This week, the big ISPs hate smaller competition, Valve adds new support to its SteamOS and Netflix doubles down on content, but might block you from watching it.
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.
With the intense partnership that Microsoft and Intel have had over the past few decades, combined with Intel's entrance into mobile processors, it has always been a bit baffling that the legacy of Wintel has not been available on Windows Phone. When Windows 10 was announced with its common core, it was widely expected that support for Intel's processors would be a natural inclusion in Windows 10 Mobile from day 1. As it turned out, initial support was available.
Valve's "gaming console" Linux-based operating system SteamOS, has not been successful, either commercially or with hardware partners producing Steam Machines. In fact, many manufacturers are skeptical of the platform for a number of reasons. The primary reason for the skepticism might be the lack of games available on the platform, but a leading concern is the lack of hardware that can be used with it.
In West Virginia, citizens have grown tired of private Internet service providers skirting the line of acceptable Internet speeds, reliability and consistency. In some parts of the state, there is simply no Internet solution at all outside of satellite services. In response to the restlessness, people have rallied to push for a publicly funded fiber-based Internet service. They also have legislators pushing for the infrastructure to be built to allow this to happen. Needless to say, the big private companies are completely unhappy with this idea and are looking to shut it down.
From a consumer point of view, one of the annoyances about Netflix is that, if you are not in the USA, there is a lot of content missing. This is because many content producers license their content either exclusively for the US market, or have different streaming agreements for other countries. This means that a non-American will be missing some of the best content that Netflix has to offer.
Last week, Hulu struck a deal with Sony Pictures to add more movies and big-name content to the platform. Not to be outdone, Netflix announced this week that it will be spending a large amount of its $5 billion programming budget for 2016 on children and family content, to further cement itself at the top video-streaming service.