How the Xbox 360 knows if your hard drive is genuine

The IBM PC was a runaway success because it was user moddable. IBM failed to recognize this with their follow-on PS/2, which was locked down. It flopped. DEC's Rainbow PC flopped because they tied it to proprietary floppy disks.

Chrysler was loved by hotrodders in the 60s and 70s because the company even published extensive manuals on how to hotrod them to various levels, and supplied the parts!

I put my money where my mouth is, the D language is 100% open source.

Not sure about the modern xbox, but a lot of game consoles have traditionally been sold at a loss with the expectation of making it up on game licensing fees.

Making more sales at a loss without a significant enough increase in licensing revenue equals a bigger loss. And that's before accounting for the higher support costs of people with incompatible 3rd-party hardware calling Xbox support.

> these tiny parts usually run with high privileges and dramatically impact the overall system. In such cases, MTE/CHERI play pretty nicely - they help ensure that whatever bugs we have in these areas are killed at their root cause (probabilistically/deterministically). This is exactly why MSR, MSRC and Azure Silicon pushed for this AMAZING project of CheriIoT ... scaling CHERI down to RISC-V32E, the smallest core RISC-V specification. I’m very excited about this project, and I hope once we will open-source the ISA and the prototype, more folks across the industry could join.

That is a direction that would benefit everyone: open silicon and open firmware for the most security sensitive components. It is technically possible and at least some humans in big companies understand the importance to future would-be-digital civilizations.

A big and weird part of this is simply because Valve is different. Still a corporation, still flawed, but certainly, if nothing else, definitely different. They have an appeal almost reminiscent of how people once regarded Google a long time ago. They've gotten a solid reputation for playing the long game with respect to building their ecosystem, and in that regard, Deck feels like a product many years in the making: the Steam client and games library, Proton and DXVK, the overlay and other middleware libraries, the multiple iterations of SteamOS, and many more endeavors all came into the product that the Deck is today.

Meanwhile, PS Vita did not have the luxury of the depth of consumer goodwill that Valve has, even if Sony has many times the breadth of consumer goodwill; worse, it needed to bootstrap it's ecosystem, whereas Valve has committed to bringing it's entire existing ecosystem to Deck instead. Valve also had the luxury of not being a traditional video game console vendor, and thus I don't think it elicited as strong of a reaction in the "console wars" either: I do not think that people view it the same. And hell, I don't think Valve does either. It has an aggressive starting price, and thus definitely can compete, but it seems probably still profitable. At the higher end, it's priced more like a gaming laptop, and thus the enthusiast gear that you would expect. I think they landed themselves a nearly unloseable situation with Deck. Because it's basically just an extension of their existing Steam ecosystem, it's essentially a value-add at worst. I would bet it acts more complimentary to other consoles, and there are probably few Deck owners without at least one other game console.

As a competitor to Nintendo's gaming handhelds and as a successor to the PSP, it seems like consumers largely rejected the PS Vita. Maybe in an alternate universe where Sony took an entirely different approach to the ecosystem and marketing of the PS Vita, things could've gone very differently.