Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Thu 27th Aug 2009 20:31 UTC
The recent release of the PS3 Slim brought about joy for those who were waiting for a less expensive/smaller gaming system and indignation for those who were waiting for a Linux experimental machine of the same type as there was no "OtherOS" or Linux option on this model. Why? we cry sadly. Because, the deep, omniscient voices of two Sony representatives boom back.
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Member since:
2006-10-20
Sony is just like Apple with the iPhone. They want you in their walled garden. They are not trying to sell you a pc. They are trying to sell you a games console to make them some money. They also want to sell you movies, anime and games. The minute Sony locked down the PS3s GPU anyone who wanted to run linux on the ps3 should have run screaming from the platform. It is obvious Sony don't give a damn about people owning their hardware and that we are all just "licensees" to them. This is why I never bought a PS3 and why a friend of mine sold his. He wanted it for a home set top box but sony only allow their preapproved rubbish on it. Not worth the time/hastle. The people saying that Sony allowing Linux on the platform helped to curb hardware hacking are probably right.
You open your system but make the GPU a pain, people give up and move on. You try to close the entire system and people try to hack it open. By openning the system enough to get linux on, but not too much. Sony has ensured that noone is throwing large resources at cracking the platform for both piracy and homebrew. Half the homebrew community is probably thinking you can homebrew ps3 already. The other half wants GPU access but doesn't know howto get it. The piracy scene is looking at bluray as being expensive as hell, and they don't have enough hardware hackers interested in probing the ps3 platform because all that's left to probe is the GPU and security system. Vs having the entire platform to explore. A lot of hardware hackers do it because they find interesting things along the way. With the PS3 most of the mystery has been revealed. There's just that 10% of hard work which most hardware hackers don't really care about. Breaking encryption is usually a means to an end for them. That end is usually knowledge of the system and getting 1-2 uses out of the object other than what it was originally intended for. With PS3 there is no mystery. Just a stupid locked down GPU and a copy protection encryption scheme that's in hardware and is annoying to break. Noone is interested in breaking in.
Edited 2009-08-28 01:34 UTC