This week, Amazon gets mad at a book publisher over pricing, Windows brings Bing with 8.1 and the lawless Internet town ain't big enough for cable companies and content providers.
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.
Microsoft has been working hard to increase Windows 8's adoption rate. One of the issues they have faced from manufacturers is the pricing of the operating system versus the perceived lower cost for Android on low-end tablets. One of the rumored ideas to solve this perceived issue was a reduced cost or free version of windows designed for low-cost devices.
Last week on our show, we talked about upcoming changes to the Xbox One and how Microsoft has completely lost the original vision and true innovation of the next-generation console. Despite all of that though, the Xbox team announced a couple more updates coming in June that will prove useful to those who already have or are considering picking up an Xbox One.
Cable television is an interesting beast. Each content provider negotiates pricing with each cable provider on a regular basis. When a contract ends both groups sit down and discuss what new pricing should look like. From time to time these negotiations take longer than the expiration of the contract and you lose stations temporarily. Almost everybody has experienced stations like CBS or Fox disappearing from the cable provider for a few days.
What happens when a large company that owns the market doesn't get what they want? Someone is punished. That's exactly what happened when Amazon didn't get the price reduction they wanted in negotiations with Hachette, the smallest of the five main book publishers.