This week, Scandanavia supports pirates, not profit, HP loses $9 billion by spending $11 billion and GameStop blames consoles as its reason for closing 200 stores.
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.
HP has been unable to pick itself back up after being knocked down from its rendition of CEO roulette. Meg Whitman, former eBay CEO, picked up the slack and tried to continue on but problems continue to plague the company. If wavering on the future of webOS, deciding to make another smartphone and weathering a 30,000 employee layoff wasn't enough, HP has recently discovered a huge blunder with their $11 billion acquisiton of British software company, Autonomy. In fact, things are so bad now that the company announced this week that it would be devaluing $9 billion of the acquired assets in order to balance the sheet, citing "accounting improprieties and disclosure failures" during the purchase of Autonomy.
For some strange reason, it seems that almost every single tech news publication has been bashing Windows 8 since its inception, citing "severe learning curves" and other nonsense. Be it their desire to love to hate great things or if it's to make up for the multi-figure check that's sitting in their back pockets from the iNeedGoodReviews company, the fact remains that consumers who read the publications have been misguided from the get-go. Despite all of the alleged reasons to not buy or upgrade to a Windows 8 machine, however, Microsoft said this week that since the launch, the company has sold over 40 million licenses of Windows 8. This outpaces Windows 7 as far as early upgrades are concerned and it also means that most people understood that you now start from the Start Screen.
We are all annoyed by Facebook's constant privacy policy changes and advertising schemes, but apparently not as much as the governments of the Scandinavian countries, who believe that Facebook's recent changes to their news feed advertisements go against the European Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications. The directive was created as a way to prevent email spam by requiring a user to have opted-in to receive solicitations, unlike the US requirement to be able to opt-out of solicitations.
Following last week's news that Xbox Live members broke the record of hours logged for a week, with 442 million from November 6th through 13th, some rumors leave the Redmond office this week. If the rumors are true, it would surely put any doubt to rest that Xbox really is synonymous with entertainment. Word on the street is that there is an Xbox TV coming, that would directly compete with traditional set-top boxes, as well as the Apple TV, Roku, Boxee Box and others. Sources say that it will be a watered-down iteration of the existing Xbox 360 that would be completely designed with a focus to play all types of media using the same frame that Windows 8 operates on. If all goes according to plan, reports are saying we should see the Xbox TV hit stores right before holiday 2013, along with the Xbox 3, or whatever you'd like to call it.