Wow. Apparently they had a stable Linux build back in October last year, then delayed it due to a game breaking MacOS bug (why!?). Then, after fixing that, Linux was the top priority, along with French support apparently.

A year of silence ensued [External Link] and I gave up hope. Still on my wishlist though and they'll get a sale if they ever launch, but I'm not holding my breath at this point. The Station comes out next month and that might be a better option at this point - go with the devs who can do a simultaneous launch, in my opinion.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

All I'll say in response is that you're waaaaay more tolerant of ineptitude than I am. I just upgraded my PC last year, so I'm furious that it'll be another couple of years before I feel justified buying a new motherboard/CPU to work around this particular cock up. Furious.

Needless to say, I doubt that that replacement combo will be of Intel design...

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: razing32I'm pretty sure that's not how a hostile takeover works :S:

Really, REALLY hostile!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Just to be clear here - Meltdown is a vulnerability that takes advantage of a bug in Intel's chips. Call it a "design flaw" if you're feeling kind, but it's a hardware bug. It's executing instructions from its buffer without checking that this is allowed. Speculative Execution is one thing, but not checking privileges before execution? Madness.

That's why AMD's latest chips don't suffer from the Meltdown flaw. Yes, they use Speculative Execution, but at least they have the good grace to check if they're allowed to execute those speculative commands before they do so.

Spectre is more widespread. It's also a Speculative Execution vulnerability but has nothing to do with checking privileges. But you have to have some kind of capability on the box first, before you can take advantage of Spectre - you have to have some way to influence the buffer cache.

But yeah, in summary - total bug.

And yes, I am assuming that Intel knew about this years ago. I'm assuming that based on the "conspiracy theory" I mentioned in my earlier comment. Might be true, no idea.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Luke_Nukem

Quoting: orochi_kyo

Quoting: EagleDeltaI understand your feelings, but if that's how you feel, then you shouldn't use computers.

Such a long post to justify something that actually could be avoided if testing before releasing were done properly, then Intel jumping into new models and products while old stuff is still broken isnt good. Im pretty sure intel will keep pushing new stuff in order that people forget about this meltdown problem because they cant fix it, those models are just too deep broken.
"I understand your feelings" no you dont, and stop telling people to stop using something just because they expect quality and responsibility from manufacturers.

The flaw isn't something that could be tested for. It's an inherent design flaw, a bad decision made in the name of performance. Their reasoning would largely have been "Well, who the hell is going to manage to exploit that?"

Everyone here should read this thread on twitter explaining meltdown and spectre [External Link] instead of making these weird armchair assessments.

The one thing I agree on is that Intel handled it bloody poorly.

Apart from someone trying to use Twitter to explain such a technical subject, I completely agree with you. BUT, while that design decision was made as long ago as 1995 when security was 99th on a list 100 priorities, this is 2018 now and Intel (and AMD and probably to a certain extent ARM) can only be described as wilfully negligent in overlooking this behaviour in the modern day.

As I said earlier, I suspect that Intel knew about this much earlier than June, probably for years and kept a lid on it. Their pushing KASLR so hard (for unrelated attacks, such as KRACKS and the whole Intel ME cock up) was probably done in the hope that a software remedy would be found and accepted early, so that they wouldn't have to acknowledge the extent, reach and scope of this hardware design flaw.

I'm not a fan of the The Register, but they sum it up pretty perfectly here [External Link]:

Recent reports that these exploits are caused by a “bug” or a “flaw” and are unique to Intel products are incorrect.

Translation: Pleeeeeease, pleeeeease do not sue us for shipping faulty products or make us recall millions of chips.

Before the kernel devs called their Kaiser implementation KPTI, they were mulling over whether to call it FUCKWIT [External Link]. I think that tells its own story!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Nah, you guys are thinking of this one:
View video on youtube.com

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: SeegrasI played some 7 hours or so yesterday, and it doesn't really feel like I'll finish it soon. Maybe that's because they added stuff, or maybe it's because I just suck, or maybe it's because the fucking pieces of shit of other bots level the same speed as me (what's the use of levels if everything else gets better the same time as you? I hate it).

It's lying in the corner because of shitty leveling mechanics now, together with Borderlands.

I hit a wall with it too, at around... can't remember... level four? It's the final level before your "command robot" tool allows you to control four robots. Once you (somehow) hit that level, the game's a lot easier. I think I ended up sniping from miles away while my two robot companions through themselves to the wolves was I eventually managed to steal a couple of crucial nodes and make that last level jump.

Hope you get back into it though - a lot of fun, despite that bit of frustration!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: EagleDelta

Quoting: HoriThe Meltdown vulnerability was the final straw. I completely lost hope in Intel. It's too late to bring me back (and many others).

I understand your feelings, but if that's how you feel, then you shouldn't use computers. ]

The way Intel handled this wasn't bad PR, it's a catastrophe. They were notified in June, did pretty much nothing except push harder for Kaiser (now KPTI in Linux, the fix) to be implemented in various places they had influence.

More damning is one of their chief engineers dumping over $50M of Intel stock this year. Intel are saying "it was a scheduled stock movement", but in fact, it was scheduled in October, long after disclosure of Meltdown in June.

And if you want a conspiracy theory, apparently Intel, as early as January this year, were pushing hard for KASLR adoption across the industry - KASLR is the predecessor to the KPTI/Kaiser fix for Meltdown. So it looks like Intel saw this bombshell coming from a long way off... but continued to sell their faulty processors without any disclosure.

I expect they've just lost a massive amount of pricing power with their (big) cloud customers who will be rightly pissed at their attitude. Playing their cards so close to their chest and the stock dump after disclosure is the icing. I imagine there will be huge lawsuits out of this, and possibly some jail time for insider trading if the SEC get involved.

Fun and games.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: dubigrasuNot many reasons to be disappointed in SteamOS itself. The SteamOS experience (features wise) is as good as the Steam Client allows it to be.

Quoting: dubigrasuAll these feature you want (and we want) belong to the Steam Client, not to SteamOS.
The Steam machines didn't failed because SteamOS wasn't doing its job, they failed because (among other strong reasons) the Big Picture experience as is provided by the Steam Client wasn't up to par with what you find on existing consoles. The disappointment is mostly wrongly directed at SteamOS, which just a vehicle for the Steam Client.

I don't agree here. I don't want Netflix/Spotify/Amazon Prime/whatever support in Steam. But if I buy a Steam Machine, running SteamOS, I want an easy way to access those third party tools, just like my PS4 does.

Sure, SteamOS is linked to Steam, and I get that. But they shouldn't be if they truly want to offer SteamOS as a viable "console" experience. People keep saying "...but SteamOS isn't competing with consoles!!", but if the public see it as a console alternative, then it really, really is competing with consoles. And it fails, badly - more expensive, less AAA games, no third party support. Literally, not a single reason to buy a Steam Machine (except Linux gamers wanting a couch experience) and nothing exciting about running Steam OS otherwise.

I think ElectricPrism nailed it - it's a development target now and nothing more.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Code ArtisanThe steam machine reminds me the Apple Pippin:

• Hardware same as PC (Macintosh)


• Running a PC OS (MacOS)


• Produced by third parties (Bandai)

The Pippin was a huge failure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin [External Link]

That Wikipedia article is gold:

Marketing failure
Once Bandai licensed Pippin from Apple, Apple made no effort to market the Pippin platform. All the marketing was to be done by the licensees.

Sound familiar??

View this comment - View article - View full comments