My father-in-law has a 2009 Lexus RX 350 hybrid and the in-dash system is already showing signs of obsolescence. The most glaring thing is actually the built-in GPS. It doesn't take long for those maps to get out of date and guess what Toyota's solution is to upgrade the maps? Replace the computer. It would cost nearly $2000 to get updated maps loaded into his car. Toyota didn't think to have some simple way of upgrading the mapping data via USB or anything. They have to take the dashboard apart and install a new computer to upgrade the maps. That's just stupid.

Is anyone else amazed by the sheer scale of an operation like that? Not just Foxconn itself (which I know is huge) but the effort and cost of installing 40,000 robots.

Any idea what the small distorted square shape is on the left 1/3 of the screen at 38 seconds? Looks like some unfinished effects work. It moves along with one of the dwarves (dwarfs?).

The university I work for has developed our own home-grown learning management system. The beta is going...so-so and we're supposed to drop-kick Blackboard in 2 months and go wholesale with our own LMS. As a tech I'm somewhat concerned.

Yep. I got my CES badge at the airport 2 years ago. It was really convenient. They had a table setup by the baggage claim. The line stayed short since they generally only had people come up when a plane landed so it kind of went in surges that were mitigated by the time it took to get off the plane. Worked really well.

I work IT in education. The general attitude at the institutions I've worked for has been that if you end up putting in extra time for some reason you can make it up by pulling half days or leaving early without taking vacation time. Education may not pay the best but the benefits sure are nice. On top of liberal policies, free tuition, and excellent health insurance, I also get 6 weeks vacation time, and 2 weeks sick time each year (and they roll over!).

Personally I don't care. I have to care at work - half of my job is ensuring license compliance with some extremely expensive engineering software.

I prefer to listen to air molecules vibrating. Sometimes they sound AWESOME!

I'm one of the people that 3D is absolutely painful for (take THAT grammar nazis!). I'm already prone to migraines and the 3D just makes it worse. When I went to see Avatar in 3D I preemptively popped 2 Excedrin and still ended up with a mild headache by the end.

Just give it to Angela on "Bones." She'll just happen to have recently finished writing some program that will figure it out in under an hour based on a grainy picture of the note.

Woah - I had no idea. I always thought the hindu gods were all different (like ancient Greek, Roman, or Egyptian gods). You have taught me something today good sir.

I'm a Mormon and that is the most awesome explanation for the theistic beliefs of different religions I've ever heard.

Although I think the Mormon view would be more like God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit each have their own accounts, but they all play alliance holy paladins on the same server in the same guild.

Dish Network DVR, HDTV, Wii, PS3, Wii controller charger, wireless access point, Mac Mini, 2 external hard drives.

This is just a "status quo" article. There are occasional spending upticks centered around events (like Y2K) but we typically get our marching orders from the C-level people and are expected to just get it done.

I work for a large university (32k students) and we've got roughly 30 people taking care of about 4,000 computers, 10 important web servers (there are a whole bunch more that no one cares about), Active Directory and Novell Netware (we're in the process of dumping Novell), Groupwise, Magic Service Desk, VMWare, network file storage, multiple POS systems, and a whole bunch of backend stuff that makes all of these systems talk to each other for authentication purposes. That 30 people includes all of our support personnel, network admins, AD admin, programmers, DBA guys, and our email admin. We're also moving from Netware to AD, and from Groupwise to Exchange. If you look at just our desktop support personnel we've got 13 full-time technicians to do desktop level support for 2,000 employees and 32,000 students. We're all looking at this as an opportunity to get good experience to put on the resume and then jump ship for decent money.

Part of that need for maintenance is a need to have good people to do that maintenance. We finally got the school to cough up funding for IT personnel training (we were paying for our own training/certifications), now we just want to get paid more than the high school dropouts working for facilities.