

Should Sony quit the internet?



Now yet another attack has struck the befuddled company.










Comments     Threshold


RE: Angry little men
By Paj on 5/25/2011 12:51:00 PM , Rating: 4
Completely agree.

One upshot to take out of it though is that it will probably encourage future tech related products to be more supportive of the homebrew/enthusiast community, and realise its a losing battle trying to fight them. Microsoft making the Kinect hack-able, and even encouraging users to do so, is a great example of this, and how it can generate positive PR for the company.

RE: Angry little men
By M4gery on 5/25/2011 4:03:20 PM , Rating: 3

Yup, and if Sony had pursued this route with the PSP and really supported the homebrew community, they might have monkey-stomped the GBA and DS, or at least be a very strong competitor.

RE: Angry little men
By Daemyion on 5/26/2011 6:38:47 AM , Rating: 2
Out of all the consoles out there, past and present, this has happened to the one that was arguably the most open. Regardless of what really happened, Sony got the impression that OtherOS was used to make in-roads against it's drm model, yanked the support, and ended up where they are today.

Chances are that because of this any console in the future will be locked down as tight as possible. Why take the chance with such a fickle community? Especially when the feature appeals to less than 5% of the install base?

RE: Angry little men
By Paj on 5/26/2011 7:49:13 AM , Rating: 2
Someone posted a link to an article of how some US defense agency bought several hundred PS3s and hooked them all up to create a supercomputer at a fraction of the cost it would have been if made using off the shelf components. This was done when it was more open however.

Pretty cool!

RE: Angry little men
By Daemyion on 5/26/2011 9:40:34 AM , Rating: 2
Indeed, but there are two things to consider here:
The DOD doesn't play games on the PS3 and as such probably doesn't connect them to the internet or patch them. So it is highly likely that the removal of OtherOS didn't affect them at all.
The DOD would have been better off buying CELL chips from IBM direct, rather than having something primarily designed as a gaming machine be converted to doing work. There's a good reason why a different level of support for mission critical items exists.

Finally, this still wouldn't coerce future console and handheld manufacturers to create more open systems. In fact, this kind of behaviour* reinforces the notion, both for manufactures and prospective alternate-needs clients, that there should be a strong divide between consumer oriented gaming systems and general purpose/mission critical hardware. Any project built around the DOD test case would do well to stop considering gaming hardware as a viable low cost alternative.

* the hacking, not the DOD project obviously

RE: Angry little men
By Aloonatic on 5/26/2011 8:24:13 AM , Rating: 2
Can't say that I agree with you.

They'll never give people access to their hardware again, and as someone points out, Sony made the mistake of actually being a class leader on this front, but then changed their minds and became just like Nintendo and MS. Queue angry "enthusiasts".

What they are going to do is try to make the homebrew/enthusiast community work for them, which is what they are doing now. They'll create community portals where enthusiasts can do what they want and create games etc within the parameters set by Sony, MS, etc and make games that channel create energies more profitably, like LBP, but even more involved.

You know, I know, everyone knows that the reason behind the otherOS being pulled was to stop (well, delay) the console being hacked/chipped or at least to make it more inconvenient for people to play pirated games and software.

No large company is going to make their hardware even more open. They just give too much earning potential away when they do that. Sure, more people might buy their consoles if they did, but then they might not make money back in the long run, so they wil have to make initial unit proces highter, and then the closed console that still plays the lastest CoD game is a lot cheaper to start with, so that's what peopel will buy.

It's a nice idea, but outside of the enthusiast/homebrew community where people may genuinely just want to harmlessly tinker and experiment with hardware, you need to realise that for 99.999999999% of people, making console "open" is purely about piracy, and that group makes up 99.999999999% (well, the vast majority by far) of the global market.

