I'm a little surprised that this came from FB and not Google/YouTube but I can definitely see its value.
Does it make sense to clock hardware and GPUs at this rate? A 3GHz GPU would run at 2,822,400,000 Hz and would synchronize to any video (incoming or outgoing) refresh rate allowing for no missed pixels, pixels that are sampled at transitions or maybe some FLICKer.
Depending on the application, media and its refresh rate, this may not offer a lot of tangible advantages. For instance, in gaming, I don't see a lot of advantages with basing the clock speed on the Flick.
I have a couple of Acer Win10 systems with a similar amount of DDR/SSD as these systems and they don't take well to any apps other than Office and performance, in terms of waiting for a window to come up, is abysmal (it's actually a lot worse with Office360).
The systems have 4GB DDR and 32GB SSD - with Office the SSD is filled to around 19GB
Maybe Win10s running on Apollo Lake has better performance but I would view any systems with a jaundiced eye until I had a chance to test them out.
I use my gmail account as a spam dump - you want to send me something that I'm not asking for, you get my gmail account. I suspect many other people use it for that as well. Note that this only assumes accounts using the "gmail" domain and not business accounts that are hosted by Google (and are gmail accounts in all but name).
Next on the list are kids who wouldn't be savvy enough (or have a credit credit/cell phone), then I don't see them using two factor authentication. Then you have companies that create accounts for testing and demonstrations. Finally, you have people who don't think their privacy, information, social security or credit card numbers are important enough to warrant entering a number that comes through on their phones when they log into their GMail accounts. Put them all together and 90% not using two factor authentication seems reasonable.
For the many people that will disagree with this post, you can voice your concerns via email at myke.predko@gmail.com
When I say *laptop* I use it for email, presentations, business operations and demonstrations. I don't use it for software development or any kind of network or processor intensive tasks.
It's thin, light, rugged with a good screen. Works well with projectors with 6+ hours of battery life (after four years). Microsoft Office's operation is fair (but I think that's more of Microsoft's issue than Apple's OS X).
I'm not an Apple guy (although I am a vehement Win 10 hater), just that this laptop has done what I've needed of it for years for my business, in a variety of different locations (and countries) without a glitch or problem of any kind.
The bad news is that they're losing money on the A380.
The good news is that they're making it up on the volume of the A320. It looks like they made a genius move on the C-Series as it eliminates the need for them to revamp the A319 line so they can focus on the A321/MOM (Middle Of Market) aircraft.
Boeing, on the other hand, is making their money on the big twins and hoping the B737 can catch up/be profitable while trying to figure out if their MOM aircraft will be an extended B737, shrunk B787 or new aircraft.
If you go back 20 years ago when the A380 was being proposed - Airbus confidently proclaimed that there would be a 1,300+ unit market for a huge four engine jet. Boeing predicted that, at best, there would be a 360 unit market.
The difference was based on the assumptions made by each manufacturer. Airbus, at the time, was pushing the A340 (four engine) over the A330 and getting reasonably good traction which lead them to think that four engines and more passengers was the way to go. Boeing had just finished the B777 and could see it eating into the B747 market - the B777 offered better economics for 250-350 passengers which Boeing decided was the optimal passenger size for long range.
It's interesting to see what happened as Airbus started to develop the A380, it gained a lot of good press and a gold plated launch customer in Emirates (to which Boeing responded with the B747-8 to show they were still in the market but wouldn't require a lot of development funds). Boeing sank their development money into the 7E7 (which became the B787), gained sales of almost a thousand sales before the first roll out and Airbus scrambled with the A350.
The A380 failed simply because Airbus misread the demand for the aircraft (along with the desire to have the bragging rights on the largest airliner out there) and Boeing had a better product roadmap for this space. Boeing is now finishing up the first the second generation B777 prototypes while Airbus is trying to finish the A350 line and revamp the A330.
The writing has been on the wall for the A380 for at least 5 years (arguably 10) and really the big question is when will Airbus decide to take the write-down on the lost development costs.
It's changed the way applications are written. It has put pressure on companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google to provide development tools and libraries free of charge.
But thinking Open Source Software will/would/has changed the world?
A few people have questioned the validity of rating Framework popularity by the question rate on Stack Overflow. I just wanted to say that I think it's valid in this case if I compare it to other surveys of different programming languages based on the rate of new questions - I see something every year or so like (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017) in which the popularity of different programming languages is rated by the activity on each language.
I'm of mixed thoughts about Stack Overflow - All of us use it to help with figuring out a problem although at best, you'll find the answer around 25% of the time and probably 30% of the time what's there will lead you in the wrong direction. But, questions do get asked and looking at them by time, you'll get an idea of what people are doing.
I looked at it from the perspective of *other* Stack Overflow queries where C is still highly regarded as a programming language by the number of new questions that continue to be posted.
So, if C is still getting a large number of questions constantly, indicating that it is a popular/in use language, doesn't it stand to reason that various JS Frameworks can be said to be dying because they aren't getting a large number of questions constantly?
I came into a company that was a recently bought out startup where I found the CTO to be incredibly knowledgeable about web programming, PC application programming and PICmicro firmware programming.
Now, that I'm doing a startup and programming for multiple targets (namely, HTML in Javascript with jQuery and Angular, PC and MaC programming in Java/C/C++/C#/Objective C and firmware in C) I think I would probably impress new programmers coming into the company in the same way.
For the purposes of this analysis, I thought using Stack Overflow was very appropriate.
Yes you get karma whores, but going by dates and frequencies of requests/replies you get a pretty good idea of the trends/lifecycles which is what this article is about.
There is so much wrong about Javascript revealed here that I think we have to question its use going forwards.
The language itself is a great start to programming websites but the need for frameworks, which become "flavours of the month" that makes support so much more difficult as time goes on and the framework goes out of favour resulting in companies scrambling to find people with the skills to maintain them (sort of a short term Cobol analog). This gets worse when you realize that most web page developers don't know how to code and are using published features of the frameworks or example snippets on things like Stack Overflow.
What about security of the various frameworks and ensuring they don't do anything nefarious. I guess the extreme examples would be collecting customer data and running cryptocurrency miners on end-users webpages - but I'm sure there are a lot of more minor security issues that can be hidden in these frameworks.
Finally, I have to wonder about the maintainability of all these frameworks. On one hand, I guess frameworks with issues get identified by the community quickly and are abandoned (but, going back to the previous point, companies have to spend more money because their developers aren't competent to move the page to different frameworks).
I'm not sure I see a solution for these problems. Maybe WebAssembly will be the ultimate solution (with tested and supported libraries that web developers can use and rely on) but I'm hoping that W3C and other groups are looking ahead to the next generation of web development tools.
Just saw the headline and panicked, checking my Linux systems (all running ubuntu 16.04 LTS) and did a quick check:
myke@mimeticsL01:~$ uname -a Linux mimeticsL01 4.4.0-108-generic #131-Ubuntu SMP Sun Jan 7 14:34:49 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux myke@mimeticsL01:~$
I've never had a problem with Ubuntu updates (although I RFTA, it sounds like all Ubuntu users have an issue at one time or another). I suspect that the kernel update was tested before it was released so this updates affects some subset of the systems out there.
Like many other people, I was very concerned when i saw the headline saying the updated was "bricking" systems - whoever wrote the headline needs to have the term "bricking" explained to them (ideally with an actual brick).
In the future, msmash, you might want to be a bit less sensational in the headlines and make sure you understand if the terms used in it are correct.
I'm sure the overwhelming answer to this question will be "Yes", but I wonder if there are cases where implementing downgrading of capability in technology products is justified and even argued as necessary.
- What about a phone that only provides communications on a radio protocol that is going obsolete and would cost the carrier (and the customer) much more to support it? (In Canada, CDMA service ended on May 31st - would it have been so bad for customers to get new product before the shut off date?) - What about processor technology that has issues that the manufacturer cannot fix but has software work arounds which are expensive to maintain (especially on older systems), causes problems on other devices in the system and causes an overall performance degradation? (Any apparent relationship to the Intel/ARM64 Spectre and Meltdown bugs is non-coincidental.)
Personally, I think Apple should be fined/jailed for dropping the operating performance of older iPhones in order to drive sales of the new devices - and, I would not label this "Planned Obsolescence" per se but damaging customer-owned product in order to generate new sales.
But, if the supplier can demonstrate that it is in the customer's best interest for strongly encourage them to replace their existing technology AND it is not price gouging the customers (ie the replacement product is made available at cost) should this be illegal?
The man is fucking up Google in the worst possible ways.
What tangible metric can you show that Google has been hurt by this?
As far as I call, this is a lot of smoke, noise but no fire.
Has Chrome usage gone down because of people being outraged over this? Are companies looking to alternative to AdWords/Analytics? Are sales of Android phones dropping? What about Google Home devices? How has the stock been affected?
I always felt that the fact that the shuttle was designed with technology that didn't meet the application requirements was the biggest issue. Don't forget that a good fraction of the protective tiles and the engines had to be removed/refurbished between flights (which was not part of the concept) - this added $400M to $1B (depending on your source) to each flight. I think the design amortizations costs became insignificant pretty quickly with that additional cost for each flight.
A recurring criticism of the shuttle was that the weight/drag/cost/complexity penalty of the wings made it an inefficient approach in many people's minds - they felt that the "wrapper", as you so eloquently put it, had to be as simple as possible to maximize payload and minimize costs - the refurbishment costs seemed to validate this approach.
Now, we have SpaceX where the design was made with the thought that a certain amount of payload would be held back to provide for fuel and hardware to return to the launch pad, allowing the booster to be reused. Many of the same criticisms made about the shuttle came back with the initial Falcon concept until SpaceX was returning and reusing boosters as well as providing significantly cheaper access to space. I'm looking forward to seeing Dream Catcher's first orbital flights to see if it can provide a cost-effective reusable lander.
So, to maybe articulate my thoughts more efficiently, the US should have stayed with the hardware developed for the Apollo moon missions until the technology to effectively reuse space hardware became available.
I chose 1975 as the numbers in the Time "Apollo and Skylab: Looking to the Future" (copyright was 1976) book were based on 1975 and there are additional numbers corroborating these in NASA's "Space Settlements A Design Study" (NASA SP-413), which is the 1976 Gerard O'Neill Space Colonization study, which also provide cost numbers for 1975 - and it was at the end of Apollo/Skylab era so that seemed appropriate looking forwards.
The cost of launching a Saturn V Apollo mission is NOT equal to the cost of launching a Saturn booster on another mission (which is why I went to such pains to try and isolate the booster costs so they can be compared to modern day boosters). The numbers I quoted are assuming development costs were amortized by the Apollo program (which I feel are defendable). The numbers quoted in the Wikipedia entry include development costs paid for during the Apollo years and don't reflect the fact that they should not be included in later missions.
"Elegantly executed Skylab"? Wow. I have never heard that description for it before - I can only think that you weren't around when it was damaged during launch, the various problems during the manned expeditions, including what was thought of as a ridiculously high per day cost to it ending up being regarded as uncontrolled space junk crashing to Earth. I didn't think anybody regards it as a shining example of NASA technology and know-how.
Why aren't you looking at Mir as a comparison point? I would think that is a much better example of a long term space outpost.
I'm not sure that you can consider STS launches to Gemini-Titan/Apollo-Saturn as an apples to apples comparison. Don't forget there were up to four orbiters available at the highest rate years and they were extensively rebuilt between missions. I don't know how that factors into your comparison.
The problem with history is that it is based on the goals of the person writing it and their sources. It's too easy to find conflicting perspectives and data that challenges "current wisdom" that we can rely on what we think we know and what we can find through basic Google/Wikipedia searches - or, for books written more than forty years ago.
Sorry, I have to challenge you on a number of things about your post and the assertions within it - maybe you can provide some links to the analysis that you read to help provide some facts.
I don't think it's fair comparing Skylab to the ISS as you're comparing a short term outpost to a long term station. Skylab was occupied for a total 171 days with 3 astronauts - 513 days in operation at a cost (in today's dollars) of approximately $10B ($2.2B in 1975). That works out to $19.5M/astronaut-day in today's dollars. The ISS has a cost (so far) of $150B but has been in operation for over 17 years - let's say during that time there were only three astronauts on board, it works out to $8M/astronaut-day or about 40% of Skylab's per operating day cost. The longer the ISS stays up in it's present configuration (and you expand the calculation to include the number of days its had more than three astronauts), that number will be significantly less and continue to fall.
Sorry, NASA budgets have never approached DOD budgets - Take a look at the US budget for 1967 in which the major investments in Apollo was taking place:
(http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/69/1967): "General Space, Science and Technology" (which I'm guessing is more than just NASA) is 7% of the budget while the DOD was 49%.
It's hard finding costs for Saturn boosters sans payloads, but I think you would find that their costs are very competitive compared to existing expendable launchers (as well as the space shuttle) and in the ballpark of the Falcon 9. What makes difficult to get apples-to-apples costs is that the Saturn V was not designed to deliver payloads into LEO - the third stage was used to achieve orbit as well as restarted to send the CM/SM/LM to the moon. Probably the best way to calculate costs per pound are to use the Saturn V first and second stage to put up Skylab as well as the Saturn IVB used to send the CM/SM to to Skylab.
The Skylab Saturn V first and second stage costs were $50M (in 1975 dollars) with a Skylab payload of 170,000 lb. which works out to $294/lb to LEO. The Saturn IVB which sent the CM/SM and consumables to Skylab cost $25M (in 1975 dollars) with a payload of 46,000 lb. which works out to $543/lb to LEO. I have a Time book on Apollo, from when I was a kid, in which the cost per pound for the Saturn V launch was stated to be $500/lb. - so these numbers seem reasonable. In today's dollars (using http://www.usinflationcalculat...), that's $1,347/lb for the Skylab Saturn V and $2,487/lb for the Saturn IVB. As a point of comparison, the Falcon 9 costs $1,240/lb. The Ariane 5, in its smallest/cheapest configuration is $4,700/lb.
The STS was a bad left turn for launchers and set the expectation that launch costs would be in the range of $10,000/lb or more. I think that was the real crime - the shuttle's costs got out of control very quickly and nothing was done to reign them in. If the decision was made to drop the STS and keep with Apollo technology (just like the Russians that continued working with their 1960s/1970s technology), which was proven, reliable and cheap compared to the resulting STS and expendable boosters costs, along with the same NASA budgets for space exploration, then I suspect a station of the ISS' capabilities could have been put up by the late 1970s as well as maybe an outpost on the moon by 2001 - and we would have avoided the long drought in government sponsored manned space exploration.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little surprised that this came from FB and not Google/YouTube but I can definitely see its value.
Does it make sense to clock hardware and GPUs at this rate? A 3GHz GPU would run at 2,822,400,000 Hz and would synchronize to any video (incoming or outgoing) refresh rate allowing for no missed pixels, pixels that are sampled at transitions or maybe some FLICKer.
Depending on the application, media and its refresh rate, this may not offer a lot of tangible advantages. For instance, in gaming, I don't see a lot of advantages with basing the clock speed on the Flick.
I have a couple of Acer Win10 systems with a similar amount of DDR/SSD as these systems and they don't take well to any apps other than Office and performance, in terms of waiting for a window to come up, is abysmal (it's actually a lot worse with Office360).
The systems have 4GB DDR and 32GB SSD - with Office the SSD is filled to around 19GB
Maybe Win10s running on Apollo Lake has better performance but I would view any systems with a jaundiced eye until I had a chance to test them out.
There's no way the processor/chipsets are $120-$170 USD - especially considering the systems they are going into have SRPs of around $190USD.
I suspect that, for these systems, processor/chipset costs are on the order of $10-$15USD.
I use my gmail account as a spam dump - you want to send me something that I'm not asking for, you get my gmail account. I suspect many other people use it for that as well. Note that this only assumes accounts using the "gmail" domain and not business accounts that are hosted by Google (and are gmail accounts in all but name).
Next on the list are kids who wouldn't be savvy enough (or have a credit credit/cell phone), then I don't see them using two factor authentication. Then you have companies that create accounts for testing and demonstrations. Finally, you have people who don't think their privacy, information, social security or credit card numbers are important enough to warrant entering a number that comes through on their phones when they log into their GMail accounts. Put them all together and 90% not using two factor authentication seems reasonable.
For the many people that will disagree with this post, you can voice your concerns via email at myke.predko@gmail.com
When I say *laptop* I use it for email, presentations, business operations and demonstrations. I don't use it for software development or any kind of network or processor intensive tasks.
It's thin, light, rugged with a good screen. Works well with projectors with 6+ hours of battery life (after four years). Microsoft Office's operation is fair (but I think that's more of Microsoft's issue than Apple's OS X).
I'm not an Apple guy (although I am a vehement Win 10 hater), just that this laptop has done what I've needed of it for years for my business, in a variety of different locations (and countries) without a glitch or problem of any kind.
The bad news is that they're losing money on the A380.
The good news is that they're making it up on the volume of the A320. It looks like they made a genius move on the C-Series as it eliminates the need for them to revamp the A319 line so they can focus on the A321/MOM (Middle Of Market) aircraft.
Boeing, on the other hand, is making their money on the big twins and hoping the B737 can catch up/be profitable while trying to figure out if their MOM aircraft will be an extended B737, shrunk B787 or new aircraft.
Do a Ctrl-F in this discussion for "Airbus didn't predict the rise of the big twins"
If you go back 20 years ago when the A380 was being proposed - Airbus confidently proclaimed that there would be a 1,300+ unit market for a huge four engine jet. Boeing predicted that, at best, there would be a 360 unit market.
The difference was based on the assumptions made by each manufacturer. Airbus, at the time, was pushing the A340 (four engine) over the A330 and getting reasonably good traction which lead them to think that four engines and more passengers was the way to go. Boeing had just finished the B777 and could see it eating into the B747 market - the B777 offered better economics for 250-350 passengers which Boeing decided was the optimal passenger size for long range.
It's interesting to see what happened as Airbus started to develop the A380, it gained a lot of good press and a gold plated launch customer in Emirates (to which Boeing responded with the B747-8 to show they were still in the market but wouldn't require a lot of development funds). Boeing sank their development money into the 7E7 (which became the B787), gained sales of almost a thousand sales before the first roll out and Airbus scrambled with the A350.
The A380 failed simply because Airbus misread the demand for the aircraft (along with the desire to have the bragging rights on the largest airliner out there) and Boeing had a better product roadmap for this space. Boeing is now finishing up the first the second generation B777 prototypes while Airbus is trying to finish the A350 line and revamp the A330.
The writing has been on the wall for the A380 for at least 5 years (arguably 10) and really the big question is when will Airbus decide to take the write-down on the lost development costs.
Nope. See my comments.
It's changed the way applications are written. It has put pressure on companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google to provide development tools and libraries free of charge.
But thinking Open Source Software will/would/has changed the world?
I don't think that's reasonable.
A few people have questioned the validity of rating Framework popularity by the question rate on Stack Overflow. I just wanted to say that I think it's valid in this case if I compare it to other surveys of different programming languages based on the rate of new questions - I see something every year or so like (https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017) in which the popularity of different programming languages is rated by the activity on each language.
I'm of mixed thoughts about Stack Overflow - All of us use it to help with figuring out a problem although at best, you'll find the answer around 25% of the time and probably 30% of the time what's there will lead you in the wrong direction. But, questions do get asked and looking at them by time, you'll get an idea of what people are doing.
I looked at it from the perspective of *other* Stack Overflow queries where C is still highly regarded as a programming language by the number of new questions that continue to be posted.
So, if C is still getting a large number of questions constantly, indicating that it is a popular/in use language, doesn't it stand to reason that various JS Frameworks can be said to be dying because they aren't getting a large number of questions constantly?
I came into a company that was a recently bought out startup where I found the CTO to be incredibly knowledgeable about web programming, PC application programming and PICmicro firmware programming.
Now, that I'm doing a startup and programming for multiple targets (namely, HTML in Javascript with jQuery and Angular, PC and MaC programming in Java/C/C++/C#/Objective C and firmware in C) I think I would probably impress new programmers coming into the company in the same way.
For the purposes of this analysis, I thought using Stack Overflow was very appropriate.
Yes you get karma whores, but going by dates and frequencies of requests/replies you get a pretty good idea of the trends/lifecycles which is what this article is about.
There is so much wrong about Javascript revealed here that I think we have to question its use going forwards.
The language itself is a great start to programming websites but the need for frameworks, which become "flavours of the month" that makes support so much more difficult as time goes on and the framework goes out of favour resulting in companies scrambling to find people with the skills to maintain them (sort of a short term Cobol analog). This gets worse when you realize that most web page developers don't know how to code and are using published features of the frameworks or example snippets on things like Stack Overflow.
What about security of the various frameworks and ensuring they don't do anything nefarious. I guess the extreme examples would be collecting customer data and running cryptocurrency miners on end-users webpages - but I'm sure there are a lot of more minor security issues that can be hidden in these frameworks.
Finally, I have to wonder about the maintainability of all these frameworks. On one hand, I guess frameworks with issues get identified by the community quickly and are abandoned (but, going back to the previous point, companies have to spend more money because their developers aren't competent to move the page to different frameworks).
I'm not sure I see a solution for these problems. Maybe WebAssembly will be the ultimate solution (with tested and supported libraries that web developers can use and rely on) but I'm hoping that W3C and other groups are looking ahead to the next generation of web development tools.
Just saw the headline and panicked, checking my Linux systems (all running ubuntu 16.04 LTS) and did a quick check:
myke@mimeticsL01:~$ uname -a
Linux mimeticsL01 4.4.0-108-generic #131-Ubuntu SMP Sun Jan 7 14:34:49 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
myke@mimeticsL01:~$
I've never had a problem with Ubuntu updates (although I RFTA, it sounds like all Ubuntu users have an issue at one time or another). I suspect that the kernel update was tested before it was released so this updates affects some subset of the systems out there.
Like many other people, I was very concerned when i saw the headline saying the updated was "bricking" systems - whoever wrote the headline needs to have the term "bricking" explained to them (ideally with an actual brick).
In the future, msmash, you might want to be a bit less sensational in the headlines and make sure you understand if the terms used in it are correct.
Really? Let me try i...***Signal Lost***
I'm sure the overwhelming answer to this question will be "Yes", but I wonder if there are cases where implementing downgrading of capability in technology products is justified and even argued as necessary.
- What about a phone that only provides communications on a radio protocol that is going obsolete and would cost the carrier (and the customer) much more to support it? (In Canada, CDMA service ended on May 31st - would it have been so bad for customers to get new product before the shut off date?)
- What about processor technology that has issues that the manufacturer cannot fix but has software work arounds which are expensive to maintain (especially on older systems), causes problems on other devices in the system and causes an overall performance degradation? (Any apparent relationship to the Intel/ARM64 Spectre and Meltdown bugs is non-coincidental.)
Personally, I think Apple should be fined/jailed for dropping the operating performance of older iPhones in order to drive sales of the new devices - and, I would not label this "Planned Obsolescence" per se but damaging customer-owned product in order to generate new sales.
But, if the supplier can demonstrate that it is in the customer's best interest for strongly encourage them to replace their existing technology AND it is not price gouging the customers (ie the replacement product is made available at cost) should this be illegal?
How am I the bad guy here? I just explained the situation to you.
You're confusing two different situations.
If an employee of a privately owned bakery refused to back a cake for a gay couple, they can be fired.
The bakery can't refuse to provide products and services to a customer based on the owner's religious beliefs.
But was instantiated incorrectly.
The man is fucking up Google in the worst possible ways.
What tangible metric can you show that Google has been hurt by this?
As far as I call, this is a lot of smoke, noise but no fire.
Has Chrome usage gone down because of people being outraged over this? Are companies looking to alternative to AdWords/Analytics? Are sales of Android phones dropping? What about Google Home devices? How has the stock been affected?
I always felt that the fact that the shuttle was designed with technology that didn't meet the application requirements was the biggest issue. Don't forget that a good fraction of the protective tiles and the engines had to be removed/refurbished between flights (which was not part of the concept) - this added $400M to $1B (depending on your source) to each flight. I think the design amortizations costs became insignificant pretty quickly with that additional cost for each flight.
A recurring criticism of the shuttle was that the weight/drag/cost/complexity penalty of the wings made it an inefficient approach in many people's minds - they felt that the "wrapper", as you so eloquently put it, had to be as simple as possible to maximize payload and minimize costs - the refurbishment costs seemed to validate this approach.
Now, we have SpaceX where the design was made with the thought that a certain amount of payload would be held back to provide for fuel and hardware to return to the launch pad, allowing the booster to be reused. Many of the same criticisms made about the shuttle came back with the initial Falcon concept until SpaceX was returning and reusing boosters as well as providing significantly cheaper access to space. I'm looking forward to seeing Dream Catcher's first orbital flights to see if it can provide a cost-effective reusable lander.
So, to maybe articulate my thoughts more efficiently, the US should have stayed with the hardware developed for the Apollo moon missions until the technology to effectively reuse space hardware became available.
I chose 1975 as the numbers in the Time "Apollo and Skylab: Looking to the Future" (copyright was 1976) book were based on 1975 and there are additional numbers corroborating these in NASA's "Space Settlements A Design Study" (NASA SP-413), which is the 1976 Gerard O'Neill Space Colonization study, which also provide cost numbers for 1975 - and it was at the end of Apollo/Skylab era so that seemed appropriate looking forwards.
The cost of launching a Saturn V Apollo mission is NOT equal to the cost of launching a Saturn booster on another mission (which is why I went to such pains to try and isolate the booster costs so they can be compared to modern day boosters). The numbers I quoted are assuming development costs were amortized by the Apollo program (which I feel are defendable). The numbers quoted in the Wikipedia entry include development costs paid for during the Apollo years and don't reflect the fact that they should not be included in later missions.
"Elegantly executed Skylab"? Wow. I have never heard that description for it before - I can only think that you weren't around when it was damaged during launch, the various problems during the manned expeditions, including what was thought of as a ridiculously high per day cost to it ending up being regarded as uncontrolled space junk crashing to Earth. I didn't think anybody regards it as a shining example of NASA technology and know-how.
Why aren't you looking at Mir as a comparison point? I would think that is a much better example of a long term space outpost.
I'm not sure that you can consider STS launches to Gemini-Titan/Apollo-Saturn as an apples to apples comparison. Don't forget there were up to four orbiters available at the highest rate years and they were extensively rebuilt between missions. I don't know how that factors into your comparison.
The problem with history is that it is based on the goals of the person writing it and their sources. It's too easy to find conflicting perspectives and data that challenges "current wisdom" that we can rely on what we think we know and what we can find through basic Google/Wikipedia searches - or, for books written more than forty years ago.
Sorry, I have to challenge you on a number of things about your post and the assertions within it - maybe you can provide some links to the analysis that you read to help provide some facts.
I don't think it's fair comparing Skylab to the ISS as you're comparing a short term outpost to a long term station. Skylab was occupied for a total 171 days with 3 astronauts - 513 days in operation at a cost (in today's dollars) of approximately $10B ($2.2B in 1975). That works out to $19.5M/astronaut-day in today's dollars. The ISS has a cost (so far) of $150B but has been in operation for over 17 years - let's say during that time there were only three astronauts on board, it works out to $8M/astronaut-day or about 40% of Skylab's per operating day cost. The longer the ISS stays up in it's present configuration (and you expand the calculation to include the number of days its had more than three astronauts), that number will be significantly less and continue to fall.
Sorry, NASA budgets have never approached DOD budgets - Take a look at the US budget for 1967 in which the major investments in Apollo was taking place:
(http://federal-budget.insidegov.com/l/69/1967): "General Space, Science and Technology" (which I'm guessing is more than just NASA) is 7% of the budget while the DOD was 49%.
It's hard finding costs for Saturn boosters sans payloads, but I think you would find that their costs are very competitive compared to existing expendable launchers (as well as the space shuttle) and in the ballpark of the Falcon 9. What makes difficult to get apples-to-apples costs is that the Saturn V was not designed to deliver payloads into LEO - the third stage was used to achieve orbit as well as restarted to send the CM/SM/LM to the moon. Probably the best way to calculate costs per pound are to use the Saturn V first and second stage to put up Skylab as well as the Saturn IVB used to send the CM/SM to to Skylab.
The Skylab Saturn V first and second stage costs were $50M (in 1975 dollars) with a Skylab payload of 170,000 lb. which works out to $294/lb to LEO. The Saturn IVB which sent the CM/SM and consumables to Skylab cost $25M (in 1975 dollars) with a payload of 46,000 lb. which works out to $543/lb to LEO. I have a Time book on Apollo, from when I was a kid, in which the cost per pound for the Saturn V launch was stated to be $500/lb. - so these numbers seem reasonable. In today's dollars (using http://www.usinflationcalculat...), that's $1,347/lb for the Skylab Saturn V and $2,487/lb for the Saturn IVB. As a point of comparison, the Falcon 9 costs $1,240/lb. The Ariane 5, in its smallest/cheapest configuration is $4,700/lb.
The STS was a bad left turn for launchers and set the expectation that launch costs would be in the range of $10,000/lb or more. I think that was the real crime - the shuttle's costs got out of control very quickly and nothing was done to reign them in. If the decision was made to drop the STS and keep with Apollo technology (just like the Russians that continued working with their 1960s/1970s technology), which was proven, reliable and cheap compared to the resulting STS and expendable boosters costs, along with the same NASA budgets for space exploration, then I suspect a station of the ISS' capabilities could have been put up by the late 1970s as well as maybe an outpost on the moon by 2001 - and we would have avoided the long drought in government sponsored manned space exploration.