F5 Live: Refreshing Technology (Audio)

This week, we're at ROBOTICON Tampa Bay 2015. ROBOTICON is a FIRST Robotics showcase competition involving teams from Junior FIRST Lego League (Jr. FLL), FIRST Lego League (FLL), FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) and FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC). Scott and Daniele talk with members of teams, program partners, sponsors and organizers.

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.

Daniele is a student at Florida Polytechnic University who is studying Computer Science with a concentration in Cyber Security. In High School, she was introduced to the science and technology world through the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), a robotics foundation where students of varying ages can compete through tasks that their robots perform. With help from mentors she met through FIRST, she became interested in programming and developing. Today, Daniele is a special events host for F5 Live: Refreshing Technology and PLuGHiTz Live Special Events and a co-host for both The New Product Launchpad and FIRST Looks.

This week, we are at Mizucon 2015 with the 3000 Brigade, talking about their upcoming show with 3000 Brigade Podcast host Trey Davis and much of the rest of the cast.

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!

Trey was born into a tech career. Instead of going to summer camp as a child, Trey spent summers working at the local news station with his father, an Emmy award winning news director. He honed his audio skills singing in a band, and later worked as a lighting and audio technician for a theme park. Within two years he became the lead technician for the entire park, which included a fully operational CNN sponsored TV station, a full theater and a circus. Later, he became the lead lighting and audio tech for one of the Ringling Bros. circuses, with a stint as a clown for the pure joy of performing. It was at Ringling that he met his wife, who he calls the most beautiful, loving, and funny person he has ever met, and who is also the creator of the 3000 Brigade. Trey was a performer with the 3000 Brigade for nine shows, as well as hosting the 3000 Brigade Podcast, while still doing media on the side. Trey currently edits and cleans audio for PLuGHiTz shows and has also been a special events host.

Erin Hurst has been cosplaying for almost 20 years, but don't call her out on it. It just makes her feel old. As a complete and total drama nerd she found a way to bring her passion for theater and cosplay together forming the 3000 Brigade, aka 3KB. Erin has been writing, directing, and acting in what has become the largest active cosplay performance troupe in the country. The troupe began in 2007 and this year marks a decade worth of 3KB performances. She is extremely grateful for her stage manager/costume coordinator Jessica Koesters and technical director JoAnn Minieri.

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.

This week, Xbox stays true to the 360, Star Wars might be up for a re-release and AVG makes users think twice about their products.

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.

This week, the newest update to Apple's mobile operating system was released to the public, bringing iOS 9 to existing devices (iPhone 4S and higher). The update, which Apple says is mostly centered around stability and bug fixes, does have a number of enhancements that make it a good install, but it has not been all roses for Apple and its users. Let's cover the different aspects so you can make an informed decision.

Even though the Xbox One is well past its freshman year, Microsoft is still committed to the Xbox 360. With new preview programs, free games and other enhancements, both the current-gen and old-gen consoles are well worth their value. The Xbox team is looking to add to that value by giving Xbox 360 users more abilities and linking the console to the Windows 10 world.

With the sensitive topic of data privacy and protection being so prevalent as of late, would you ever expect an anti-virus and Internet security company to breach consumers' trust of said data and privacy? This week, we might have seen it all, as AVG is now in the hot seat for their latest privacy policy, which openly states that it will sell your information.

It has been a long time since the original Star Wars films were available to the public. Because Lucas cannot leave a good thing alone, it seems like every few years he releases another special edition, with changes to the graphics, the characters, the environments and, in one annoying case, the story of the film. Well, it appears that Lucas, or possibly Disney, in their infinite wisdom, are considering re-releasing the original theatrical cuts of the films.

This week, Verizon gets social with its media, Amazon drops it low on its tablets and Google adds more fiber to 3 cities' diets.

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.

When most people see $50 tablets, they usually assume it's a cheap, piece of junk Android that's probably infected with a ton of malware. But what if a big name company were to release a super affordable tablet? Enter Amazon. The company announced this week that it has plans to put out a Fire-branded tablet for this holiday season.

With the announcement of the new Apple TV, Apple has decided to try and compete in videogames in the living room. Based on what was shown on-stage, Apple has no chance of competing with Microsoft, Sony or even Steam, but they do have a chance of competing with Nintendo. In fact, with the motion-controller built into the remote, Apple seems to be going after Nintendo directly.

When it comes to learning about your every activity, Google and their new parent company have lots of options. Between Search, what's left of Google+, Photos, Android, Chrome and Docs, plus the Nest product line, the company can easily learn a lot about your activities online and offline. The problem with all of this data collection is that it is indirect.

In January of 2014, Verizon purchased OnCue from Intel, the company's never-released media streaming service. In the wake of the failure of their partnership with Redbox for Instant Streaming, Verizon has decided to go solo.

This week, Apple might be crossing over to new platforms, Hulu goes commercial free and Machinima pays the price for Xbox ads.

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.

The differences between the way Apple does business and how everyone else in the industry do business are well documented. For most of the Mac's existence, the largest software developers for the platform were Microsoft and Adobe, with Apple barely making the list. Microsoft has produced Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even a version of Internet Explorer for a period of time. Adobe has produced what is currently called the Creative Cloud, which includes products like Photoshop and Premiere. Even Google produces Chrome for the Mac.

When a new product launches, one of the most important things to do is get good marketing to the world. While television, web and mobile ads are good, what is better is positive content. The best way to get this is from tech blogs and websites, but sometimes that is not possible. For example, when Microsoft released the Xbox One, many media outlets misunderstood the platform or wanted to see it fail and published negative content instead.

A few years ago, ICANN, the organization that oversees the overall Internet protocols, proposed a slew of new top-level domains. TLDs are the suffix at the end of a website. Most commonly you will see .com, .net, .tv, etc., but there are many others, and new ones are being added all the time.

After years of customers asking for it, and months of speculation, Hulu has finally confirmed what we have all wanted - advertising-free streaming. What was once called Hulu Plus has been renamed "Limited Commercials" and will remain unchanged at the $7.99 price point. Coming in at $4 more, "No Commercials" will mostly live up to its name for $11.99 per month. In addition, you can add Showtime content to either plan.

This week, Samsung pushes ads to the phone, Google forgets about forgotten articles and it's Popcorn Time!!

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.

Advertising has always existed in electronics as a way to overcome the large costs of product development. Obviously, the most common place we see them are on websites and in free apps, though we are beginning to see them in other places. Earlier this year, HTC introduced advertising into the notification system in Android, bringing a lot of negative attention to the already struggling company.

Almost exactly 1 year ago, Nintendo announced the 2DS, a handheld designed to be less expensive than its larger 3DS and 3DS XL siblings. It removed the 3D capabilities, as well as the hinge, making it a dual-screen tablet design, rather than the better-known clamshell design.

Google is in the middle of an Inception-style moment. When the European Union ordered Google, Bing and Yahoo to offer the ability to request content removal from the search index, a lot of places wrote about the order. It was, after all, a strange requirement of a company whose whole business model revolves around knowning everything people want to know. Since then, many articles have been written about requests that have been made through the system

When RIAA took offense to BitTorrent, while they obviously didn't understand what the company does, they did have something right: it can be misused. One of the products that is misusing the protocol is a site called Popcorn Time. If you have not encountered the site you're in luck. Using the BitTorrent protocol, Popcorn Time allows you to stream television and movies with or without legal access.

This week, Google knows its Alphabet, the NFL uses the power of the Surface and Crackdown 3 uses the power of the cloud.

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.

The NFL and Microsoft have had a bit of a tumultuous partnership. A couple of years ago, the full push behind Microsoft's Surface as the technology that powered on-field devices ended up with announcers calling them iPads. This led to Microsoft issuing a statement and demanding all personnel know what the computers were actually called. This seemed to have fixed the problem, with NFL teams adopting more and more Microsoft technology, and even venturing into the virtual reality world. Now, the partnership between the National Football League and the team behind Windows has been extended even further, with new things coming for the fan, player and coach.

As we fully move into current-gen gaming on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, we're finally starting to see the consoles pushed more and more. For the Xbox One, the Azure cloud was supposed to make playing games more immersive and dynamic, however fans seemed to hate innovation when this feature set was announced back at E3 2013. Because of this, many games pulled back on using cloud services to improve gaming experiences, however some first-party titles were still taking advantage of the superior performance. This week, Reagent Games stamped their approval on cloud-backed gaming as well, saying that Crackdown 3 will be so intense, your only bottleneck will be your Internet service provider.

Corporations change their names all the time. Usually, the change comes about when a company is in trouble and restructuring its operations. Research in Motion became BlackBerry during a restructuring that was intended to minimize other divisions. Tandy Corporation became RadioShack Corporation when they shed their other businesses, like Tandy Leather, to focus on their retail business, which was at an all-time high. What almost never happens is a company changing their name when the old name is highly recognizable.

You remember Columbia House, right? You know, the website and mail-order service where you could get 13 records, tapes, CDs or DVDs for JUST $1? As a kid, I thought this was the coolest and best deal ever, and I remember seeing those commercials on TV, in the mail and online for as far back as I can remember. And even though some of their marketing tactics were downright shady, it pains me to report that another nostalgic company has fallen.

This week, Verizon loses its contracts, BitTorrent keeps its cool with RIAA and Microsoft kills it at Gamescom.

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.

The US wireless market has always been a bit of an oddity in the global wireless industry. Much of the world operates on the premise that you are responsible for purchasing your phone, the US wireless companies have long paid the cost of your phone up-front in exchange for you promising to stick with them for 2 years. This allowed you to spread out the cost of the device over the length of the contract, meaning you wouldn't have to pay $700 for a new iPhone (excluding the first generation).

It has been no secret the PlayStation 4 has continually outsold the Xbox One. Microsoft is not unaccustomed to this position, having been outsold in both of their previous generations, only to gain the upper hand as they improved and added to the platform. For example, Xbox 360 sales really took off after the NXE (New Xbox Experience) in 2009. The Xbox 360 ended up being the undisputed leader of its generation.

After the Ellen Pao disaster, Reddit has been working to implement the new policies announced at her resignation. The process has not been a particularly simple one, as backlash from some of the communities on the site has been vocal. Fortunately, those communities have been a small percentage of the overall userbase.

It has been quite a while since the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA, has made any moves that required discussion. Over the past few weeks, however, the industry trade group has begun sending out letters to organizations that they believe to be actively harmful to the music industry as a whole. First they contacted CBS complaining that the company provides software that promotes the theft of otherwise legal music.

This week, the Super Bowl commercializes the Internet, Razer buys Ouya for the name and Uber tries to hook up with old people.

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.

Uber may be a company who doesn't know exactly who they are, but they do seem to know what they need: drivers. As the company continues to try and expand the number of markets in which they operate, the only way they can support this is with enough drivers for the demand for rides. The problem they have encountered, however, is a general disinterest in their target demographic for people to use their own vehicles to drive others around.

Ouya hasn't been in the news much lately, mostly because the company failed to gain momentum after a less than stellar Kickstarter launch. However, the $99 Android console has made headlines again as gaming company Razer announced that it acquired the console maker.

When LinkedIn had their initial public offering, they proved social could be successful - something that Facebook and Groupon were not able to do. Since then, however, LinkedIn has never really shined, though they have not failed, either; they have lived right in the middle, uninteresting results. There have been no major gains nor losses in terms of user count, revenue or profit.

There's a big change brewing for the upcoming Super Bowl in February. No, it isn't going to be actual musicians for the halftime show or the introduction of self-inflating footballs. Instead, it'll be in the advertising and commercials themselves. CBS has announced that for the first time ever, the company will be live-streaming all national Super Bowl ads through its video-streaming services.