Editor’s letter: It being just after Memorial Day and all, “many InfoWorld readers are having their patriotism tested by a topic that hits close to home: offshoring,” explains Steve Fox in Is outsourcing getting too expensive? “Wouldn’t it be ironic if the same economic forces that once made offshoring inevitable could someday make it impractical? It could happen.” Columnist’s corner: First, a joke (sort of anyway). How many techs does it take to turn on a PC? The short answer is three can do it, but in three hours. “It was a Monday morning. A user called in unable to get his computer to boot up,” writes our Off the Record author. Two hours, a pair of theories and a junior floor tech later and, “the dead PC remained dead.” Next the IT support manager dispatched a senior tech to the scene. Perhaps a resurrection was in order. Reality check: Two trends are currently unfolding that impact people’s relationship with information, explains Ephraim Schwartz, in Dumbing down and smartening up via the Web. One grabs attention, the other moves it toward deeper sets of knowledge. “The scarier trend is what I call the dumbing down of information to accommodate what some are calling Digital Natives,” he writes. “On the smartening up side, I see the concept of social networking creating a growing pool of people who have access to and thus are aware of far more information than ever before.” The news beat: BEA Systems tackles event-driven architecture with a product ripe for SOA in Java environments, BEA WebLogic Event Server. Toshiba says it will use an AMD chip in a low-end laptop. And Microsoft claims to have sold more than a million Zune music players. Technology Industry