This week, Sprint no longer sees the Light, Walmart converts your DVD to nothing and Pakistan wants to put a plug in their tube.
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.
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.
Walmart, the world's largest everything it would seem, has been feeling the push to get involved in the social craze. For a retailer, such as Walmart, the reason to want to get involved is the same as Google's reasons: data. There is no better way to find out about your customers than to spy on their online usage.
The FBI are apparently baffled by new technology. In this case, they cannot seem to figure out how to get past the lock screen on an Android smartphone. Why would the FBI be outsmarted by a small piece of protection software and why can't they just ask one of their CSI buddies? Great questions!
This story is so strange that I'll just jump right into it. Pig farms are exploding. I put it in bold so you wouldn't have to have a double-take to make sure you read it right. In the Midwest, manure pits are filled with a new foam that is simply dynamite!
It would appear that this week the end to a very short but very tragic story has been written. LightSquared, the company that Sprint had announced a LTE network partnership with in October, has lost its never-existent partner. Sprint has announced that it has ended its planned partnership. This is a decision that we have expected to hear considering the problems that LightSquared has had and the money that Sprint has poured into its other 4G partner, Clearwire.
Even with the Wii U being released this year, Microsoft says the company will not be following suit by releasing their next Xbox console and hopes to get one more year out of the Xbox 360's life. Sources have reported that the Xbox team has confidence that the console will continue selling at a record pace, especially when it's paired with the Kinect.
There are a lot of companies in the forefront of technology news that consistently live on or over the line of ethical conduct. Whether it be Google using their search position to marginalize or steal from their competition or Apple using near slave labor to produce their products, we live in a world where ethics and technology seem to not work together.
We have another disc-to-digital story for you this week but I promise it's not like Sony selling CDs online, or the tried-but-failed Zediva or, our favorite new broadcast streaming service, Aereo.