Steam Machines

Now is the point at which Valve loses me.  I am all about making Linux a viable gaming platform with AAA titles running in and out of it.  That sounded awesome, because for what I use my home machine for… it seems silly to try and justify the cost of a windows operating system.  All I have really wanted to awhile was an easy way to play windows games under Linux… and I know Wine has existed for years… but it is far too fiddly and unreliable for my tastes.  Yesterday apparently they started making the second part of their big announcement… that there would in fact be “Steam Machines”.

As I said above, this is the point where I stop giving a shit.  This does in fact seem like a battle for the living room… and currently as many others have suggested… gamers can totally play in our living rooms already.  I guess I don’t really see there is a market for a PC platform for console gamers.  Folks who prefer to play on consoles prefer to play on consoles…  folks who prefer to play on PCs prefer to play on PCs.  While there is cross over between the two, I have never once heard a console gamer say “man I really wish I had a consolized PC”, nor have I really heard that from a PC gamer either.  I will have to see how the rest of the announcements shake out, but all I was interesting in was the operating system… not another hardware platform.

Human Chop-Shop

Yesterday was a truly bizarre day.  I went to work like normal, but had plans to go to the Oklahoma Surgical Hospital over lunch to sit with my mother who was having outpatient surgery there.  I am not sure what exactly I was expecting, but I guess I was expecting a traditional hospital.  What I was presented with was more akin to a place that rents out booths for surgeons much like a hair dresser does.  Granted I know nothing about their business model, but they did not seem to be outwardly affiliated with any of the hospital chains.  They appeared to be some odd neutral party where people come to get operated on and then leave.

Essentially the entire place consisted of a huge waiting room where you wait with the person who will get operated on moments from now.  Eventually they bring them back into what looks like an emergency room, with little curtain drawn stalls.  At this point they get the patient into a hospital gown, hooked to an IV, and given a nifty little medical bracelet system.  The above picture is the one my mom had on her… I asked the nurse what it would take to get a few more “bangles”.  The purple one is apparently latex allergy… so I told mom we needed to work on that one for next time.  She said that she had no desire to “collect them all”.

I had all intent of staying over my lunch break and then going back to work for my 1:30 staff meeting.  That however did not quite work out, as Moms surgery kept getting pushed back and they did not take her for surgery until around 3:15.  All the while she kept getting more and more nervous.  I am thankful that I have a truly phenomenal boss, because all I had to do was text him to let him know I would not be in that afternoon and the reasoning why.  My sticking around was an attempt to try and keep Mom as calm as possible, but I am not really sure how well it worked.  She would be fine and then all the sudden her little hands would go to fidgeting and you could tell she wanted to run away screaming.

When they finally took her away I left and asked Dad to text me when he heard something.  Apparently she was in recovery until around 5:30, so was pretty slow coming around fully from the anesthesia.  I talked to her around 6:30 on her way home, she was doing okay and in decent spirits.  I am guessing today she will hurt like hell.  Essentially years ago she had an operation where they removed some cancerous spots from her nose and replaced the skin with a big graft.  Over time they have realized the margins were not as clear as they thought… so they were coming back today to try and trim a bit more off the tip and get the rest of it before it grew any more.  Her surgeon has been with her through numerous cancer surgeries and is likely the reason I still have a Mom… so we all expect the best.

Deforestation

Tuesday evening before bed we noticed that the thermostat in our house was way higher than it should be.  Over the summer months we keep the temperature at a stable 74*,  but Tuesday night it was sitting at 79* and the day had not really been that hot.  During the summer months and those 100+ degree days, the thermostat has a bit of trouble keeping up.. but it rarely gets above 76* before cooling back down.  Our big fear was that the unit had frozen up… as this had happened a handful of times throughout the years.  Sure enough upon going outside I saw the all too familiar sheathe of ice encasing the pipes going from the outside unit to the unit upstairs.

We turned off the air completely last night, giving it time to thaw over night and during the day.  So when the surgery took far longer than I had expected and I ended up taking a half day… I ran home to do battle with the AC unit.  Our unit came with our house and at this point is over thirty years old.  We have been told multiple times by the company we use to service the unit, that they simply do not make a unit as well built as the one we currently have… and that their advice is to literally run it until it ceases to run any longer.  However as we enter into each summer season… we have fears in the back of our head that it will be the last for the unit.

There are several things that can cause a unit to freeze up like that, but the main two are being low on Freon or having the air intake blocked somehow.  Essentially my plan was to hose off the unit outside to remove any grass clippings or left over cottonwood, and change the filter inside just to make sure it had a nice clean air intake system.  We don’t really get outside much, we tend to scurry around like rats doing whatever needs to be done when it needs to be done.  We hire a neighbor kid to do our lawn, so quite honestly it has been an entire season since I had been around on the side of our house where the AC unit is.

When I got around there… I was greeted with a crazy sight.  Essentially all he rain we have gotten has caused the tree next to the AC unit to go into absolute miracle grow style overdrive.  There were limbs everywhere… and essentially one entire side of the unit was blocked by growth.  Additionally at some point birds had dropped some blackberries or something similar from the air… and two little bushes had started growing as well.  So over the next hour and a half or so I proceeded to go to town with a cheap pair of clippers and took off all of the limbs blocking the unit while trying my best to keep from making the tree as a whole look scalped.

Additionally it had been a pain in the ass to get through the back gate for awhile, as the tree had grown a bunch of little offshoot branches that were hanging low.  I trimmed all of these back a bit so that it is still sufficiently shaded, but now a 6’4” or taller adult can comfortably walk under them.  While I was at it… I went into the backyard and did various other gardening tasks that had needed to be done.  Somewhere we have picked up a patch of ivy along the side of our house… and while it is pretty to look at… it was causing a huge mess as it had grown in and around the tools in my tool rack.  So I spent awhile untangling that mess and adding it to the green waste pile.

We are essentially horrible stewards of our lawn.  I love the concept of having a lawn, but have no real desire to ever go out and experience it.  The older I get the more light sensitive I have become… so as a result my perfect scenario is a dark room with nothing but the light of a monitor.   Outdoors is pretty much the exact opposite of that.  Long story short…  after the deforestation and changing the filter for good measure… I was able to turn on the AC unit and it has been working like a champ.  I feel horrible for not noticing the virtual kudzu that was the tree…  but like I said… we don’t go out into our yard much.

Wrapping Up

Well it is once again that time… and I have wasted another bit of your morning and mine rambling on at length.  I had a tidbit about Diablo 3 that I was going to try and weave in… but other things seemed more pressing.  Someday I will have that subsection… I just know it.  I hope you all have a great day, and I hope mine is super productive.  I have a lot of things to get done before Friday.  Our department is going out to a local dev conference, so that should be enjoyable.  Just have to think of someplace good to go for lunch.

Steam OS

I feel like I am late to the party when it comes to talking about this announcement.  Yesterday seemed to be the big day of it spreading out onto various blogs both professional and private.  At this very moment… I am not really sure what to think about it.  Admittedly I am a PC developer, I write code for Microsoft products, I play games that run under windows, and I have never found a reasonable replacement for Photoshop.  All of those things mean I am pretty much chained to windows as a platform goes.  The biggest of those however is the fact that it is a pain in the ass to get my games running under Wine in Linux.

While the Microsoft developer portion will likely never go away anytime soon, being able to reliably play all the games I want under Linux would make me likely kick windows to the curb as a home operating system, at least on my main gaming machine.  The problem is… steam has literally thousands of games in its catalog… but only roughly 200 of them run on Linux.  The vast majority of those are small indie titles, that are fun, but not the meat that the PC gamer is looking for.  So the real challenge will be for Valve to get major developers to support their Steam OS on an even playing field with the consoles.

Good For Linux

Linux has always been an extreme niche community.  The problem with Linux as a whole is the freedom of choice that is a positive for the serious user, is a massive negative to broad based adoption.  Too much choice confuses the average consumer, and vendors don’t like not having a clear winner they can invest money in.  Old fights like Gnome vs KDE and Ubuntu vs Redhat etc have always stunted the growth potential of what otherwise is an extremely mature operating system, more than ready for primetime.

While Linux has floundered at becoming a viable desktop operating system for the majority of America, I feel like a gaming machine is a niche it CAN conquer.  Windows 8 licenses start at $100 and go up from there.  I know no gamer that would not be willing to switch to a free operating system, and spend that hundred dollars elsewhere on games or gaming stuff.  If I could get the games I want to play, running reliably and without fiddling under a Linux based operating system… I would kick windows to the curb without a second thought.

Ultimately I am going to have to find a replacement for Photoshop as it is… so that piece is no longer the hurdle it once was.  With Adobe switching to a monthly subscription fee, that is just too much bullshit for me to deal with on a regular basis just to be able to comfortably make images.  I am not making any money from Photoshop, and therefor I just cannot justify the cost.  I have always had access to it through my work machine, so I have always kept my home version a few releases behind the curve.  But with the licensing mess for the foreseeable future, it is making Gimp and namely GimpShop that much more appealing.

In Gaben We Trust

Basically steam has done this miraculous thing as far as I am concerned.  They have gotten me to not only tolerate… but LOVE DRM.  If I have a choice to buy something through steam, or through a secondary retailer like green man gaming that provides a steam code… I will always do it.  I like having my entire games library organized in one spot, that is easy to download and play whenever I feel like it from each of my machines.  Valve and Steam have absolutely won me over with dirt cheap pricing and truly epic sales.  So while I mostly abuse their sales… when it does come time for a title to be released that I care enough about to pay full price… I will almost always gravitate to buying it through them.

Right now if ANYONE can bring enough gravitas behind Linux gaming… it would be Steam.  They have the best chance to make this work, because they provide what every games company has to have to make a new operating system work… a prebuilt retail outlet.  You can say whatever you want about Steam, but I feel like they are doing far more good for the gamers than they are doing harm.  I know publishers really do not like dealing with them… Origin is the evidence of EA breaking out on their own to avoid the “Steam Cut”.  However I really don’t see any of these splinter groups making enough of a dent to be worthy of jumping ship.  Everyone universally hates Origin, as much as they seem to love Steam.

What This Means

If anyone can make Linux gaming viable, it will be Gaben, and as a result I am cautiously optimistic about this.  A lot of the posts yesterday keyed in on the whole concept of bringing steam to the living room.  For me that is not the significance here, and not really something I would want to do anyways.  The majority of the reason why I don’t play consoles more than I do is because it is chained to a television, and not something I can do either on my gaming rig upstairs or my laptop.  Sure there will be the occasional gamer that wants to hook up a steam box and play PC games like they used to play console games.  That is totally cool and awesome that it might be a reality.

For me however this is about unshackling PC gaming from the “Windows Tax”.  I would say probably 95% of what I use my PCs at home falls into one of two categories.  Firstly there is gaming, and up until now that has been entirely a windows based activity.  Secondly there is using web based technologies…  these are 100% platform agnostic, and if Steam OS has Chrome I can pretty much do anything I would ever care to do here.  I no longer use a traditional word processor and have converted to Google Drive for everything I do for myself.  I use Live Writer to do my blog, but there are numerous really solid Linux packages that do the same thing.  So if the gaming worked awesome on Linux… I would have nothing left chaining me to the windows operating system.  As far as running visual studio, I could always Virtual Machine that… or just remote desktop into my work machine.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap things up and get on the road, but at this point we really don’t know many details other than the fact that something called Steam OS exists.  There are supposedly three more big announcements waiting in the wings regarding this.  Right now I am cautiously optimistic, but if this turns out to be nothing but a set top box… I will ultimately give zero fucks.  I am hoping for a viable windows gaming replacement.  Anyways…. I hope you all have a great day ahead of you.  My mother is having surgery today, so hopefully that will go extremely well.