This week, Call of Duty decides to be half the game it used to be, Australlia plays a real version of Second Life when it comes to Facebook friends and Pandora pays artists pennies because of the government.
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!
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.
Last week, Google was charged with antitrust in Russia. The charge was in regards to how Google treats its own services in Android, and how they force their policies on manufacturers through contracts. The way they best enforce these policies is by denying access to the Play Store on devices that don't give preferential treatment to Google's services, even above the manufacturer's.
It was a shock to many of us when Activision announced support for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in their upcoming Call of Duty: Black Ops III. It seemed likely that the end of AAA titles on legacy hardware was a thing of the past, yet here we had Activision promising a flagship product still in development for older hardware. There was always a catch coming, though, we just didn't know what it might be.
Many years ago, a US judge deemed that Facebook "friends" were not real friends, and could not be admitted in court. That ruling made sense, especially for the time, when friends would have included celebrities and the like, with Facebook having not implemented personality Pages quite the way they exist today. Either way, even today, many of us can list off people in our Facebook "friends" list that we do not actually know. Personally, I have dozens, and that's okay.
It's official: streaming is an important part of the music industry. In fact, it recently overtook CDs in overall revenue making it the business model to beat. However, not everyone is happy with this change in the way business is done. Take, for example, Taylor Swift, who very publicly removed her music from streaming services with an annoying message, and attacked Apple when they re-launched Beats Music as Apple Music.