It depends on whether a machine is one on which I do work for which I get paid, or not. My main workstation, which is the source of my income, warrants a very conservative update approach. I was very slow in leaving XP, and with a mature, stable Windows 7 environment, I'm in no hurry at all to adopt another version of Windows. Yeah, like everyone else I've seen the popups inviting me to upgrade to Windows 10. You first. I can't afford to be down while I figure out why things aren't working or figuring out where Microsoft hid certain buttons this time.

I will sometimes install a new version on a spare machine just to see where technology is heading, and acquaint myself with what I will eventually have to deal with, but that's a lower priority. I'm not really interested in spending half my life doing upgrades and figuring out what broke.

Hm. That sounds like grounds to find a new server team.

Yes. Outsourced IT services is a double edged sword. On the one hand, a botched assignment can provide business possibilities for people who can do a better job. (Or, at very least, communicate better.) On the other hand, the botched work can instead be handed off to already snowed-under local personnel.

Yes. I wrote "cheapest" first, and then changed it to the more ...shall we say "businessly correct", "cost-effective".

In our case, it's more likely that the data will be leaked to our competitors. Which raises a different question -- a *lot* of our company confidential data is now going through or being stored on "cloud" services. In some cases, those services are supplying both us and our largest competitors. At what point does it become, um, cost-effective to discretely sell a company's data to a competitor? I mean, it's all there, on the same server pool.

Good point. Locals are still going to be necessary.

...that the company will buy IT as a service from the most cost-effective supplier, most current IT personnel will be laid off (a few will be repurposed), and then users will discover shortly after cutover that calling the (now overseas) helpdesk has suddenly become an exercise in frustration, because of the language barrier and because the helpdesk person often knows less about computers and about the environment than the customer, because the business model dictates that you can pull people off the street, hand them a stack of procedures, and they become IT personnel. (This works as well as you imagine.)

Management and team leaders will beg the remaining IT management not to make their users call the helpdesk, in vain.

Due to lack of effective IT services and the necessity to actually get work done, little pools of IT start to pop up around the company. It starts as a file share on someone's PC, and then an off-the-books PC becoming a dedicated resource (there's a rogue EXSi server not three feet from me) and developers start to remember old admin and dba skills. After awhile, the company IT infrastructure is still used for no-brainer stuff like mail and large storage appliances and relatively static work like billing is still done on big, enterprise-class machines, but more and more anything that needs to be flexible, or resources that need to respond rapidly to user needs, are done surreptitiously, under the table, with the funds being disguised as other thing.

Then, when development itself is outsourced, it's left to the "development managers" and "offshore interface personnel" to maintain the still-used local resources, plus, usually, additional personnel to try to find some use for the code produced by those offshore resources, who have no real context of what the code is being used for.

(Parenthetically, the problem is not confined to IT. A company of which I have experience who has outsourced their accounting, still doesn't realize that after three years the offshore accountants still don't know the difference between California and Canada, and think the transaction must be correct if they don't get an error when they hit "return". The remaining 10% of retained accountants are kept busy correcting mistakes and doing the work over again.)

Anyway, the point being, some IT people don't choose to fade away, they go underground. They find that users can be very thankful of a helpful person who can communicate well and has knowledge of the company and what the user is trying to accomplish. Who isn't following a script but genuinely trying to help, with the expertise to do so. I have a title that sounds like a different job, but I'm still doing admin and customer support. When I'm not at my regular job, I have a side business providing home support for people who are tired of "I am being here for helping you turn it off and back on again".

So yeah, I guess IT has changed.

That's a good answer. What I meant, though, was why would NASA bother to fake a mission to Pluto?

I was thinking more Robot Wars, only the robots fly.

(Or a former basketball player...)

Wasn't this the plot of iZombie, like, three weeks ago? At very least, this is old news.

But but.... WHY??

Ok, I like a lot of Neil Young's songs, but ... in my experience the quality of the streaming service is mostly the device producing the music, not the amount of information in the stream itself. In other words, if you're playing it on the mono iphone speaker, yeah it'll sound crappy. Plug in a set of trendy white buds... yeah still crappy. (Who thought ear buds were a high quality musical experience?) Plug in a decent set of over-ear headphones... and, assuming your bandwidth isn't being extremely "shaped", well that's pretty ok.

Besides, if he's really into music quality, why did he allow his music to be published on commercial CDs at all? The sound quality of a CD is ok, but not stellar.

> So you think it is far more appropriate for them to have to develop a nonstandard plug rather than trust in the honesty and decency of the citizens of the UK?

Wait, we ARE talking about charging an iphone?

Besides, the security guard or whatever she was needs some validation in her life, and making a stink about a few shillings of electricity and seeing the perp arrested probably made her feel all warm and fuzzy on the walk home to her studio flat and 13 cats.

I'd say that "happy birthday to you" (written in 1893) sorta qualifies as a dinosaur.