Except that they have a lower level API and as they are a single hardware target games can be heavily optimized
The levels exposed to developers for PCs and consoles are the same. You can write PC games in intel assembly and opengl calls, it's usually just not worth the man hours to get slightly better performance when PC hardware is so cheap.
The fact that many game companies choose to write software at this low level for game consoles is not indicative of a feature that is missing from PCs, it's just a slightly different economic situation, and even that is changing as more and more games come out on multiple different platforms.
Steam Boxes do not have these advantages thus need more powerful hardware for the same result.
Steam boxes also leverage a larger and more liquid hardware market. You can buy last years CPUs and graphics cards sometimes for half the price. You can't buy last year's PS4 or xbone on sale for half the price.
So yes you might need more powerful hardware to get the same performance on a PC, but that more powerful hardware is more than likely cheaper (if shopping for good prices) than the less powerful hardware in a console at any given time. Not to mention the fact that the PC hardware will run non-optimized code *much* faster than a console.
Nor do they have a manufacturer willing to have little profit or a loss on the hardware in order to get them in the hands of consumers.
Nor do they need a specific hardware manufacturer. PC's are commodities. It ultimately doesn't matter if some manufacturer is willing to specifically brand one of their products as a "steam box", for the same reason it doesn't matter if some manufacturer is willing to brand one of their products as a "gaming PC". I don't need to get a "steam PC" in order to run steam on it, why should it be any different for running steamOS?
For some reason people expected both games optimized for Steam Boxes as well as cheap hardware, neither of which were ever going to be a reality.
Who expected games to be optimized for steam boxes (beyond simply optimized for linux-x86_64)?
Not only do I not expect it, I don't care. It won't be long before you can get PC's *much* faster than a PS4 for a fraction of the price.
There is a reason consoles are becoming more and more like PCs both in terms of hardware and software. It's just more economical to be able to leverage this far bigger electronic ecosystem.
Consoles aren't magic. The reason they can play games 10 years after they were made, is because people take a lot of time and effort to make sure their games can still run on those 10 year old machines. It has nothing to do with the hardware itself.
Furthermore, if there were magic future proof hardware, they would just put that in PCs as well.
Also, I can play high end games on a 10 year old PC. I just need to turn down all the graphics settings, which is exactly what the version of games running on old consoles do.
The hardware is basically just a PC. Lot's of companies already build PCs. Lot's of people build their own PCs. Building a PC is not a risky business venture.
The software is just a linux application. As long as you don't right your games in a relatively platform independent way (e.g. don't use directx), then porting the game to other platforms including steamos should be relatively easy. Even if you didn;t bother making a platform independent game, there are companies who basically only port games as their business model.
People don't (or at least shouldn't) develop games for a "said machine" anymore. There are certainly still risks associated with game development, but it should no longer be related to the machines(s) the game is running on.
A lot has changed since the 3DO came out. Both in hardware and software
As long as you are not storing all the security clearance info for the united states in your smart thermostat, I think it will be fine. The chinese will be able to mess with your temperature and turn on and off your lights with impunity. They can probably also try to unlock my doors during the brief periods of time when my wife hasn't already left them unlocked.
I would love to see these devices be better secured, but I think the reason they aren't is *because* of the lack of potential harm that is possible. If people were dying because their routers and thermostats were being hacked, then I'm pretty sure the consumer demand for secure devices would drive manufacturers to producing incredibly secure devices for a price that the market would bear.
The law could require not to hold anything a pre-18 year old says online against them. This includes mocking and laughing at those comments, or thinking someone is stupid, or thinking they are bad person, etc. In essence, if you don't have something nice to think about those comments, then you would be required to not think about them at all and act as if the comments were never made.
This law should also be about as enforceable as the one described in the article.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.