They would definitely not agree to that

dbrand wouldn’t ask them – as usual

Just make Frank face plates. Surely nothing will go wrong.

Why am I not surprised they didn’t get a license

Why am I not surprised they went ahead without even asking to get a license?

Pretty sure these are the occasional individuals, not large scale bot nets.

The PS3 compute cluster incident commented below is what came to mind.

You mean the thing that was amazing advertisement for the computing power of the PS3 over the Xbox360? Yeah, Sony suffered so much from the abuse.

do you think it would stop a savvy IT personnel?

You expect companies to list on their tax forms with hundreds of Steam accounts?

No, machine generated output is not eligible for copyright protection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality

Duh - people are shitty and would abuse it.

One order per valid account (the same restrictions they applied to Steam Deck purchases years ago, account at least a year old and previous game purchases from that account). There can’t be large scale abuse.

If they did that, some companies would buy them for their offices. It can probably run Windows too.

Not if Valve sticked to their 1 order per valid account rule.

All the same

Sure. Fans work totally different when there’s a slightly newer processor.

Of course. And it will last for years.

The Steam Machine uses semi-custom processors.

Steam Machine uses old crap AMD had lying around. This is also why it’s not an APU design.

Companies like Asus fart out new designs every year. It’s doable if the design pipeline if efficient enough.

changing the design now

Not now. When RAM prices started skyrocketing. That wasn’t only today or yesterday.

The point of shitty old processors was to get them cheap. Now that RAM and storage are the biggest factors, they could have gone with newer processors and not be significantly more expensive but significantly more performant.

Tech workers

I don’t. Not that this has to be true for others but I use the command line for ping, ipconfig, and winget.

Well who uses powershell? Common people open command prompt and it doesn’t support ls.

Windows Terminal is shipped with Windows and defaults to PowerShell. Too bad Windows ships some ancient PS version by default but winget install Microsoft.PowerShell isn’t that complicated.

Cheap Eastern European and Indian coders.

ls works on Windows just fine. PowerShell understands this command since a long time, maybe even since the very beginning (not looking through the git commits, just to find out).