This week, Samsung is blanking out, Valve is going out of the house, and Amazon is headed out of this world.
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.
In 2018, Samsung made headlines, but not for the reasons they would have hoped: Galaxy Note7 devices were exploding. Now, Samsung is facing an equally embarrassing, yet far less dangerous issue with Galaxy S20 owners beginning to experience screen failures.
A few weeks ago, Valve boss Gabe Newell confirmed that the company was working on something console-related, but did not say what it was. We speculated that perhaps they would expand their relationship with Microsoft, bringing the Steam Store to the Xbox consoles in the same way Microsoft wants the Steam Store to enter the Microsoft Store on Windows 11. As it turns out, the company had a much grander plan for entering the space, announcing the Steam Deck handheld gaming computer. This is not to be confused with Elgato's Stream Deck, which is also a gaming product (and one we use in the studio).
Last week, President Biden signed an Executive Order, among other things, encourages research into how to provide greater choice in internet access. Many people, especially in apartments and condos, only have a single choice in ISPs because of agreements between the complex and a particular service provider. One company that has taken on this challenge on its own is Starlink, the Elon Musk-backed satellite internet company. With a good idea comes competition, and this will be coming in the form of the Amazon-backed Project Kuiper.
Shortly after Netflix introduced profiles, they also introduced Kids' profiles. This concept allowed parents to limit the content that their children had access to. By choosing this profile type, the content is limited to only child-friendly content. However, there is one big problem - it's not really easy to get a report of what your kids actually are watching. Netflix plans to fix this by introducing an email report of viewing habits.