Mostly, because the hardware is getting more and more powerful - and I don't "invest" as much money in my personal hardware anymore as I used to do.
Thus, spare hardware (and dev-VMs) at work (which we have plenty) are faster than VMs at home.
Plus, if we can show a benefit and it will add to the bottom line (or save a lot of time), we do get a project, time and a budget to build it - on current hardware.
We do have a guy (he's now retired, but still contracts for us...) who has his complete build environment for a software (some 60ish VMs) on a server-sized desktop at home. He bought an LGA2011-board with a 6-core i7 CPU and 64GB RAM just for this.

But he has always preferred to work from home anyway.

but there is a catch: to reliably detect bit-rot and other problems, you also need server-grade hardware with ECC.
ZFS (especially when your dataset-size increases and you add more RAM) is picky about that, too.
Bit-rot does not only occur in hard-disks or flash.
You should really, really take a hard look at every set of photos and select one or two from each "set", then have these printed (black and white, for extra longevity).
If this results in still too many images, only print a selection of the selection and let the rest die.

AFAIK, the support for blind-people in iOS is still much, much better than anywhere else.
Not only in iOS itself, but also throughout the apps, too.
Instead of tactile feedback, iOS uses voice-over, where you swipe over the screen and it spells out what you touch (I've never tried it, but that's AFAIK the way it works).
Blind people seems to be OK with that.

...their business model wasn't that solid, after all.

I believe Apple should be lauded for trying to build "The best office building in the world".
If the building comes out as expected, it will be a landmark like the Empire State Building (or the (collapsed) World Trade Center (before it collapsed)).

Yes, it could all be had cheaper - but OTOH, it's still better than paying out huge bonuses to the execs or buying more corporate jets. There are a thousand ways to waste money. This way, at least the public gets something in return.

According to the article, UK security services fear China, Russia and Pakistway have also figured out a way to turn mobiles into microphones...

My watch is solar-powered and syncs with one of the most precise atomic clocks in the world. It doesn't perform any blood-test, nor does it take fitness parameters, though. When a smart-watch emerges that does the clock-thingy well, plus the aforementioned blood-test, I'll be tempted.

If the spectrum is saturated (1k people tethering their MacBookPros to their phones...), that password doesn't buy you anything at all.

They have an online form where you can check if your data was in the compromised lot. It requires to enter your bank- details...

That's so ..... fishy

Didn't help Iran when STUXNET hit, did it?
The truth is: if you have no network-connection, people start using USB-sticks over and over - which creates a completely different attack-surface.
Air-gapping critical infrastructure isn't a bad idea - but it can't be an excuse to not secure these system at all.

I like this quote:
"Finally, Snowden’s physical location worked to his advantage. In a contractor’s office 5,000 miles and six time zones from headquarters, he was free from prying eyes. Much of his workday occurred after the masses at Ft. Meade had already gone home for dinner. Had he been in Maryland, someone who couldn’t audit his activities electronically still might have noticed his use of thumb drives."

Reminds me of the days when Aldrich Ames was splurging all the money the Soviets gave him - and nobody noticed (the first couple of years).

Trial-periods and time spent in prison before execution is much shorter in China.
In China, the verdict is usually "final" on the spot and execution follows swiftly.
Most inmates in the US and Europe probably have some sort of infectious disease (from sharing needles, drugs, etc.pp.) that they acquired in the years waiting for the verdict and the appeal and the appeal to the appeal....

Reminds me of the cops in that series.
The creepy thing is that almost everything I see in the news almost every day reminds me of the dystopian future in that TV-series.
The trick they did was to place everything in 2077 - when in reality it's just around the corner.

I'm not sure, actually. There aren't that many physical servers (a couple of hundred - vmware has helped reduced than a lot, already). We are a bit of a "boutique"-ISP in that some of our customers are not price-sensitive at all. Which is good, because we can't compete on price anyway - we compete on flexibility, knowledge, reaction-time. We usually build multi-server, often multi-site, multi-network solutions in heterogeneous environments with high availabilty demands....
Salaries are probably at least as big an expense.

True. Efficiency has always been a concern.

Until recently, we mostly used FreeBSD ;-)
Now, a lot of Ubuntu is creeping in...

THB, I'm trying to make-up my mind on OpenStack.
We already have a large VMware installation - and due to the way our business works (customers work with us and the servers we provide for them for years instead of months or weeks, almost no "peak load" stuff that requires dynamic provisioning...), I feel we don't really need a scale-out platform (which OpenStack seems to be) but rather a virtualization-platform.
If we were to implement OpenStack, we'd have to build in parallel:

• -a new storage platform (like ceph or gluster, which we know nothing about, obviously)
• -a new backup platform (equivalent of veeam?)
• -most likely a separated switching (going 10G)
• -and probably duplicate a lot more things that are on VMware currently

Add on top of that the fact that it usually requires a lot of time and effort to get anything built "right" (and seldom on the 1st attempt), I doubt we'd make a lot of savings over VMware even in the medium term.
Even more concerning in my view is the fact that most of the corporate "backers" of OpenStack sell public "Cloud-Services" themselves - we have already learned the hard way (via a different "cloud" product) that when for these companies the need to choose between customers of such a public service and those with a "private cloud" installation arises, they will most likely tend to favor their public cloud customers (or whichever business is bigger).
Coupled with that comes my prediction that OpenStack will "fragment" rather sooner rather than later, with each of its backers offering some sort of "enhanced" ("enterprise") version (with stability patches and some additional features) that may or may not be a bit cheaper overall than VMware (all things taken into account), leaving you with a solution that works "almost like VMware, for almost the same price".
Am I too pessimistic?