It depends on people you hire to operate those IT departments within small operation. If you get an energetic "jack of all trades" IT guy who has very little social life, but huge passion for technology, then he will create a home for himself within organization and maintain that "must solve each problem individually" approach. He will attract similar people to himself and with small group will be able to maintain flexibility, low budgeting and high productivity. I'll admit that success of that business model strongly depends on "who you hire", since maintaining system of checks/balances for IT in a small organization is somewhat hard.

zero0ne, I was responding to the guy who said "We did that in our organization. Then we fired them all and outsourced our IT."

In regards to OP's post... Any IT needs to be separated in their own department to create accountability as you've mentioned. It's a lot easier to know who to go to for any technology oriented issues and those people often will know that if something breaks, they'll be looked at for solutions. That "knowledge" promotes IT guys to think long term when they implement various fixes and roll out new systems into production environment.

I knew a company that did just that... Outsourced company milked that company for money for a few years, while making short term decisions (often bad ones). Then, one day things started to break constantly and consultant was hired to locate source of the problems. Later, that IT was brought back "in house" to avoid making messes like that in the future. People that work under same roof as your company, tend to care a little more about your operations. This is just one example out of many, where short term thinking of cutting IT spending ended up costing company a lot more in a long run.

And most of those people stayed with XP till Windows7 came out... A lot of businesses did the same thing, simply stayed on XP and skipped Vista entirely. At work we are already making plans to skip Windows 8 unless Microsoft gives us ability to make our workstations more business oriented rather then having them look like a bunch of touchscreen home PC's.

I am quite sure that not all of it is what we call "physical" servers. It's most likely a cluster of beefy hardware running a ton of VM's. As that hardware becomes obsolete, engineers will run less VM's on it and later move it out of main production environment to handle less stressful tasks. It's common now, seeing several servers (48Cores, 512GB ram) running a few hundred virtual servers. So it will take a long time before that hardware will be completely thrown away...

LOL, that video never gets old. :) Sad thing is that the whole "Submarine Aircraft Carrier" thing was done before plenty of times in the past. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12u-ppn_Q3M --- Japanese Submarine Aircraft Carrier
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_aircraft_carrier

No Russians had underwater launch capable missiles for a long time. The one that's currently being used is USSR era R-29RM Sineva SS-N-23 missile and will be replaced by Bulava missile. Bulava missile was strongly pushed up in research only due to active expansion of NATO bases and missile shield construction plans in Eastern Europe. Either way, as soon as missile shield plans were announced, Russia started dropping billions into anti missile shield projects such as Bulava and Topol-M to maintain nuclear deterrent.

Simple! That's because all of them were still under warranty!!!! :)

Last I recall there was already a craft with nuclear propulsion launched a while back, not to mention a good share of nuclear powered satellites are already up in orbit. Space is full of radioactive particles, so it's not a big deal.

I do agree with Rei. NASA needs to fund research a little better at this time, instead of trying to waste available resources on useless missions. If they would just push technology research just a few years, they could have a lot of options to choose from to accomplish their goals a lot more efficiently. I realize that by going to Moon, it could increase public interest and potentially gain additional funding for technology research related projects, yet it can also backfire in many ways which could set NASA back later on.