This week, Microsoft is seeing double, Epic Games' licensing is getting Unreal, and Google is in the crosshairs.
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.
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.
2019 began the era of the folding phone. Samsung took a side by side approach to the concept, while Motorola took a top to bottom approach. While both were different, they were variations on the same theme: one piece of bendable screen. Microsoft also announced an entry in the folding phone category, but they took a very different approach to the concept. Rather than trying to bend glass and LCD panels, Microsoft's Surface Duo decided to take a page from the Kyocera Echo's book and simply have two distinct screens.
Over the past year or so, Epic Games has been adjusting the way it does business. Much of the company's new focus has been based around a philosophy of helping developers to keep more of the money they make. First was the Epic Games Store, which broke from the traditional 30 percent revenue sharing model in favor of only a 12 percent fee. Earlier this year, the company launched Epic Games Publishing, which followed the same model. Full ownership of intellectual property, possible full funding, and a smaller than normal licensing fee.
Over the past few years, two technology terms referring to tax have become popular. While the term Apple Tax refers to the 30 percent commission Apple taxes on transactions made through services that developers don't want to use, Google Tax is very different. In the case of Google, it refers to taxes and fees designed specifically to target the company. That's because Google has become a target of investigation in nearly every western nation.
If you have a YouTube channel, you're about to read something that will likely upset you: "wanna be friends?" This comment has been absolutely rampant across the site, appearing on almost every video posted for months. Many creators have noticed that the comment can appear before a video is even made public, suggesting that there is something unsavory going on. Well, that fear is completely justified, as the result of the comment is far worse than just being obnoxious.