"A modern Unix-like can spawn repeated processes very fast- too fast to worry about, in general."
All blanket statements are false.
I find that process-spawn overhead can still be important, especially when you're dealing with large data sets or non-trivial processing. It can mean the difference between minutes and hours of processing.
As far as your arguments about "finite learning time" go, I think you're overstating the brain drain something like "xargs" introduces. It isn't like we're learning a new programming language; I think there is room for both, here, and both are useful tools.
"Just use -exec. It's slower, but easier and you don't have to fight with line-endings, spaces in the filenames, and stupid cli arg limitations."
find parameters -print0 | xargs -0 command
I use that all the time. The -print0/-0 stuff causes find and xargs to use NUL-terminated strings.
I've run into CLI length limits maybe twice in the past five years. If you do hit it, "xargs -s n", where "n" is the maximum number of characters in a command on your system, will work around it. Alias that in and you'll never have to type it again.
xgamer04 "Brooks' Law: 'Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.'"
Here, here! When I first read The Mythical Man-Month, one of the major realizations I took away from it was, "We haven't learned anything in 40 years of software design. We are still making the exact same mistakes we made back then." Here it is in 2005, and the only thing that's changed is that we're on to 50 years now.
Anyone who has anything to do with computer engineering but hasn't read TMMM needs to go do so. Promptly. You'll find incredible insight and perspective.
RAID-0 is equally as redundant as RAID-1. There are two disks performing a job that either one of them could do alone. The second disk is redundant. RAID-0 uses the redundancy for performance instead of continuous backup.
Who the heck mod'ed that up?
Say you have two identical disks striped without mirroring ("RAID 0"). The data is interleaved across the two disks. You usually get higher performance. You always get twice the disk space. There is no redundency here; your disk space is increased. Your reliability is much lower. If you loose either disk, you loose your entire logical volume.
Say you have two identical disks, mirrored ("RAID 1"). The same data is written to both disks. Data storage is redundent but reliability is increased. You can loose either disk but still have your logical volume. You usually get higher read performance (reads can be interleaved).
With mirroring, writes have to be done to both disks. Performance is complicated. Depending on the implementation, writes can be faster, slower, or the same as other RAID levels. With shared I/O paths, writes are slower then a single disk (you have to write one disk, then the other). In theory, if you have parallel I/O paths, writes should be the same as a single disk, but slower then a striped array (like RAID 5). That's because with striping, you can distribute the writes across multiple disks. In practice, many if not most RAID implementations (even those with dedicated RAID processing hardware) lack the processing power to make this happen. So mirroring is actually faster on writes then RAID 5, because no RAID calculations need to be done.
RAID 3 is striping with a dedicated parity disk.
RAID 5 is striped partiy (both data and partiy are distributed over all disks).
The best performance and redundency typically comes from using a striped array of mirrored disk pairs. You can loose either disk in a pair without loosing data. You distribute reads and writes over all disks. No fancy XOR calculations; just simple mirroring and interleaving. Very expensive, though.
Whatever you do, do NOT use an air compressor like you would use with power tools and/or to fill a tire. You'll blow components off boards and blades off fans that way."
Bah! If it comes off, it must not have been very wall attached, and thus needed to be replaced anyway!;-)
Seriously, at my last job as an IT whore (AKA "consultant"), we had a "closet" for cleaning dust. It had compressed air, but on an adjustable regulator so you could pick a real light flow for delicate stuff, or heavy for that baked-on dust. We also had a nice exhaust fan to suck it all outside. That worked out so well.
Don't forget a bunch of dixie cups. I find the small (3 oz) plastic ones work best. Keep em stacked up in a nook that will keep them from falling over.
What for? Easy: For parts. When you start taking something apart, put the bits in a dixie cup. When you move to the next level/layer/component, put a new cup in the old one. When you're done taking apart, put an empty cup in the top of the stack. Now you've got all the parts, in a nice neat stack, reasonably safe from spilling, at a cost so low it's almost free.
Yah, you can use those fancy bins and trays and stuff, but this is so much cheaper and can actually work better. Takes up less space, sometimes, too.
"...you should really compare Explorer vs Aqua vs GNOME vs KDE."
"Explorer" isn't the name of the Windows GUI. "Explorer" is the file browser, like the Mac Finder or KDE's Konqueror.
That said, I don't know the name of the Windows GUI itself. I know the "trim" in XP was named "Luna", but the rest of the GUI is basically the same. In Vista, it's "Aero" or "Aero Glass" is supposed to be the radical new GUI, but since it's still vaporware, it remains to be seen just how that materializes.
The only name I've ever seen for it is "USER", from the USER.EXE and USER32.DLL that implements the basic UI components for Windows. But "USER" isn't a very practical name. "GDI" is low-level graphics primitives (much like Xlib in nix land), not the higher-level GUI. "Common Controls" (COMCTL) refers to the standard dialogs for open, save, print, and such, but that's not the GUI, either.
Anyone here know the "code name" or whatever for the actual GUI introduced in Windows 95?
I know engineers, they love to change things!
on
Office 12 Exposed
·
· Score: 1
" it looks as though they've thrown every bit of GUI common practice and standardization out of the window."
Oh $DEITY, don't even get my started. One of the things I loathe the most about Microsoft (and believe me, I've got a hell of a long list) is their love of gratiuitous, pointless changes. Changing the names slightly, moving things somewhat, changing the accelerator keys and the shortcuts, so you can never be sure what any key will do on any given day, or what a menu option will be called in this program.
It's bad enough for me, a geek and a keyboard junkie who is often six steps ahead of the computer (and that's another thing, how the hell is it can a computer running at 2,000,000,000 cycles per second with enough memory to store a dictionary fifty times over can't keep up with me, a lousy typist who hits the backspace key every third keystroke?), since I hit one series of buttons and end up having it do something else.
But then I have to write documentation for the poor unsuspecting users at work, who might be using one of four different versions of Windows (and two different "Start Menu" variations for XP) and three versions of Office. Most of thes people don't know that Word isn't part of Windows in the first place. So first I have to write a ten page document explaining how to identify which version of Windows and Office they have. Then I have to write like 20 different variations of each document/procedure/whatever, or try and explain the possabilites at each step. So what should be a simple, ten step quickie instruction sheet to do something simple turns into a tome that needs a binder just to haul the damn thing around in.
Farking Microsoft. Sets the world back six years every time they release something.
ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
This rant was brought to you by the letters M and S, and the number 32.
"To compliment his German accent, Larry Ellison has also donned a monical and top hat..."
Q: What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.
While we're on the subject:
"Let's face it, Bill Gates is just a white Persian cat and a monocle away from being the next James Bond villian. 'No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to upgrade.'" -- Denis Miller
"I find it funny how Sony are trying to soften the problem by calling them 'stuck pixels' rather than dead. Almost like you could give 'em a little nudge and they'd start working again!"
They're not dead, they're... stunned. Those PSP pixels stun easily. Give 'et a rest and it will come right back! Remarkable things, those PSP pixels. Beautiful colors!
rwven: "I'm not saying you're wrong, about this, but if you have some evidence i'd sure like to see it..."
I don't know if Paul Thurrott is a paid shill, but he's definitely the ultimate Microsoft fanatic. Read his past stuff. He's always raving about how new and radical and excellent and wonderful Microsoft's stuff is, even if it hasn't been released yet, was horribly buggy, came three years after everyone else did the same thing, etc., etc. Basically, he acts like a propaganda outlet for Microsoft.
He might do all that for free. Some people are just fanboys. Hell, look at Slashdot. "Suddenly, a bunch of Linux nerds cried out in horror, and were silenced.":-)
Did you know RPM will let you remove every package
on
10 Computer Mishaps
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Hey, did you know RPM will let you remove every package from the system?"
I once had cause to utter the above sentence. I was working on a customer's web server remotely. I was performing some maintenance, upgrading this, migrating that. At one point, I had a list of installed packages I wanted to remove from the system. Well, I screwed up something and somehow managed to run "rpm --erase" with a list of every package currently installed on the system. I was multi-tasking and had switched to other things, so I didn't really clue in to the fact that my RPM transaction was taking way too long to run until some of the scripts tied to the uninstall action started complaining because things like "perl" were missing. I started pounding on [CTRL]+[C] but it was already too late. Almost everything was gone. I couldn't even scp files in.
That was a fun drive to the client site. At least the data was all still there, since only the software was removed.
OS24Ever writes "... I would think this could open some doors for Firefox to replace IE in many Windows environments."
Yah, and with a nick like OS24Ever, this person is obviously the perfect choice for making predictions about the acceptability and potential for success of a product....;-)
(Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm a former OS/2 user and licensee myself. "Blue Spine" all the way, baby.)
"Lots of things that are trivial to do on Earth are quite difficult to do in space. NASA sometimes belabors every baby step..."
As I said, my comments were not directed at NASA. Pay attention.:-)
As you point out, NASA has good reasons for what they do. Even the constant radio chatter about what people are doing is by design. Most times, the Mission Controllers cannot see what is going on, so they need that commentary to keep the "picture" in their minds accurate. It also establishes a record of what is going on, in case something bad happens and they need to look back. It also allows others to double-check what is going on, and possibly stop a problem before it stops. I'm not complaining about that.
I'm complaining about the media obsession with STS-114. If it wasn't for the fact that the last STS mission ended in a disaster, the mainstream media wouldn't give this mission two seconds of attention.
"Believe it or not, some people are interested in this. I've had NASA TV playing on my computer for the past two days."
Well, sure. If you want continous coverage of spaceflight activity, you tune in the NASA channel. That makes sense. My complaint is about the mainstream media and web media, both of which have featured non-stop commentary on every little thing, with no insight as to what is important and what isn't, and with plenty of "lay experts" giving their two bits. That isn't news.
I find it interesting that several people have replied to my message commenting on how "we" should have safe, cheap, reliable, common space travel by now.
I have to wonder why all these people who are such experts on spaceflight are posting on Slashdot instead of working at NASA.
Second, it's folly to assume that because the overall pace of technological advancement is fast, a particular field should be fast. Now, maybe we should be making faster gains in spaceflight. Unlike everyone else here, I'm no expert, and won't make a claim one way or the other. But I do know that drawing specific conclusions from a general trend is rarely a good idea. "Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns", as they say in the investment business.
"But after having done this since 1961, you'd think that we'd be at a point where getting "those brave souls" back to Earth in one piece was mundane."
While I agree with the rest of your comment, it's worth pointing out that 45 years is a drastically short period of time in human history. How long did we sail the seas before trans-oceanic travel stopped being experimental and perilous? We're so used to the incredibly fast pace of recent technological advancement that we forget that not everything comes quick. Expecting spaceflight to have become mundane in so short a time may not be reasonable.
I hate to say this, but I'm glad this is over, and we can stop getting the minute-by-minute news reports of every damn thing the crew did.
"This just in: Shuttle still in space. NASA still monitoring."
"The inner airlock hatch will be shut now. Then, later, the outer hatch will open."
"The shuttle just vented 11 mL of waste gas into space."
"Commander Eileen just burped."
Sheeesh.
(Note well: I'm not slamming NASA, the space program, or our astronauts. (Not in this comment, anyway.) I'm slamming our culture of media sensationalism and short attention spans.)
Here's a tip that often gets lost on people: Everything in business spending -- and by that I mean EVERYTHING IN BUSINESS SPENDING -- comes down to one thing: Return On Investment. How much do you get back for what you spend, and how fast?
Of course, quantifing things like worker productivity, morale, and community image can be hard, but you can make a good go at it. Look at how much time people spend waiting for the computer, bitching about the computer, or otherwise Not Getting Stuff Done Because Of The Computer.
It's amazing how many people don't get this. User: "I want this, and this, and this." Me: "Will it help you do your job?" User: "No." Me: "Buh-bye now." Salesdroids, too: "Our new Plasmomatic 6000 SUX can make copies and solve the halting problem!" Me: "But I just want to make copies. Why should I pay for more?"
More serious examples: When evaluating new network printers, I look up how much paper we bought for the thing over the past couple years and figured out average pages per month. Cost-per-page is easy to find in spec sheets these days. I picked a few models, got the costs and calculated differences in same, and then figured out how long the savings would take to pay for the price differences. This pointed right at the model to buy.
I found the QA people were doing diagrams for their procedures in, $DEITY help me, Microsoft Paint. Getting approval for a vector graphics program was simple once I showed how much faster it would make things.
Conversely, when the new CAD guy wants a high-performance laptop but will only be on the road three times a year, it's easy to point out that the ROI is not there. He gets a much cheaper high-performance desktop, and he can limp along with one of the "floater" laptops if he has to.
If an investment can't pay for itself, you don't buy it.
A lot of budget decisions become a lot easier once you understand this concept.
History shows that the human race is perfectly capable of exhausting finite resources, despite common sense and economic pressures to the contrary. Species get killed off, local arable land gets over-farmed into wasteland, local food supply is insufficient and famine sets in, local population strains living space/facilities and crime/disease sets in, etc.
Sure, all these problems become self-correcting, given enough time. As long as we're limited on one planet, all problems are self-correcting. We either learn to live on this planet, or we die. So far, we haven't taken over ever square inch of the planet, so problems have always been local. I suppose we can wait until all problems become global.
The problem is I, for one, don't want to live in a dystopian nightmare vision of a world. I like clean air and forests and open spaces and clear water and natural habitats and all that stuff. I also like not killing each other over food and water and oil. I am of the opinion that we can, indeed, sustain something much like our current standard of living without turning the whole planet into a cesspool or open mine pit.
It's also worth pointing out that economic factors are not the only ones at play in the real world. For that matter, people don't always make rational decisions. Real-world economics also lag behind models because information and resources both take time to transit.
"When oil gets expensive, people will find substitutes."
Substitutes? Sure. Equivalents? Maybe so, but possibly not. It's foolhardy to think we can invent our way out of every possible problem. Sure, we can go back to stone knives and bear skins if have to, but again, do we want to?
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: There are things that have survival value, and then there are things that give value to survival.
Slashdot Mirror
"A modern Unix-like can spawn repeated processes very fast- too fast to worry about, in general."
All blanket statements are false.
I find that process-spawn overhead can still be important, especially when you're dealing with large data sets or non-trivial processing. It can mean the difference between minutes and hours of processing.
As far as your arguments about "finite learning time" go, I think you're overstating the brain drain something like "xargs" introduces. It isn't like we're learning a new programming language; I think there is room for both, here, and both are useful tools.
"Just use -exec. It's slower, but easier and you don't have to fight with line-endings, spaces in the filenames, and stupid cli arg limitations."
find parameters -print0 | xargs -0 command
I use that all the time. The -print0/-0 stuff causes find and xargs to use NUL-terminated strings.
I've run into CLI length limits maybe twice in the past five years. If you do hit it, "xargs -s n", where "n" is the maximum number of characters in a command on your system, will work around it. Alias that in and you'll never have to type it again.
"It's strange to see microsoft in a relatively powerless position. I'm not sure how to feel about this situation."
There's an old saying: When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled.
I can assure you that regardless of whether MSFT wins or RIAA wins, consumers will loose.
xgamer04 "Brooks' Law: 'Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.'"
Here, here! When I first read The Mythical Man-Month, one of the major realizations I took away from it was, "We haven't learned anything in 40 years of software design. We are still making the exact same mistakes we made back then." Here it is in 2005, and the only thing that's changed is that we're on to 50 years now.
Anyone who has anything to do with computer engineering but hasn't read TMMM needs to go do so. Promptly. You'll find incredible insight and perspective.
RAID-0 is equally as redundant as RAID-1. There are two disks performing a job that either one of them could do alone. The second disk is redundant. RAID-0 uses the redundancy for performance instead of continuous backup.
Who the heck mod'ed that up?
Say you have two identical disks striped without mirroring ("RAID 0"). The data is interleaved across the two disks. You usually get higher performance. You always get twice the disk space. There is no redundency here; your disk space is increased. Your reliability is much lower. If you loose either disk, you loose your entire logical volume.
Say you have two identical disks, mirrored ("RAID 1"). The same data is written to both disks. Data storage is redundent but reliability is increased. You can loose either disk but still have your logical volume. You usually get higher read performance (reads can be interleaved).
With mirroring, writes have to be done to both disks. Performance is complicated. Depending on the implementation, writes can be faster, slower, or the same as other RAID levels. With shared I/O paths, writes are slower then a single disk (you have to write one disk, then the other). In theory, if you have parallel I/O paths, writes should be the same as a single disk, but slower then a striped array (like RAID 5). That's because with striping, you can distribute the writes across multiple disks. In practice, many if not most RAID implementations (even those with dedicated RAID processing hardware) lack the processing power to make this happen. So mirroring is actually faster on writes then RAID 5, because no RAID calculations need to be done.
RAID 3 is striping with a dedicated parity disk.
RAID 5 is striped partiy (both data and partiy are distributed over all disks).
The best performance and redundency typically comes from using a striped array of mirrored disk pairs. You can loose either disk in a pair without loosing data. You distribute reads and writes over all disks. No fancy XOR calculations; just simple mirroring and interleaving. Very expensive, though.
Whatever you do, do NOT use an air compressor like you would use with power tools and/or to fill a tire. You'll blow components off boards and blades off fans that way."
;-)
Bah! If it comes off, it must not have been very wall attached, and thus needed to be replaced anyway!
Seriously, at my last job as an IT whore (AKA "consultant"), we had a "closet" for cleaning dust. It had compressed air, but on an adjustable regulator so you could pick a real light flow for delicate stuff, or heavy for that baked-on dust. We also had a nice exhaust fan to suck it all outside. That worked out so well.
Don't forget a bunch of dixie cups. I find the small (3 oz) plastic ones work best. Keep em stacked up in a nook that will keep them from falling over.
What for? Easy: For parts. When you start taking something apart, put the bits in a dixie cup. When you move to the next level/layer/component, put a new cup in the old one. When you're done taking apart, put an empty cup in the top of the stack. Now you've got all the parts, in a nice neat stack, reasonably safe from spilling, at a cost so low it's almost free.
Yah, you can use those fancy bins and trays and stuff, but this is so much cheaper and can actually work better. Takes up less space, sometimes, too.
"...you should really compare Explorer vs Aqua vs GNOME vs KDE."
"Explorer" isn't the name of the Windows GUI. "Explorer" is the file browser, like the Mac Finder or KDE's Konqueror.
That said, I don't know the name of the Windows GUI itself. I know the "trim" in XP was named "Luna", but the rest of the GUI is basically the same. In Vista, it's "Aero" or "Aero Glass" is supposed to be the radical new GUI, but since it's still vaporware, it remains to be seen just how that materializes.
The only name I've ever seen for it is "USER", from the USER.EXE and USER32.DLL that implements the basic UI components for Windows. But "USER" isn't a very practical name. "GDI" is low-level graphics primitives (much like Xlib in nix land), not the higher-level GUI. "Common Controls" (COMCTL) refers to the standard dialogs for open, save, print, and such, but that's not the GUI, either.
Anyone here know the "code name" or whatever for the actual GUI introduced in Windows 95?
" it looks as though they've thrown every bit of GUI common practice and standardization out of the window."
Oh $DEITY, don't even get my started. One of the things I loathe the most about Microsoft (and believe me, I've got a hell of a long list) is their love of gratiuitous, pointless changes. Changing the names slightly, moving things somewhat, changing the accelerator keys and the shortcuts, so you can never be sure what any key will do on any given day, or what a menu option will be called in this program.
It's bad enough for me, a geek and a keyboard junkie who is often six steps ahead of the computer (and that's another thing, how the hell is it can a computer running at 2,000,000,000 cycles per second with enough memory to store a dictionary fifty times over can't keep up with me, a lousy typist who hits the backspace key every third keystroke?), since I hit one series of buttons and end up having it do something else.
But then I have to write documentation for the poor unsuspecting users at work, who might be using one of four different versions of Windows (and two different "Start Menu" variations for XP) and three versions of Office. Most of thes people don't know that Word isn't part of Windows in the first place. So first I have to write a ten page document explaining how to identify which version of Windows and Office they have. Then I have to write like 20 different variations of each document/procedure/whatever, or try and explain the possabilites at each step. So what should be a simple, ten step quickie instruction sheet to do something simple turns into a tome that needs a binder just to haul the damn thing around in.
Farking Microsoft. Sets the world back six years every time they release something.
ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
This rant was brought to you by the letters M and S, and the number 32.
"at least they got SOMETHING working crossplatform"
The Microsoft definition of "portable" is "runs on more then one version of Windows".
I wish I was kidding.
"To compliment his German accent, Larry Ellison has also donned a monical and top hat..."
Q: What's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison.
While we're on the subject:
"Let's face it, Bill Gates is just a white Persian cat and a monocle away from being the next James Bond villian. 'No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to upgrade.'" -- Denis Miller
"I find it funny how Sony are trying to soften the problem by calling them 'stuck pixels' rather than dead. Almost like you could give 'em a little nudge and they'd start working again!"
They're not dead, they're... stunned. Those PSP pixels stun easily. Give 'et a rest and it will come right back! Remarkable things, those PSP pixels. Beautiful colors!
Comic Book Guy? Is that you? What are you doing posting on Slashdot? ;-)
Rosyna: "The author is a 'known' MS Shill."
:-)
rwven: "I'm not saying you're wrong, about this, but if you have some evidence i'd sure like to see it..."
I don't know if Paul Thurrott is a paid shill, but he's definitely the ultimate Microsoft fanatic. Read his past stuff. He's always raving about how new and radical and excellent and wonderful Microsoft's stuff is, even if it hasn't been released yet, was horribly buggy, came three years after everyone else did the same thing, etc., etc. Basically, he acts like a propaganda outlet for Microsoft.
He might do all that for free. Some people are just fanboys. Hell, look at Slashdot. "Suddenly, a bunch of Linux nerds cried out in horror, and were silenced."
"Hey, did you know RPM will let you remove every package from the system?"
I once had cause to utter the above sentence. I was working on a customer's web server remotely. I was performing some maintenance, upgrading this, migrating that. At one point, I had a list of installed packages I wanted to remove from the system. Well, I screwed up something and somehow managed to run "rpm --erase" with a list of every package currently installed on the system. I was multi-tasking and had switched to other things, so I didn't really clue in to the fact that my RPM transaction was taking way too long to run until some of the scripts tied to the uninstall action started complaining because things like "perl" were missing. I started pounding on [CTRL]+[C] but it was already too late. Almost everything was gone. I couldn't even scp files in.
That was a fun drive to the client site. At least the data was all still there, since only the software was removed.
Yah, and with a nick like OS24Ever, this person is obviously the perfect choice for making predictions about the acceptability and potential for success of a product....
(Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm a former OS/2 user and licensee myself. "Blue Spine" all the way, baby.)
"Would rolling the clock back on your computer give you instant access again? I know it works with some "free trial" software."
That makes clocks a "circumvention device" under the DMCA. The RIAA and MPAA hereby order everyone to stop using time.
"... a perfect opportunity for the application of a little common sense..."
What is this "common sense" of which you speak? Where may I download it from?
"Lots of things that are trivial to do on Earth are quite difficult to do in space. NASA sometimes belabors every baby step..."
:-)
As I said, my comments were not directed at NASA. Pay attention.
As you point out, NASA has good reasons for what they do. Even the constant radio chatter about what people are doing is by design. Most times, the Mission Controllers cannot see what is going on, so they need that commentary to keep the "picture" in their minds accurate. It also establishes a record of what is going on, in case something bad happens and they need to look back. It also allows others to double-check what is going on, and possibly stop a problem before it stops. I'm not complaining about that.
I'm complaining about the media obsession with STS-114. If it wasn't for the fact that the last STS mission ended in a disaster, the mainstream media wouldn't give this mission two seconds of attention.
Blech.
"Believe it or not, some people are interested in this. I've had NASA TV playing on my computer for the past two days."
Well, sure. If you want continous coverage of spaceflight activity, you tune in the NASA channel. That makes sense. My complaint is about the mainstream media and web media, both of which have featured non-stop commentary on every little thing, with no insight as to what is important and what isn't, and with plenty of "lay experts" giving their two bits. That isn't news.
I find it interesting that several people have replied to my message commenting on how "we" should have safe, cheap, reliable, common space travel by now.
I have to wonder why all these people who are such experts on spaceflight are posting on Slashdot instead of working at NASA.
Second, it's folly to assume that because the overall pace of technological advancement is fast, a particular field should be fast. Now, maybe we should be making faster gains in spaceflight. Unlike everyone else here, I'm no expert, and won't make a claim one way or the other. But I do know that drawing specific conclusions from a general trend is rarely a good idea. "Past performance is not a guarantee of future returns", as they say in the investment business.
"But after having done this since 1961, you'd think that we'd be at a point where getting "those brave souls" back to Earth in one piece was mundane."
While I agree with the rest of your comment, it's worth pointing out that 45 years is a drastically short period of time in human history. How long did we sail the seas before trans-oceanic travel stopped being experimental and perilous? We're so used to the incredibly fast pace of recent technological advancement that we forget that not everything comes quick. Expecting spaceflight to have become mundane in so short a time may not be reasonable.
I hate to say this, but I'm glad this is over, and we can stop getting the minute-by-minute news reports of every damn thing the crew did.
"This just in: Shuttle still in space. NASA still monitoring."
"The inner airlock hatch will be shut now. Then, later, the outer hatch will open."
"The shuttle just vented 11 mL of waste gas into space."
"Commander Eileen just burped."
Sheeesh.
(Note well: I'm not slamming NASA, the space program, or our astronauts. (Not in this comment, anyway.) I'm slamming our culture of media sensationalism and short attention spans.)
Here's a tip that often gets lost on people: Everything in business spending -- and by that I mean EVERYTHING IN BUSINESS SPENDING -- comes down to one thing: Return On Investment. How much do you get back for what you spend, and how fast?
Of course, quantifing things like worker productivity, morale, and community image can be hard, but you can make a good go at it. Look at how much time people spend waiting for the computer, bitching about the computer, or otherwise Not Getting Stuff Done Because Of The Computer.
It's amazing how many people don't get this. User: "I want this, and this, and this." Me: "Will it help you do your job?" User: "No." Me: "Buh-bye now." Salesdroids, too: "Our new Plasmomatic 6000 SUX can make copies and solve the halting problem!" Me: "But I just want to make copies. Why should I pay for more?"
More serious examples: When evaluating new network printers, I look up how much paper we bought for the thing over the past couple years and figured out average pages per month. Cost-per-page is easy to find in spec sheets these days. I picked a few models, got the costs and calculated differences in same, and then figured out how long the savings would take to pay for the price differences. This pointed right at the model to buy.
I found the QA people were doing diagrams for their procedures in, $DEITY help me, Microsoft Paint. Getting approval for a vector graphics program was simple once I showed how much faster it would make things.
Conversely, when the new CAD guy wants a high-performance laptop but will only be on the road three times a year, it's easy to point out that the ROI is not there. He gets a much cheaper high-performance desktop, and he can limp along with one of the "floater" laptops if he has to.
If an investment can't pay for itself, you don't buy it.
A lot of budget decisions become a lot easier once you understand this concept.
"Resource exhaustion is economically impossible."
History shows that the human race is perfectly capable of exhausting finite resources, despite common sense and economic pressures to the contrary. Species get killed off, local arable land gets over-farmed into wasteland, local food supply is insufficient and famine sets in, local population strains living space/facilities and crime/disease sets in, etc.
Sure, all these problems become self-correcting, given enough time. As long as we're limited on one planet, all problems are self-correcting. We either learn to live on this planet, or we die. So far, we haven't taken over ever square inch of the planet, so problems have always been local. I suppose we can wait until all problems become global.
The problem is I, for one, don't want to live in a dystopian nightmare vision of a world. I like clean air and forests and open spaces and clear water and natural habitats and all that stuff. I also like not killing each other over food and water and oil. I am of the opinion that we can, indeed, sustain something much like our current standard of living without turning the whole planet into a cesspool or open mine pit.
It's also worth pointing out that economic factors are not the only ones at play in the real world. For that matter, people don't always make rational decisions. Real-world economics also lag behind models because information and resources both take time to transit.
"When oil gets expensive, people will find substitutes."
Substitutes? Sure. Equivalents? Maybe so, but possibly not. It's foolhardy to think we can invent our way out of every possible problem. Sure, we can go back to stone knives and bear skins if have to, but again, do we want to?
To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: There are things that have survival value, and then there are things that give value to survival.