The difference between the Steam Machine and an off the shelve gamer pc, is that Valve has created a viable pathway to move away from Microsoft's dominance in the PC gaming market. This is Valve showing to PC hardware makers that a PC gaming market without Windows is possible. Valve just needs to prove that consumers are willing to buy a Linux gaming machine, so the Steam Machine is the litmus test. Microsoft is Valve's biggest threat to the survival of their business. Since MS's anti-consumer behavior will push consumers away from PC gaming. Valve wants to create a PC gaming market where MS's choke hold has been destroyed. Remember this isn't Valve's first attempt, the first Steam Machine was released when Win8 was released where MS tried to push the Windows Store as the default way to download software.
SkunkWorkz
It’s not just for shareholder value, like a downsize or stock buyback would achieve. This will literally fill their coffers to the brim faster than staying in the consumer market. Also the consumer market won’t go away anytime soon and there are very few competitors to begin with. They can just return to the consumer market once the AI bubble has burst like nothing has changed. Only difference is they will have way more money in the bank than if they never left.
De plane! De plane!
It all depends how you perceive the XY plane. Like if your job involves blueprints than XY plane lies flat and horizontal then it makes sense that Z axis is height. Hence why engineering software is all Z-Up. If the XY plane is upright, like screen coordinates, then Z is depth. Hence why many software that is used to create content for the screen is Y-Up. Like Maya, Houdini, Unity, OpenGL etc.
Screens vs paper. It's why all the engineering software uses Z-up, since they came from a paper top-down view workflow. But many of the creative software uses y-up, since they exist to create art that gets consumed on a screen. Like animation and games.
True but I think it’s also because of screen coordinates, Y is always the vertical axis in screen coordinates. So programmers translated that to 3D coordinates because in real world space the screen doesn’t lie flat but is up right. It’s probably why Y is up in OpenGL and calls the depth buffer the Z-Buffer.
Y-up sorta makes sense in games. Imagine a 2D platformer, Y is up and X is horizontal. Now add depth. Instead of flipping axis just use Z for depth.
No Unity uses Y as up. Unreal uses Z as up
They saying the quiet part out loud, and the fools still ignore it. What a cult does to a mother fucker.
Well then pineapple juice is your solution.
The existence of the Steam Machine does not stop people from building their own Linux gaming box. The Steam Machine just proves that it is possible to do so. Like many people’s first PC was a pre built machine and then their subsequent machines were all custom builds. The Steam Machine can do the same for Linux PCs.