Slashdot Mirror

Because the PS3's hardware was stupid.

No, it was not.

You would think that watching the news, but look at the stats and you'd know you were wrong:

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Example:

Crime rate per 100k people:
1968: 3,370.2
2011: 3,295.0

The peak was around from 1975 to 1996, ranging from about 5.2k to 5.8k per 100k population. It's been in the 3k range and steadily falling since 2004. But falling crime rates don't attract viewers.

Other sources. Crime rate in the 00s. See PDF pages 3 & 4 (national rate steady decline): http://www.umassd.edu/media/umassdartmouth/seppce/centerforpolicyanalysis/crime.pdf

1991 -- 2010, FBI stats on Violent crime. 2010 level almost half of that in 1991: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls

As far as the linux debacle is concerned, we gotta be honest with ourselves and admit that only the /. crowd lost on that.

What about the cluster people? Or were you counting those as the slashdot crowd?

Should they remove features after sale? No, but its not going to impact their target audience all that much either.

They sold it, even to their target audience, as "It's not just a console, it's a computer, even a supercomputer." If they then turn around and remove the feature, even if their target audience doesn't notice or care, how is that in any way fair? If you sold minivans with turbochargers to a bunch of soccer moms, then went around stealing the turbochargers back, I think even the soccer moms (who really didn't need it to begin with) have the right to be outraged.

Im a bit more pissed off that users are now required to update to the latest firmware before playing offline games.

See, this wouldn't bother me at all, if it weren't for the fact that the latest firmware actually removes features. With the saner devices I buy, upgrading the firmware tends to improve the user experience, not randomly remove features.

I cant really comment on the whole rootkit incident because i've only read about it. Then again, think about all the nasty little surprises we've heard about with removable storage.

Well, which in particular? The most common thing I hear about is removable storage that comes with malware by accident. This was by design, as a DRM measure.

when I think of $evil_corp Sony isnt exactly #1. Somewhere in the top 10, but certainly not #1.

I might, at least among large technology companies. I don't see Microsoft doing anything close anymore -- the only real contender is Apple.

However, just as you said that big studios program for the console first and think about PC later you gotta think those same studios are writing their games for Windows first. Max and linux ports are an afterthough if they're given attention at all.

The difference between OpenGL and Direct3D is tiny compared to the difference between either of those and the most efficient ways to program for a console. Plus, you've got all the same hardware and interfaces. I'd be very curious to see how Valve games run on the Mac -- I can't imagine they'd be that much worse than in Windows.

I do miss the days when Linux had the advantage, though. Back when Quake 3 was the hot new shit that you'd use for benchmarking, we had the very interesting situation where it ran faster under Wine than Windows, and the native Linux port was faster still.

Mainstream devs will always produce games for he largest target market and that happens to be Windows PC right now.

And the more I support indie games, particularly Linux ones, the more I'm changing that trend, I hope. I'm certainly not content to take the approach that so many Linux users do -- give up on gaming on the desktop, thus removing one more reason to have Windows (and maybe never booting Windows at all after that), and get a console. As evil as Microsoft might be, the only modern console developer who doesn't seem to be actively evil is Nintendo -- I don't think the Wii is a joke (and I am still considering buying one), but I do think that if you're really going for gameplay over graphics, you get a lot of the same by sticking to Linux indie games on the PC.

...it didn't provide access to all the superjuicy bits - even if they weren't exactly needed for homebrew..

What, like actual hardware accelerated graphics? IIRC, it just provided a framebuffer. Try uninstalling your video drivers and then playing any game.

you really ought to just get a dev license and start making some serious money.

Not everyone's in it for the money, and then you're subject to Sony's rules about what is and isn't allowed on the console. Do you think they'd ever allow something like XBMC?

before long, SONY realized their hacking was getting awfully close to not just unlocking some additional functionality, but also to unlocking piracy.

Interestingly, if you look at the timeline, piracy was about the first thing to fall. It was never the motive, otherwise you'd think these guys would stop.

So they removed OtherOS.

And thus, the first serious effort to hack the PS3. Before they removed OtherOS, it was this invincible platform, people were much more focused at hacking other systems since the PS3 already let them do something, at least.

Keep in mind, the people who made the first attempt are not the same people who ran projects like this.

You also say this casually, as if it's an OK thing for Sony to do, as if it's theirs to remove anymore. If I'd bought a PS3, I'd expect OtherOS to be a feature I bought it with. No matter that Sony had a pissing contest with some hackers, what they're doing here is trying to take back a feature I fucking bought. It's not terribly different from breaking into my car and stealing the stereo back because they've heard some people do evil things with stereos.

...I can do that on a generic PC, laptop, tablet.. you know.. the -real- hacker-friendly hardware.. why bother hacking the PS3 at all if NOT for the piracy?

For the things you can't do on a PC, laptop, tablet, etc. Never mind that, again, it was sold open. How would you feel if Dell took back your ability to run other OSes on your laptop, and locked you to Windows ME?

See if another console developer ever tries to be hackerfriendly again.

I would hope that other developer would take a look at the timeline. The PS3 certainly wasn't harder to hack than any other console. It's now been ripped open harder and deeper than any other console -- Sony is suing because that's what they know how to do, because they know very well that they can't put the cat back in the bag, that they can't just release a patch and call it done. And of course, as a nasty side effect for Sony, piracy is now possible.

But this didn't happen for years. They bought themselves years and years by being even marginally open. If they'd given more access to the hardware, there'd likely be even less incentive to hack it. It's not likely that they'd have kept it closed forever, but it's pretty clear that the only reason the PS3 remained uncracked for so long while other platforms were routinely pwned was OtherOS.

Everybody whining about the homebrew.. get a fucking PC and have at it

Why should I have to? I mean, I have a PC. You're talking about getting another one, trying to make it small, quiet, and cool, while adding enough power to play games, then getting a controller and trying to find PC games that play well from the couch with a controller, then setting up something like MythTV and buying a remote...

Never mind the people who already bought a PS3 for that purpose, back when it was actually reasonable to do. Or the people building clusters out of them. They should just, what, suck it up and throw all that shit away, and then go buy whatever h

...it didn't provide access to all the superjuicy bits - even if they weren't exactly needed for homebrew..

What, like actual hardware accelerated graphics? IIRC, it just provided a framebuffer. Try uninstalling your video drivers and then playing any game.

you really ought to just get a dev license and start making some serious money.

Not everyone's in it for the money, and then you're subject to Sony's rules about what is and isn't allowed on the console. Do you think they'd ever allow something like XBMC?

before long, SONY realized their hacking was getting awfully close to not just unlocking some additional functionality, but also to unlocking piracy.

Interestingly, if you look at the timeline, piracy was about the first thing to fall. It was never the motive, otherwise you'd think these guys would stop.

So they removed OtherOS.

And thus, the first serious effort to hack the PS3. Before they removed OtherOS, it was this invincible platform, people were much more focused at hacking other systems since the PS3 already let them do something, at least.

Keep in mind, the people who made the first attempt are not the same people who ran projects like this.

You also say this casually, as if it's an OK thing for Sony to do, as if it's theirs to remove anymore. If I'd bought a PS3, I'd expect OtherOS to be a feature I bought it with. No matter that Sony had a pissing contest with some hackers, what they're doing here is trying to take back a feature I fucking bought. It's not terribly different from breaking into my car and stealing the stereo back because they've heard some people do evil things with stereos.

...I can do that on a generic PC, laptop, tablet.. you know.. the -real- hacker-friendly hardware.. why bother hacking the PS3 at all if NOT for the piracy?

For the things you can't do on a PC, laptop, tablet, etc. Never mind that, again, it was sold open. How would you feel if Dell took back your ability to run other OSes on your laptop, and locked you to Windows ME?

See if another console developer ever tries to be hackerfriendly again.

I would hope that other developer would take a look at the timeline. The PS3 certainly wasn't harder to hack than any other console. It's now been ripped open harder and deeper than any other console -- Sony is suing because that's what they know how to do, because they know very well that they can't put the cat back in the bag, that they can't just release a patch and call it done. And of course, as a nasty side effect for Sony, piracy is now possible.

But this didn't happen for years. They bought themselves years and years by being even marginally open. If they'd given more access to the hardware, there'd likely be even less incentive to hack it. It's not likely that they'd have kept it closed forever, but it's pretty clear that the only reason the PS3 remained uncracked for so long while other platforms were routinely pwned was OtherOS.

Everybody whining about the homebrew.. get a fucking PC and have at it

Why should I have to? I mean, I have a PC. You're talking about getting another one, trying to make it small, quiet, and cool, while adding enough power to play games, then getting a controller and trying to find PC games that play well from the couch with a controller, then setting up something like MythTV and buying a remote...

Never mind the people who already bought a PS3 for that purpose, back when it was actually reasonable to do. Or the people building clusters out of them. They should just, what, suck it up and throw all that shit away, and then go buy whatever h

...it didn't provide access to all the superjuicy bits - even if they weren't exactly needed for homebrew..

What, like actual hardware accelerated graphics? IIRC, it just provided a framebuffer. Try uninstalling your video drivers and then playing any game.

you really ought to just get a dev license and start making some serious money.

Not everyone's in it for the money, and then you're subject to Sony's rules about what is and isn't allowed on the console. Do you think they'd ever allow something like XBMC?

before long, SONY realized their hacking was getting awfully close to not just unlocking some additional functionality, but also to unlocking piracy.

Interestingly, if you look at the timeline, piracy was about the first thing to fall. It was never the motive, otherwise you'd think these guys would stop.

So they removed OtherOS.

And thus, the first serious effort to hack the PS3. Before they removed OtherOS, it was this invincible platform, people were much more focused at hacking other systems since the PS3 already let them do something, at least.

Keep in mind, the people who made the first attempt are not the same people who ran projects like this.

You also say this casually, as if it's an OK thing for Sony to do, as if it's theirs to remove anymore. If I'd bought a PS3, I'd expect OtherOS to be a feature I bought it with. No matter that Sony had a pissing contest with some hackers, what they're doing here is trying to take back a feature I fucking bought. It's not terribly different from breaking into my car and stealing the stereo back because they've heard some people do evil things with stereos.

...I can do that on a generic PC, laptop, tablet.. you know.. the -real- hacker-friendly hardware.. why bother hacking the PS3 at all if NOT for the piracy?

For the things you can't do on a PC, laptop, tablet, etc. Never mind that, again, it was sold open. How would you feel if Dell took back your ability to run other OSes on your laptop, and locked you to Windows ME?

See if another console developer ever tries to be hackerfriendly again.

I would hope that other developer would take a look at the timeline. The PS3 certainly wasn't harder to hack than any other console. It's now been ripped open harder and deeper than any other console -- Sony is suing because that's what they know how to do, because they know very well that they can't put the cat back in the bag, that they can't just release a patch and call it done. And of course, as a nasty side effect for Sony, piracy is now possible.

But this didn't happen for years. They bought themselves years and years by being even marginally open. If they'd given more access to the hardware, there'd likely be even less incentive to hack it. It's not likely that they'd have kept it closed forever, but it's pretty clear that the only reason the PS3 remained uncracked for so long while other platforms were routinely pwned was OtherOS.

Everybody whining about the homebrew.. get a fucking PC and have at it

Why should I have to? I mean, I have a PC. You're talking about getting another one, trying to make it small, quiet, and cool, while adding enough power to play games, then getting a controller and trying to find PC games that play well from the couch with a controller, then setting up something like MythTV and buying a remote...

Never mind the people who already bought a PS3 for that purpose, back when it was actually reasonable to do. Or the people building clusters out of them. They should just, what, suck it up and throw all that shit away, and then go buy whatever h

That's like saying, they could just buy a PC. That's what I'd do, but that's also missing the point.point.

Aside from the opportunity to play around with different hardware, aside from the need to use their own hardware -- seriously, "just" throw away the PS3 you paid several hundred dollars for and buy a 360, because Sony decided to kill Other OS? -- there's also the fact that the PS3 has the Cell, which is much better at certain things than the 360.

Example: These guys. Can the 360 do that?

If you're talking about XNA, by the way, go back and read the above. Does the 360 let me run whatever I want on bare metal, or do I need an exploit? If I need an exploit, what's your point?

I wonder how the HPC community is going to respond; there is a not insubstantial community who heard "150Gflop/$400" and "Linux" and decided to build clusters from PS3s. Those machines can probably just have updates held back, but it makes replacement a problem. To forestall the inevitable "that isn't a serious use" argument, US Airforce owns Something like 2,500 PS3s for compute work.
Killing Linux on the PS3 also presents something of an issue for the other Cell "partners", who seem to be looking at the PS3 as a low-cost Cell development starter kit. The other Cell machines on the market are *much* more expensive (an IBM QS22 blade is $8-20k, depending on configuration, and Mercury Computer Systems doesn't even like talking about how much their Cell boards cost). Given that Cell is an enormously difficult architecture to target, having relatively inexpensive systems to test and train on is very desirable for the other vendors, especially now that so many of the HPC folks are fixated on GPGPU, which is also terrible to program for, but has a far lower cost of entry. It could be that IBM's decision not to pursue Cell in the HPC market is how it became politically tenable for Sony to kill off Linux on the PS3.

Why on /earth/ would Sony care about Linux on PS3's?

And honestly, for the great majority of users, why on earth would you bother putting Linux on a PS3 (aside from 'because I can' and scientific stuff ...

Well, via a slashdot article I submitted, there's a site that shows you how to make your own supercomputer with a cluster of PS3s that was about $4,000 at the time and probably less now. I think they were using Fedora 8 because of the Cell SDK support at the time. While you might call this "scientific stuff," some people might view it as a really cheap alternative for universities and hobbyists. Just a thought to consider.

this is much better [reported prior on /.] http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html 16 PS3 cell processors for approximately 400 nodes and not a bad price 16 * $500us or $8000 [less if you can stand ebay]

It would've been cheaper to just buy a Cray.

If you read the article and followed the link to his PS3 Gravity Grid site, you'd know a couple things about the cost (FREE) for this computational power:

#1) The total cost of purchasing an entire "PS3 Gravity Grid" supercomputer for yourself is less than the cost of a single simulation run on a BlueGene. In other words, you can buy the cow, the pasture, and a barn for the price of a gallon of milk.

#2) Sony *DONATED* his 8-node cluster (albeit with 20GB PS3's which they were closing out at the time) so he actually got a "supercomputer" for nearly free.

#3) The power of the 8-node PS3 cluster is roughly the same as a 200 node partition on a BlueGene SuperComputer (1 PS3 = 25 Blue Gene nodes). With 8 Cell CPUs, he has 56 SPU's running at ~3GHz to crank through his computations. This would mean a single CELL SPU is roughly 4X more powerful than a single BlueGene node which isn't unreasonable considering that it runs at a higher clockspeed (the supercomputer has to worry more about heat dissipation with hundreds or thousands of cores).

#4) I believe that by the US Gov't's somewhat outdated standards, a PS2 qualifies as a supercomputer. The FPU power in a PS3 is on ther order of 200 times higher than that of the PS2 for single precision and considerably more for double precision (which is emulated in software on the PS2).

The article summary: "An unnamed Dartmouth student was visited by Homeland Security for requesting a copy of Mao Zedong's Little Red Book for a class project."

The first sentences of TFA: "A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called 'The Little Red Book.'"

Dartmouth != UMass Dartmouth.

The student attends the University of Massachusettes at Dartmouth, which goes by the shorter name "UMass Dartmouth." This is not to be confused with Dartmouth College, which, considering that it predates the founding of the United States, is the proper institution to be called by that one-word name.

let the mod-down begin...

Nevertheless, I find the details fishy:

1. Why would a student have to write down a SSN for a book loan, but not have to write down the class for which he is requesting the book?
2. If he *did* have to write down his class, then why would the NSA waste resources on this case?
3. Why would a book by Mao be on a watch list? Surely the NSA isn't having flashbacks to the 1950's!
4. Why does it seem just a little too convenient that this unnamed student is being investigated by the NSA while doing research for a class on "fascism and totalitarianism"?
5. Why are none of Robert PontBriand's classes (the professor in question, according to TFA) listed as "fascism and totalitarianism"?

Don't forget the Ripsaw used by TeamTMT. Their vehicle looks much cooler, and more fun to drive, than the wimpy one from UMass Dartmouth. All they need to do is figure out that AI problem and they're done...

I have to ask the same question. It seems to me that PHP gained popularity as an *nix/c-Syntax alternative to Microsoft's ASP. Like ASP - quick, dirty, cheap, and not-compiled. But for all its faults, ASP at least had Option Explicit .

However, the language seems lend itself to a lot coding flaws - explicitly defined variables, variables that can do quadruple duty as scalars, arrays, maps and references with no visual cue as to what they're for, abuse of global variables, no standard library resulting in 5+ functions that do the same thing - that result in unreadable, obtuse and convoluted code.

(Before somebody flames me about such things being a matter of "taste" - there are academic studies out there regarding human comprehension of coding styles. These things are quantifiable. That's why it's called Computer Science - not Computer Art)

Yes, bad progammers can make even the best language suck, but PHP really gives you free reign to be more sloppy than most. Yeah, a lot of php apps look slick (phpNuke, phpAdmin, etc) but under the hood they're a mess. :-\

You might want to contact the SHARE Foundation. (Society for Human Advancement through Rehabilitation Engineering). http://www.share.umassd.edu/
Dr. Les Cory is the founder and a really good guy, as well as extremely technical. He was one of my professors and advisors when I was in college. Phone numbers and email address are available on the website (I'll try to be nice and keep some of the spambots away by not posting that info here.) These folks are really good at doing cool technical things on a limited budget.

Tiwana and Keil were asking MIS directors what *they* thought, not project managers or developers, leading me to believe that this is more based on client perception than someone with experience working on said projects.

Moreover, Tiwana and Keil have more business than science in their background, and neither appears to have practical experience implementing large systems.

Now, while a lack of any sort of methodology is a disaster waiting to happen, I have a difficult time believing that a bad fit for a project creates more risk than project complexity and shifting requirements combined, as they suggest.

In addition, in the section on fitting method to project, they claim that the best place for waterfall is, "... for managing larger projects where requirements are better understood." Contrast this with some little organizations like TRW, IBM, DoD, et al who have found that waterfall is the number one cause of failure of large projects. (see Iterative and Incremental Development: A Brief History)

How did these chimps get their snakeoil published in ACM Queue?

Of course, none of the apps people have mentioned here are particularly pedagogical. The best listed are collaborative discussion systems. Big whoop. So's Slashdot, and we're not learning much here.

There are, however, many applications built for learners. They just all happen to focus on teaching a small number of specific ideas. Good examples are World Watcher for teaching climatology and SimCalc for teaching Calculus to middle schoolers.

Writing small applications for teaching in a limited domain is just not sexy enough to get headlines or grants.

:w

CMM is the Capability Maturity Model. It's a system for rating the processes used by a software engineering organization. Higher levels of the model indicate higher proficiency at developing software in an efficient, consistent manner. I think the levels go from 1 to 5. If you're really interested, here's a link. http://www2.umassd.edu/SW PI/processframework/cmm/cmm.html