Game Over For Sony and Open Source?

Glyn Moody writes "Sony has never been much of a friend to hackers, and its infamous rootkit showed what it thought of users. But by omitting the option to install GNU/Linux on its new PS3, it has removed the final reason for the open source world to care about Sony. Unless, of course, you find Google's new distribution alliance with Sony to pre-install Chrome on its PCs exciting in some way."

Comments

ps3cluster.umassd.edu That's Why

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:Cost/Benefit

[Khyber]

I'll save myself from repeating and just point you out to this:

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/products/dram/Products_XDRDRAM.html

That 256 megs of 4GHz XDR eats up your puny 4GB of 1066MHz DDR2 without thinking twice, in clock speed, latency, and actual bandwidth throughput.

It uses an nVidia graphics the RSX core, which is pretty much a hyped-up Geforce 7800.

It sucked because of the hypervisor. They just removed it. Time for custom firmware to re-enable installing a third-party OS and time for direct access to the hardware.

2TFLOP supercomputer at your fingertips. The best high-end gaming PCs can barely hit 1TFLOP with all their hardware combined.