while.
The danger of this is that once a large niche is dominated, especially by something that is very complex and would require an immense amount of time to fully rewrite, stagnation can set in. In a lot of ways, organisms shape the environment to suit and entrench themselves (with software, it's "mindshare"). If you look at FOSS as a way of obtaining something good and cheap (at the expense of fast), that seems to be a problem. However, a decadent FOSS distro has a much larger chance of being successfully outcompeted than the closed source alternative, since closed source never has to compete with a fork.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interspecific_competition
It also pays to buy another hard drive to do a clean install on. It puts up enough of an extra barrier to running Windows that in most instances you won't do it. You wouldn't give up smoking by keeping a full packet of cigarettes in your shirt pocket, why do a similar thing with an OS?
DNA is a program. It is a program that has features (and bugs) that vary in different regions. These features cluster together, and those larger clusters we call "race".
You are basically saying that if you take notepad.exe and stick it in a xeon, suddenly it is going to grow all sorts of features beyond "find and replace". The converse holds, because if you take vim and put it into a system with not enough memory to run it, sure, it probably won't run, or maybe a few features won't work. It would still probably be more featureful than notepad.exe though.
Either that or you are making an argument that intellectual capacity is something not coded for in DNA (why are humans more intelligent than slugs if not for DNA?), or that the different clusters of people all have the exact same average potential intellect (seeing how every other aspect varies by race, why would this aspect be an exception?). While unsound, the argument is certain to garner you +5 insightful from the PC faithful.
Stowaways? On this 'ere ship we prefer to make 'em walk the plank... that is, if they survive the keelhauling. Arrr!
A better version of the poor man's silica gel is crystalline kitty litter (which is just rebranded silica gel).
Very likely, there will be some sort of minimum mass required to start a self-sufficient colony. Even something that can mine a planet or moon to create solar panels to power further mining, robots to repair themselves and create more robots... I suspect that this is going to take some sort of minimum tonnage to work.
We are dealing with physical constraints here, and also man-hours of research constraints.
Remember, the mayflower wasn't an open boat - it was a cargo ship. It carried about 100 people. At the bare minimum, it needed to house farm animals, tools, seeds, humans, a crew, etc. in order to create a self-sufficient colony in America. In the first year, half the people died.
If the minimum mass for a self-sufficient offworld colony requires Project Orion, then that's what we'll have to use. Some people may die as well.
At least the fleshing out of such a plan ought to be done now. Research takes time, and breakthroughs can't be scheduled. The Manhattan project wasn't completed until several years after the US entered WWII. If that is the quickest "big engineering" can operate... if an asteroid comes along we are probably fscked. Best to get started now.
Perhaps part of the trouble of modern war is that it preferentially kills the brave (and foolish). The more modern wars you have, the less people left who are happy to accept conscription.
So for having these "great" wars in the first place, we are left with all the cautious people, all the rear echelon/ draft dodgers who thought that copping a bullet storming some beach in Europe or Asia for the sake of someone you've never met, or worse, an ideology - was a generally bad idea. Maybe that's not a bad thing.
An energy crisis is liable to bring a more callous attitude towards life and death. It might even select for longer-term, sustainable thinking. Here's hoping.
I'd like to see some questions asked, and some answers. I think that humans need some form of contingency plan that does not consist purely of holes drilled in mountains. As such, we should be moving in this direction in a long-term fashion - the end goal being a self-sufficient and growing colony somewhere that is not earth. So here are some questions.
Given budgets of different sizes, what can realistically be achieved? Hence, what brings us the best bang for buck? What are the most likely approaches?
Is it possible to turn space exploration, colonization and the like into a positive feedback loop that generates more of the same? (i.e. is there a valid business model somewhere? What are the best chances for building some sort of self-sufficient colony up there somewhere, even if populated by self-replicating robots?)
What type of government is most likely to fund this for as long as it takes? If not, what sort is necessary? As much as possible should be open-sourced to prevent research being wasted forever.
What necessary technologies can we anticipate that make it much cheaper to just wait a while longer (e.g. computer hardware, robotics, solar panels, etc)?
Is there any utility in being able to put something city-sized into space via Project Orion? Ten people dead due to cancer is nothing compared to most yearly road deaths. But again, only if there is utility in that approach. Maybe self-replicating robots can do the same thing for less cost but just taking longer to ramp up.
In the end, I think that there are two issues:
1. How do we build a self-sufficient system (at first, probably sans humans) capable of growing - i.e. net energy positive, net resource positive, growing at some sort of exponential rate, even if slowly?
2. What are the minimum requirements in terms of energy/unit time and resources/human, radiation shielding etc for humans to survive and reproduce in some sort of closed-loop system bar energy?
The key is the self-sufficiency. We have finite energy on this earth, but a lot of time and brainpower to do basic research. If we can set something up such that we only have to get it working once and after that it takes care of itself, we have won. If we can figure out how to do everything completely closed-loop bar energy (which can be gotten from solar), we have won. (Water and oxygen should be able to be transported in one big shot via Project Orion provided that it is fully recycled after it arrives.)
Somewhere there needs to be a checklist and someone going down the list until all those bugs are squashed. I suspect that with a lot of it, we don't even need to go to space, it can be done cheaply on earth. Not too glamorous, extremely hard, but all necessary. It probably needs a good movie or two to convince the public though.
1) they are getting paid as large a chunk of that basic computer's sale price as possible, and most of that is profit,
2) that those basic computers are selling in high enough volumes, and
3) that it will be possible to obsolete these basic computers with increasingly faster basic computers over the next decade.
1) Prevent low power, low cost, adequately performant CPUs coming into being at the source.
2) Prevent them being used without an MS OS at the OEM level.
1. Is going to happen regardless with the Atom. Intel smells blood in the water with such CPUs bringing in more revenue than expected. And they need to. Their old business model that was reliant upon MS bringing out a bloated OS so that they can in turn release a faster CPU. With speed limits and lack of suitability of multiple cores to consumer applications, there was really nowhere else to turn. This new business model does not rely on Microsoft. It relies on volume achieved through low cost. Future obsolescence (and hence, new sales) will come from two things:
A. Improvements to performance per watt wthin a given watt and cost constraint. (i.e. we have the speed, making it low power and cheap is the difficult part.)
B. Cheap computers being cheap enough that they are throwaway. Buy one for work, one for home, one for each of your kids, one for your HTPC.
The best thing about this development for FOSS is that there is no natural symbiotic relationship for a CPU maker with MS. MS starts looking like a parasite sucking off Intel's profits no matter what happens. Kind of like say, how certain software makers looked to Microsoft at one time (e.g. Winsock, WP, Netscape, Lotus etc.)
So, can MS prevent CPUs like the Atom being used with Linux? I think the most they might be able to do is some sort of drawback system such that if an OEM is to buy an MS OS at a good price (which is advantageous of course), MS is paid for on a per/CPU sold basis, i.e. MS takes their cut whether Linux or XP is provided. I don't think they will be able to afford to yield market share to Linux under any circumstance, and like you, I doubt that they will be able to limit the capabilities of these ultraportables as per the article (i.e. 80GB HDD, 1GB RAM, 10.2 inch screen which can't be a touchscreen, 1GHz Intel CPU or equivalent VIA, 2 cores.) Because as soon as they do this at a good price, some OEM is going to come out with something significantly better running Linux and they will gain big market share.
The question is really, what price will it cost to manufacture e-books in a couple years? If they are near to the cost of a typical bookshop purchase (i.e. $100-$200), a DRM-only e-book reader doesn't have much of a hope. Which is basically the only way you can subsidize the purchase, by crippling the hardware to make it only read DRM crippled information. I don't see why this technology should ultimately cost any more than say a budget mobile phone. This is first generation after all.
Hop onto various P2P networks and I'm sure you can find a few more. Couple that with web pages and documents you'd like to print out to read, that's a bit more cost savings. It all depends on what you want to read and how much reading you will do. It's probably already a good deal for a lot of people but I'm content to wait for the time being and let the early adopters deal with the bugs.
For one thing, the monsters maintain some forward momentum such that even if you kill them they collapse on you. That was scary. Humanoid, but not quite human (appearance or voice). That's always scary. Monsters that do melee damage, rush forward and you KNOW will take some damage before you dispatch them, that's always scary (mimics human fear of dogs, wolves, lions etc).
Building a sense of foreboding, that's scary. Doom3 did that with the emails between people etc. The key is to say how horrible things are, but not to describe everything, to leave some mystery. Can be done with monsters you can't see but know they are their somehow (tracks, dark hole, sounds, CCTV).
There also has to be dynamics, light and shade. You have to be allowed some areas for your pulse to return to normal so that you don't get used to the constant adrenaline. This also starts the dread of having to confront a scary area, which makes the monsters that much worse when you do confront them.
Slow but high HP monsters (or monsters you don't have the appropriate weapon for) are great for inducing a sense of panic, evoking that dream of being able to run but not never fast enough. Indeed, anything to make you hurry, either a damage limit (e.g. the virus areas in the groves, I think they were called) or some sort of time limit, while you have to find something. Or maybe you don't have enough ammo and have to run through them all.
Another thing SS1 used was close proximity to sleeping monsters. You can see them, they might be able to kill you, so you have to be careful. And then they all wake up at once to get you.
Perhaps a few emails bitching back and forth about the base's duct-tape shortage would have done it.
If I have seen further it is by stealing Intellectual Property of ye Giants.
All technology is designed to gather dust... eventually. It's called 'functional obsolescence'. The breakthrough development that separates this technology from previous technologies (such as the C64 in your attic and the 64MB thumb drive lodged somewhere behind your monitor) is that this gathers dust right away. Since this gathers dust virtually immediately, you can theoretically sell dust gatherers to consumers at a vastly increased rate.
There are a few other things you can do as well.
http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28209/How_to_make_OpenOffice_run_faster_in_Ubuntu
This is oftentimes superior to the closed source model of the developer trying to brainstorm all the possible uses that users can come up with and coding it all into a GUI. The community gives the CLI both power AND ease of use.
Is that we haven't come close to theoretical storage densities yet. Seagate expects to achieve 50TB/inch^2 by the next decade. Currently we are at around 200GB/inch^2. So that's around 250* what we have now. A 250TB drive would contain 41k 6GB DVDs, or 5k 50GB Blu-ray discs.
For comparison purposes, the number of movies/year on IMDB is about 20-25k in recent years. If each movie is 2 hours long, that means that if you spent 12 hours per day every day watching movies, you would only get through 2190 movies per year.
Another comparison: If you wanted to record every waking hour of your life and you lived until age 75, that's 438000 hours. If you had one 250TB drive, you'd fit it all if encoded to something like XVid.
The continuing unimpeded exponential growth of storage media just blows my mind.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7044606.stm
http://business.pcauthority.com.au/feature/3203,futuretech-bigger-better-and-faster-hard-drives.aspx/1