August 13, 2023 - Episode 652

F5 Live: Refreshing Technology (Audio)

Description

This week, Cortana is dead, Netflix is bringing games to the TV, ChatGPT is crawling the web, and Disney is raising prices... again.

Participants

Scott Ertz

Host

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 Piltch

Host

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.

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Cortana is dead in Windows 11 but her corpse remains on your PC

Cortana was once one of Microsoft's biggest focuses. Starting as the spotlight feature of Windows Phone, she grew to live within and control everything in the Microsoft ecosystem. But now, Microsoft has changed course, renaming some of the former Cortana services and destroying the rest. And, like the company too often does, leaving the consumers to clean up the mess.

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Extra Life

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Netflix launches mobile game controller, Netflix Games coming to TVs

Netflix has been trying to differentiate itself from the competition. Since Netflix created its streaming business, the industry has become incredibly crowded. Everyone needs a hook, and Netflix has gone all in on gaming as that differentiator. But, the mobile game business has not been the company's only intention, and the next phase of Netflix Games hit the App Store this week with a mobile game controller.

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News From the Tubes

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ChatGPT web crawler is here and sites are trying to protect themselves

Over the past few months, AI, or the falsely named artificial intelligence, has been the topic du jour in the tech world and across all of the media. There have been positive advancements, like the ability to use language processing to summarize an audio file or to create more accurate subtitles for content. But, the majority of the "advancements" have fallen on the dark side of tech. Now, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT has a web crawler to help it index more of the internet, and publishers are panicked.

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The gravy train is over, streaming services getting more expensive

When the streaming services first launched, everything was too good to be true. The price per month versus what you got was absolutely in the consumer's favor. Companies were spending more than they were making in an attempt to attract new users. But now, with intense competition, streaming companies are changing the equation to try to be profitable and that means consistent price increases. Disney's streaming services are just the beginning.

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