Today's Forecast...Blizzcon! - 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.

Josh has come from the Brazilian wilds to bring yet another perspective on the gaming industry as well as today's up-and-coming technology. You may have seen him at GameStop over the past two years, or if you're a lover of Largo High School Productions, you have seen him up on stage doing his thing the last 4 years. On occasion, you can catch him on Xbox Live mowing down zombies in Left 4 Dead or making it rain on Madden 2010.

Have you ever owned a book that you liked so much that you wanted everyone you know to read it and you lent that book to everyone so they could? In the new digital world, that concept has become difficult or impossible. If you read books on the Kindle app on your Samsung Epic, you probably aren't lending your phone out so your friend can read your eBook.

With the WinPho 7 OS being described as an experience comparable to Android and iOS4 the next big step for Microsoft is to put on something sexy to get the attention of the 250,000 plus app developers out there. Take a quick look at the major players in the smart phone OS industry and you will find the usual suspects, Google, Apple, RIM, Palm, and Microsoft, again.

As you may or may not know, Lionhead Studio's game Fable III is about to hit the shelves this Tuesday. I have some good news for those of you that are planning on buying the game and some kind of good news for those of you that pre-ordered the game. First, the kind of good news. If you were wise enough to pre-order Fable III you will get an exclusive chance to make another mark on the world of Albion, by creating your very own villager! The only problem is that they (Lionshead) have been having some technical difficulties when it comes to creating said villager. While there have been a few slight detours here and there it seems as though it is up and running again, but we will only be able to tell if the character creator really works once the game launches this Tuesday. In case you are wondering if you can still get your hands on a redeemable code to creator a villager, the good news is that you can; just make sure you make your character by the expiration date of November 23rd.

It seems like I can't go one week without Steve Jobs finding some imaginative way to say and/or do something that I feel compelled to write about for a variety of personal reasons that originate from a dark and scary place with enchanted creatures. Similar adjectives may be used by some to describe Jobs himself and if you consider that blasphemy then this article probably isn't for you.

I am officially tired of writing about Apple but I couldn't let this one go. This week Steve Jobs announced a few things that will be new to the Apple universe and the Interwebz have gone nuts. First, the new MacBook Air (the netbook that Steve Jobs said was too expensive and a useless piece of technology a little while back) will not come with a Mac OSX restore DVD. Instead it will come with a flash drive containing the restore software.

If you thought Intel's stack-dropping acquisition of McAfee for $7.68 billion was a lot, you'll drop your jaw at this one. The world's largest chip manufacturer said earlier this week that it will spend somewhere between $6 and $8 billion on factory upgrades in the US, which will create anywhere from 800 to 1,000 manufacturing jobs.

This week Blizzard fans everywhere spent copious amounts of money to travel across the country to attend Blizzcon. I am here to weed through all of the fluff, to bring you some information that you might be interested in hearing. I am sure some of you out there are still anticipating Blizzard's third installment in the Diablo series and it just so happen that we recieved a lot of info regarding the highly anticipated game. Ranging from information about one of the new classes known as the Demon Hunter, or the fact that Diablo III will indeed be featuring Player Versus Player content (OMGZ AWESOME). If you wanna see a more in depth analysis of the pvp you can go here and check it out or if

Earlier this month, Blizzard decided to start Halloween early, by spooking all of their StarCraft II players with bans and suspensions on 5,000 accounts that were cheating or modifying the game to get an edge. A week later, the company also decided to attack the people in charge of creating cheat programs for the game.

Google is still in hot water with regards to their infamous Street View cars and their intrusive WiFi probing. There has been some speculation as to how severe the intrusion was and in a Google blog post by the senior vice president of engineering and research this past May, he went on to say that the data collected were only fragments, despite the fact that no one inside Google had analyzed the data at that time. Since then the data has been analyzed and Alan Eustace concluded, "That while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords." I can also imagine they know where you keep your porn. Of course they want to delete this data as soon as possible but there is still no word that it has been destroyed. The newest controversy in this matter centers around a statement made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Here is a scary prospect for you - Apple might want to buy Facebook. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital has been trying to figure out what Apple is planning for the $51 billion they are holding in cash and this is what he has come to. When asked about the money, Steve Jobs said,

Netflix has been having a good couple of years. They have successfully shut down Hollywood Video and turned Blockbuster into a kiosk company competing with the RedBox. Recently, however, CEO Reed Hastings realized and said that they are no longer a DVD company, they are a streaming company that just happens to offer DVDs almost as a bi-product. He said,

Hulu has implemented their Hulu Plus service (officially in beta) since June for $9.95/month, but now we are being told by a couple sources that the company is considering reducing their price by $5, to $4.95/month.