Yes.

Aircraft with human pilots are generally large and expensive units. Pilots are also very expensive too. These expense issues are what keeps multiple planes from flying around at all times spying on us.

>Back in 2000, the rule, and it worked, was one app per server.

Which was great at 2000 memory and processor levels where I might have a 32 bit operating system and a few gig of ram on a server. For the same price in U.S. dollars I can buy vastly larger hardware resources now.

>Now assholes are piling on the virtual servers

Or people who would rather buy fewer boxes and use the resources efficiently and be able to easily manage and migrate the virtual infrastructure. If you don't know how to use your resource monitoring tools, it doesn't matter if you have 100 or 1 computer systems.

>and piling as many apps as possible onto each server.

Assholes have always done that. 'Oh look, exchange, AD, and file serving all on the same installation, hmm I wonder why this doesn't work'. Bad design is timeless. There was never 'the good ole days'.

>Ever notice that games take as long or longer to load now than before, even though computer systems are orders of magnitude more powerful now?

Storage latency. Spinning hard disks are not orders of magnitude faster when loading gigabytes of random data then the 64k off of what ever medium 20+ years ago. Load that same huge game off a fast SSD or RAMdisk and it's pretty much instant.

>Not much different than running all your apps on the one piece of hardware

Do you even sysadmin?

> Virtualization: A solution in search of a problem

I'll take that as a no.

> then cutting the price of the resource in half will be met by more than twice the original quantity demanded

In the history of computing so far, this has happened 'naturally'. Moores law up to this point has lead to a doubling of chip sizes (and therefore processing power) every 18 months. Your gas analogy is not compatible with the general trend of computing technology. Users would be surprised if there next car they bought didn't get double the gas mileage (halving the price of gas in usage) in digital computing.

The question then turns in to 'is there still tasks that can be made faster or better with more computing resources'. That answer varies greatly depending on the business, but in theory the amount of computing we could find use for is much much larger then the amount we currently have.

There is a very long Wikipedia article on this topic that contains a great deal of information on what occurred. While a great deal of work has been done to show that it is not fully the oil companies fault, drilling in to a hydrothermically unstable area with a faulty well design is a recipe for disaster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidoarjo_mud_flow

A 7 character password is stupidly short these days. This is just retarded, as a brute force attack against a password that short takes very little time now (few hours at most). Even a 'leetspeak' password at double that length would take much much longer, but still get knocked out in less than a month.

>Can you say Cloud systems are more reliable than physical medium? Not really.

Compared to a single spinning disk. Yes.

>Hard disk reliability is mostly linear.

When you compare very many hard drives across a wide range of models. If you think that matters when looking at the possibility of failure in your single hard drive you're engaging in a gamblers fallacy.

The reliability of 'cloud' vs 'in house disks' completely and totally depends on the quality of equipment and software and the ability of your staff to monitor it and do proper backups.