Absolutely. This is a long term strategy stemming from the moment Microsoft spawned their app store.
A lot of people are missing the fact that the Steam Frame is Valve's attempt at staking a position in the wide-open and malleable VR space.
With Google, they identified that Microsoft developing their own search engine as an existential threat. Additionally, Internet Explorer being the only bottleneck for the web as a platform was a problem. And thus they broke it wide open, developing web technologies, investing in Firefox initially, releasing Chrome, and ultimately delivering Android.
In mobile, Microsoft came too late to respond to Apple and Google.
Meta and Apple have identified that VR is one of the next gold-mines in terms of a similar app-store and experience rich ecosystem potential comparable to PCs, web, and mobile, and have poured billions into development of hardware and software. It's documented that Meta attempted to create a proprietary OS for their VR headsets (and has debatable success).
Valve, while having fewer resources than any of the behemoths above, decided to hedge their bets with Linux and entering the market first through their well established brand built with video games. It would not surprise me if the Steam Frame begins their entry into other entertainment experiences and app opportunities. Microsoft has reasonable success weaving their ecosystem together (PC + Xbox), but they're foolish to think that their dominance would continue into VR because they have the PC space... They made that mistake with Windows Phone.
VR has so far failed to reach an amount of people to make developing games for it really worthwhile, and the metaverse really doesn’t have much going for it either.
I don’t really see much momentum in that space, and the consensus among my friends is that it’s a gimmick to try a few times - with their vr headsets collecting dust since.
Same. I have the index, plus special eyesight amendment lenses accessory that I had to fork out on. grudge #1.
The second, offline games are cool but with only 2MB ADSL, I can't enjoy anything online with them. It's like waiting for a custom map to download on CS:S when I was on 56k. Only to join just as the server changes the level.
VR gaming is niche enthusiast stuff, it will never be a thing for everyday casual gaming.
Flight sims, racing sims and most other sims where there’s stationary hardware involved can and do benefit greatly from VR, but most games are not simulations and never will be.
This is why I can't understand current VR goggle design. Why aren't there any lightweight wired display-only goggles? Stuffing all the hardware in the goggles seems mindbogglingly stupid to me. Poor performance, high weight and high price. For what advantage?
Even the selling point of a non-wired headset is questionable. I want to sit down comfortably when I game. Not walk around and crouch and crawl.
There have been numerous such goggles for the past ~25 years with little improvement in performance or price, and the fact that you're not aware of any of them suggests what the advantages are...
I think it's a price issue. VR is fun, but a headset costs more than it's worth. Prices aren't out yet, but the whole foveated streaming thing seems like cost-cutting tech, and it'd be smart for them to position themselves as "the affordable one."
The problem for me was more a software issue than hardware or cost. It (Quest 2) just felt awkward, the software selection was meh, IPD bad for me, resolution only so-so, but most of all it felt isolated from the rest of my gear. I've been planning to give it another go recently but don't have much enthusiasm for it, but a Steam headset with my collection is something I'm very keen to try.
> With Google, they identified that Microsoft developing their own search engine as an existential threat. Additionally, Internet Explorer being the only bottleneck for the web as a platform was a problem. And thus they broke it wide open, developing web technologies, investing in Firefox initially, releasing Chrome, and ultimately delivering Android.
That story ended up with Google supplanting Microsoft as the top market abuser. So I'm holding all my fingers crossed that it doesn't turn out the same with Valve, especially since by the time they get to have a shot at that top position Valve will very likely be under different leadership and maybe with different ideals.
The blog post mentions[1] that advanced views are in development. This initial release and announcement focuses on the underlying foundation they're building upon.
> New views: While we support all the fundamental views, we're planning on adding more advanced views such as a watch list, memory view, disassembly view, and a stack trace view
nvim-orgmode [1] is also available. Knowledge from emacs orgmode should carry over without much issue. I didn't feel like there was a need to reinvent the wheel like neorg does when there were powerful notetaking solutions available; does anyone have a comparison breakdown of features and capabilities?
While the TrailOfBits post is informative, they extrapolate the wrong premise from Brendan Gregg's original post[1]. Brendan's statement was originally about the particular set of eBPF tools created for observability (especially his own). These tools (like bcc and bpftrace) are specifically geared towards observability and were not built for security in mind, nor will they be "patched" or fixed for these purposes.
Does this imply that eBPF is a bad foundation for security-focused tooling? Brendan states the following at the close of this blog post:
> There is potential for an awesome eBPF security product, and it's not just the visibility that's valuable (all those arrows) it's also the low overhead. These slides included our overhead evaluation showing bcc/eBPF was far more efficient than auditd or go-audit. (It was pioneering work, but unfortunately the slides are all we have: Alex, I, and others left Netflix before open sourcing it.) There are now other eBPF security products, including open source projects (e.g., tetragon), but I don't know enough about them all to have a recommendation.
> Note that I'm talking about the observability tools here and not the eBPF kernel runtime itself, which has been designed as a secure sandbox. Nor am I talking about privilege escalation, since to run the tools you already need root access (that car has sailed!).
This reads to me that security tooling built on top of eBPF is possible and various organizations are in-flight making it happen (such as Falco[2], Tetragon[3], and Tracee[4]). These teams have recognized the shortcomings of eBPF and are layering other kernel-instrumentation capabilities such as kprobes and LSM hooks into their solutions.
Additionally, the TrailOfBits blog post states:
> Developers need to be aware of pitfalls like probe unreliability, data truncation, instruction limits, concurrency issues, event overload, and page faults. Workarounds exist, but they are imperfect and often add complexity.
These inherent limitations exist primarily because eBPF is a virtual machine within kernel space. Many of these constraints exist because eBPF programs should _never_ lock up the kernel. The eBPF verifier[5] does some checks on the possible code paths the program can take, such as finite bounded loops, null checks on variables, etc. The foundational aspect here is that the eBPF virtual machine is designed to protect the kernel while running programs in kernel space, and that imperfect/complex workarounds may be needed by security-focused projects to respect that foundation.
System76's next flagship, "Virgo," will be in-house designed and has a trackpoint keyboard with a layout will be similar to their line of Launch keyboards [1].
They've been teasing their Virgo prototype [2] [3] [4] on their social media feeds.
Execution is everything, including the buttons. Someone designing this might also want to look at the Trackpoint buttons from before Lenovo switched to flat keyboards, and see the tactile merits of that (even when combined with flat keyboards).
I wanted to chime in here that I agree with (1) as well.
In the time before Chrome, Firefox market share grew in part because of how aggressively Google and the rest of the web advertised for them. However, that market share peaked and shrunk after Chrome was released; Google shifted _all_ of their advertising from Firefox for Chrome.
I would switch to Apple Maps if there was an easy way to use it on Windows. Apple has no supported Maps website, though you can view Apple Maps through DuckDuckGo. But that's clunky and doesn't solve my use case of mapping routes on my desktop computer and then pulling them up in Apple Maps on my iPhone.
A lot of people are missing the fact that the Steam Frame is Valve's attempt at staking a position in the wide-open and malleable VR space.
With Google, they identified that Microsoft developing their own search engine as an existential threat. Additionally, Internet Explorer being the only bottleneck for the web as a platform was a problem. And thus they broke it wide open, developing web technologies, investing in Firefox initially, releasing Chrome, and ultimately delivering Android.
In mobile, Microsoft came too late to respond to Apple and Google.
Meta and Apple have identified that VR is one of the next gold-mines in terms of a similar app-store and experience rich ecosystem potential comparable to PCs, web, and mobile, and have poured billions into development of hardware and software. It's documented that Meta attempted to create a proprietary OS for their VR headsets (and has debatable success).
Valve, while having fewer resources than any of the behemoths above, decided to hedge their bets with Linux and entering the market first through their well established brand built with video games. It would not surprise me if the Steam Frame begins their entry into other entertainment experiences and app opportunities. Microsoft has reasonable success weaving their ecosystem together (PC + Xbox), but they're foolish to think that their dominance would continue into VR because they have the PC space... They made that mistake with Windows Phone.