Valve's 'Steam Box' Console Is Real, Says Gabe Newell 298
symbolset writes "The Verge is reporting that the Steam Console we discussed in November is a real thing. Gabe Newell said it will be a locked down platform for the living room. The source is a Kotaku interview with Newell at the Video Game Awards. Newell said, 'Well certainly our hardware will be a very controlled environment. If you want more flexibility, you can always buy a more general-purpose PC. For people who want a more turnkey solution, that's what some people are really gonna want for their living room. The nice thing about a PC is a lot of different people can try out different solutions, and customers can find the ones that work best for them.'"
Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:5, Informative)
We already have Ubuntu variants which boot straight to an application (XMBCbuntu), and use the official repos for updates.
Chances are someone will mix up a Steamuntu, even if its not officially supported by Valve but gets all the official Ubuntu updates.
From what I can tell of the beta Linux Steam client, its responsible for its own updates rather than adding a new repository (like Google Chrome does) and relying on the user to keep their OS up to date.
Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:-1, Informative)
Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:4, Informative)
How is that any different than just building your own PC how you want and installing Steam on it?
Stream still didn't work behind a firewall (Score:2, Informative)
I had the privilege of trying to install stream from behind a hotel firewall/router. Still doesn't work. Would download at under 16 kb/sec and there is hundreds of megs to download. I seen to recall that this is because it only uses a single tcp connection when there is a firewall and basically steam wasn't designed with this in mind. Remember, steam is fundamentally a web browser and file downloader. I know a few games where the stream based server browser also is very spotty. Firewall/NAT issues are pretty common, so if valve is aiming for mainstream then they have so far failed miserably. You need system administrator privileges to get stream to work.
Re:Microsoft's Biggest Mistake (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Cartridges should make a comeback (Score:5, Informative)
The reason why that worked was that the pins in those cartridge slots were basically pins to system memory. So when you plugged in a cart it was like plugging in roms directly to the board.
Flash just isn't as fast for reading as you think it is. Even on the ds and vita, you're still waiting for load times.
Re:What I'd like to see... (Score:5, Informative)
Chances are someone will mix up a Steamuntu, even if its not officially supported by Valve but gets all the official Ubuntu updates.
Yeah, someone already did just that [omgubuntu.co.uk] :)