32 - Steam Box specs revealed.

If you have read my blog alot or popped in and out over the last while you will know that I am looking forward to the new Steam Box that Valve, the computer games manufacturer, is about to release. Well specs have been released for the model of the Steam Box that is going to be released in 2014. Here the specs are:

Here is a quote from a website describing the specs better than I will "First and foremost, there isn’t a single static spec — even for the Valve-made beta units. The prototype units will ship with an Intel Core i7-4770, an Intel Core i5-4570, or an unidentified Core i3 CPU. As far as GPUs go, there will be a mix of Nvidia Titan, Nvidia GTX780, Nvidia GTX760, and Nvidia GTX660 models — all with 3GB of GDDR5. All units will ship with 16GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, hybrid 1TB/8GB SSHDs, and a 450w power supply. Impressively, all of this equipment is designed to fit inside a 12-inch x 12.4-inch x 2.9-inch case."

Yes the Steam Box might look like this... or nothing like this?

What sticks out to me is the 1 Terrabyte solid state hard drive! I have a new computer and I have to say the difference between a solid state drive and a regular disc drive is amazing in terms of speed. I am seriously looking forward to it. Valve are making up a machine that runs a hackable scaleable machine that seems to kick the ass of Xbox One and Playstation 4 in terms of specs.

The only thing that we do not know about yet is the price. If you valued these parts today for a machine it could come to €1500+, not the €400 - €500ish that we would like!?!

24 - Steam and the living room

So in case you do not know all about Steam and the Living Room here it is. Basically Valve, the company that made the Half Life series, Portal and Left 4 Dead series has a piece of software named Steam. Steam is the distribution software that is used by gamers to download all the games and gaming tools that they need.

Now Valve want more people to have access to their games so they are releasing an operating system named SteamOS. It is basically a variation of Linux that is tailored towards Valve games. On Friday, yesterday, Valve released the controller that would be used to play the future games from Steam and current games persumably. It is amazing looking. Look at the image below...

SteamOS, Steam, Valve, Contoller

No sticks, tons of buttons, a little screen. The pad is called a haptic controller. Read up a little more here on the BBC website - link below:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24304272

21 - Second Steam announcement.

The second of three announcements were made by Valve today. It is regarding "Steam Machines". These are the boxes that SteamOS will run in your living room as they envision. They are first going to release their own Steam Machine and then other manufacturers can make their own Steam Machines. A steam machine is basically a computer that will have to meet some basic specs as determined by Valve and run SteamOS. So basically as soon as SteamOS comes out I will be scrubbing some machine I have here at home and turning my PC into a Linux Valve gaming machine.

Interestingly I read an article today where a head in nVidia said that the reason that they do not have their chipset in the xboxOne or the PS4 is because they did not want the bother. They are focusing on new technology and innovation and they said that never again will consoles be better than PCs in the way that in the 90's that consoles were better than PCs.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.829212-Nvidia-Console-Graphics-Will-Never-Again-Outpace-PCs

I noticed that myself when I got what essentially an office computer, but a good one so it had plenty of RAM, a good quick Intel Quad Core processor and I added a smashing graphics card. What did I end up with? A gaming rig that is simply faster and better at the moment than either the PS4 or the Xbox One. And they haven't even been released yet!

So yes, it is something that I realised a while ago. Do not buy a console, buy a PC, it is as simple as that. Cheaper in the long run, games are prettier even in the short run, with a much more hugely massive games library to choose from.

And the best thing to me about a PC over a Console, and it is the one thing that I will not ever forgive their decaying corpses for... a keyboard. If I am at my games console all day I eventually need to type something, I need to get up and go to my computer, turn on my computer, while I am there and I have finished typing my email that only took 2 minutes on the keyboard, I might as well play some Steam games, after all I did just get a humble bundle for 5 dollars, and for that 5 dollars I have received something like 7 games. Yeah, it will be a while before I get back to the sub par graphics of the console on the TV... I am going to play my literally hundreds of hours of virtually free entertainment here on my PC...

Whats that?

At least you can sit back and relax on the couch! Boyeee! Haven't you heard anything I have said about how good Steam is? Steam has the Big Picture which enables better gaming on a big screen TV. Of course they have had it now for a while so it is nothing new... I guess Microsoft would have been screaming off the roof tops if they came up with some innovative new concept... lets listen....

Yeah nothing, not a peep. Just the sound of a dying concept, the sound of confused marketing people back tracking every sentence they just spoke for the last few months until at last they have said nothing, the sound of confused developers whom are not allowed by Microsoft to develop but with bloated tools that the sleeping giant burped out years ago... and then the sound of silence.

20 - Indian Summer and SteamOS

Hello there world. Beautiful day today. Seriously nice. They say it is an Indian Summer. We drove to the beach in Tuismean down a long winding road where I eventually came across a car that paused in front of me. So I reversed around 150 meters until I found a place where I could pull in. I didn't mind doing it at all really because some people do not feel as confident as I do reversing. I mention this because when I finally reached the point where I came across this car in the first place I realised that around 5 meters behind her was a huge place to pull in! :) But again, I did not mind, I just wonder what kind of misery some people go through when they do have to reverse and hate doing it.

Túisméan Lake.. beautiful if not a bit eery!

Enough about all that however. Did you hear what Valve have announced. All the gaming that we have ever known was really on a console or on a PC. Like an IBM compatible to be more exact. Apple have always had games on its operating system and today Apple have more games than ever but lets face it, the huge majority of games are on the Windows PC if they are not on Console, with an honorable mention to Linux of course which has a healthy body of games (again Apples OS is really a Linux distro).

SteamOS from Valve. 

All that is definately about to change however with the announcement yesterday from Valve that they are about to release SteamOS. That is an operating system from Valve that is specifically made to play game and it is running Linux and is free to download.

Suck it down all the rest of everyone else, free to use! Free. There will be simply loads more to say on this in times to come and eventually everyone will be talking about it, but if you want to be ahead of the curve pay attention now, I believe it is going to be amazing for games.

More on this fantastical here http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/23/4762370/steam-box-os

13 - Valve, Steam and the death of Internet Explorer.

Fantastic software company Valve is going to make an open source console using linux! This is good news because Valve make brilliant games, Half Life series, Counter Strike series, Portal series, Left 4 Dead series. Also the whole world is waiting for Half Life 3, which is probably being made for the console.

Vales games on Steam... unlimited fun. 

Guys this is really interesting. This is a page which show the statistics of which browser is being used per month. However it goes back all the way to 2002.

Death of a salesman. 

It is quite interesting to see the steady decline of Internet Explorer and the rapid growth in popularity for Google's Chrome. In all honesty it is Microsofts own fault. They had years and years to ensure that they were ahead of the curve but they kept on making their own versions of all the software that the rest of the world was using. And how are they now... soon to be dead I think. The sad thing is, when Internet Explorer does die, nobody will even care?

Do you still use Internet Explorer? Why?

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp