Samsung Makes Microsoft Surface Available to Consumers...Finally - The UpStream

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Jon is a F5 Live co-host and UpStream contributor as well as the Chief Cash Officer of PLuGHiTz Corporation. We don't know how he wears so many hats so well or how he still finds time to feed his need for all things tech but some questions are best left unanswered. If you're up for a challenge go find him on Xbox Live @shinobiJon and if you figure him out...let us know.

Allante - also well known as Wolff - is the newest member and co-host for PLuGHiTz Live! Radio. A gifted artist, he is usually found drawing up a character or two or sketching up whatever comes to mind. Do not think that he is not a hardcore gamer because he is about as hardcore as it gets! His favorites range from fighting games to RPGs, adventure and even a racing game here and there. Fighting games are his forte and he relays this message for all who oppose: You mess with the Wolff and you get the fangs!

XB360 - Enigmatic Wolff

PSN - Tsukuyomi_Okami

Avram's been in love with PCs since he played original Castle Wolfenstein on an Apple II+. Before joining Tom's Hardware, for 10 years, he served as Online Editorial Director for sister sites Tom's Guide and Laptop Mag, where he programmed the CMS and many of the benchmarks. When he's not editing, writing or stumbling around trade show halls, you'll find him building Arduino robots with his son and watching every single superhero show on the CW.

There isn't much to say about PlayStation Home that hasn't been said before. For most, it's just a big space that feels like you're the only one in it. The movie theater seems to only play "C" movies and the slushies at the ice rink are luke warm at best. After three redesigns, it appeared that Sony was really just missing the mark. However, the PlayStation Home may have some life still left in it, or it at least will go down kicking and screaming.

Back in August, Apple and Samsung got into a heated debate about the originality of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. The injunction Apple asked for was upheld in September during the patent litigation hearings in Germany. So, in Germany, you were unable to purchase a Galaxy Tab. That is, until this week.

For about a week or so, since the discovery that the latest iPhone had more problems than the Apple team knew about, the Cupertino camp has been relatively quiet. With the iPhone announcement event being a little lackluster after the untimely resignation of Steve Jobs, a lot of people were left wondering what else could go wrong for Apple. There were some holes that needed to be patched or filled and it seemed that they had no idea who was going to step in.

At the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this year, the staff at PLuGHiTz Live! Radio was able to see Microsoft show off their new Microsoft Surface 2.0 technology which yielded major improvements over Surface 1.0. Their trademarked PixelSense technology allows the LCD display to recognize over 50 points of contact at once and the demonstration at the Microsoft Keynote ended with 20 fingers simultaneously bombarding the Samsung SUR40 LCD screen for about 30 seconds with seemingly no lag or response and rendering issues. They also made the announcement that Surface 2.0 would be available sometime late in 2011 which we had completely forgotten about until the recent announcement for the pre-order that is now open to 23 countries including the U.S. and Canada.

We knew that the dashboard updates that rolled out just a couple of months ago were only the beginning. In October, Xbox announced their new video lineup, complete with content for just about everyone. So with the beta for the new dashboard update wrapping up, there had to be more features announced right around the corner.

Massimo Marchiori is an Italian mathematician who played in big role in what Google currently uses as their page rank system. Back in 1996 he presented his Hyper Search algorithm at a conference that was attended by Larry Page and well, the rest is history, until now. Marchiori has plans to create his own search engine that is not intended to be "better" than Google but "different" and really useful to people.

The Google Music Beta is now up and running to the delight of Google and it's partners, EMI Group, Universal Music and Sony Music. It's not certain that actual users will welcome the service with open arms yet but we can be sure that it won't be so warmly welcomed by Amazon, Apple and Microsoft who now have to deal with another contender in the $6.8 billion dollar online music industry.