You cannot compensate for chromatic aberration in a zoom with glass elements (because a body of glass won't change its shape under normal conditions), this is the point. Rather you can move the minimum of aberrations in the zoom range. On real cameras it's usually at the tele end (because people usually use a zoom lens as a cheap alternative to a set of teles) on a camera with a fixed lens it's probably up to marketing where to put it.
Chromatic aberration is a property of every lens but is extremely apparent in zoom lenses (because you'd need to use flexible elements to compensate for this in a zoom). Most people don't notice them because they are pretty subtle on regular scenes, professional reviewers need to shoot sky through leaves or a similar scene with a lot of high contrast edges to make the aberrations apparent enough for their audience. Since the aberration is a function on a zoom lens is a function of focal distance it's also super easy to show/hide them for whatever camera the professional reviewer got paid. It's not that I think Sony compact cameras are much better than Panasonic, just that blaming Sony for obeying laws of nature is rather silly.
Yeah, basically fair price is $0.00 or whatever. I just pointed that piracy rates at 90% levels are hardly could be described as "dropped like a stone".
The wise thing to do is to produce a new SKU of the PS3 designed for distributed computing and development which allows the Other OS option and has a special SDK but, for example, can't join PSN (and perhaps cannot even play PS3 games) or which uses a special PSN for this purpose.
How this SKU would be different than PS3 Dev or PS3 Test units already in production?
We probably mean different things. Win9x "OS" was a DOS program in the same way Win 1,2 and 3 were - you had to boot DOS then start windows from there. So it's DOS mode was just reverting to the initial DOS, unloading all the windows bells and whistles. Win2k was a standalone OS so such a mode of operation was impossible. I
Microsoft "removed" DOS-mode from Windows, it was there in 9x and then, poof, disappeared in XP! It's the same way Sony "removes" stuff - it's just not supported anymore and not available in the new version of the OS. If the feature is important to you then wtf did you switch to the OS version that does not support it?
Some European "fuel-efficient" cars would be a hazard in the US trying to merge into 80mph traffic off an uphill ramp. Driving a smaller underpowered car to save fuel does not work for the most of the US - people have big families, 50 mile commutes, broken roads, snow, animals jumping on the road etc etc. The only sensible fuel-saving measure from Europe you could apply in the US is diesel but we won't get those in the US because of the environmental regulations.
Economy is the common explanation for this but I don't see how it works. Most of the goods there (at least in Russia, I have never been to China) cost much more than in the US and a bit more than in Europe. A car that costs X dollars in the US is 2X euros in Russia. An iPhone costs ~$1000 and plenty of people buy those. But even if people were really that poor and could not afford software at the US price - so what? People in the US earn less than people in the UAE for example, they pay less for their stuff and UAE citizens pay more for their stuff. "More" and "less" make sense only when you compare with another economy, inside it's irrelevant - somebody earns less making some goods or services and sells them for less so another who is also making less can afford it. Setting regional prices is trivial - very few people there speak European languages (including English) and very few people in the US/Europe speak Russian or Mandarin. Pirates translate the software that does not have built-in localization themselves.
Piracy and openness just killed local industry before it had any chance - why pay engineers to develop hardware when you can just rip off a design that somebody else paid billions for? Why buy v1.0 if some local software (or even pirate it) when you can as well pirate something that Microsoft/Adobe/Apple/etc spent billions of dollars developing? At the end of the day somebody had to pay. You are saying you are not paying for this piracy so who does? It's not that you had to pay more, but you still had to pay. There is also hidden cost - without piracy there would be more money and more stuff would be made but since it's unknown to the general public what could have been made you can just say "nobody guarantees you a sale, a pirate is not a lost sale, live with it". Anyways, my point was that if nobody paid then geohots did not have anything to "jailbreak" any more and their own creativity does not seem to go beyond this. And most smart people would rather find a job that pays than develop stuff for geohots to "liberate". This is what actually happened in Asia, this is not some speculation.
Compare Russian and Chinese technology to the American if you think American IP laws are snuffing innovation. Heck, compare any technology to American. Somehow America managed to become the world's technology leader with the strictest IP laws in the world and the countries with inexistent IP laws just sell oil and slave labor. Some say American industry was founded on the lax IP laws in the 19th century but really, American technology of that period was nowhere compared to European. Another example is Japan, that unlike other Asian nations embraced strict IP laws after the war (it used to rip off Western designs just like China and did not drop this habit instantly even after the war). So now they make talking robot dogs, game consoles and music that TFA is so butthurt about, hey, why did not innovators and tinkerers hack a Chinese talking robot dog, Chinese game consoles or listen to some Chinese record labels? Those should be much better and cheaper than DRM-loaded crap from a Japanese evil corp, right?
The point of high production values you raised - there is no evidence that this model is inherently faulty. Hollywood has had the same model for ~100 years and does not seem to be anywhere near collapsing. It's true that you can also make money with low budget stuff. Somebody can shoot a wedding using a fraction of a movie budget and make good money, would you rather watch a silly Hollywood blockbuster or a wedding of complete strangers? I imagine you would watch wedding of your relatives but how many unmarried relatives do you have to provide you with continuous stream of entertainment? Low cost production and high cost production are different markets they can co-exist.
It's hard to tell how much money is made on PS3 vs 360: there are money that Sony and Microsoft make, there are money the third parties make and neither are reported. I have shipped two games for the "next-gen" so far - first sold much better on 360, second sold much better on PS3, however in both cases PC SKU completely tanked.
As for embracing piracy and the future full of geohots: check out Russia and China. Both countries embraced piracy in the most broad meaning long before broadband became available in the West. Street vendors had been selling CDs stuffed with the latest versions of the newest software at almost nominal margin over the cost of printing and selling a CD itself. Reverse engineering is not even illegal - almost all Soviet hardware was a copy of some American or Japanese device and most of the Soviet OSs were just "jailbroken" versions of some IBM or DEC OS complete with embedded copyright strings.
So what is the result? Where are all the Russian and Chinese inventors and tinkerers? Why, they are sending you the contents of your spam folder, they are stea... err sharing your CC# by "jailbreaking" merchant web-sites and the smartest are coding buggy software for the $59 iPhone look-alike you will by at Wall-Mart. Software industry there exists chiefly in form of outsourcing shops because developing software for domestic market is not profitable and it's very hard to compete in the international markets without a good home base. I can see how this can appeal to Slashdot crowd though: nobody is making tons of money, everything is "fair" and the consumer is happy. However this only works because there are still markets somehow protected from piracy, mainly the US. So the US customers are paying for the piracy paradise in the Asia. But who do you think is going to pay for the piracy in US?
>On a rented system, just do what the cable companies do. Turn it on, it loads memory resident software, runs, and no physical media is ever used.
A company like Sony or even Microsoft does not own any networks so they'd have to pay somebody to send these data. However the main problem is the principal network availability. It's pretty easy to write a DRM system that would be at least as hard to crack as what you suggested if there were not fixed media and it would work nice even if you owned the hardware (same as you can own your cable box only better). E.g. make a CPU that can only execute encrypted code, set a unique public for each CPU by blowing internal fuses and send the game encrypted for this key. You can copy and backup it all you want, it will only work on the CPU you have paid for. But today's market requires fixed media because quite a few people don't have a network connection in their living room.
>The way to deal with piracy is to increase value for dollar, and attack it as a social problem. When it's not cool to pirate, there will be less of it.
Lol, I remember "Don't copy that floppy" song and dance. It might work eventually but I am afraid that even if Sony, MSFT, Nintendo and Google got together and spent whatever cash they have - it would not scratch this problem. And what the point to spend tons of money to fight piracy anyways? They are in business of making money, not curing social ills. It's the government job and if government provided adequate protection of copyrights nobody would ever bother with DRM.
>Piracy is a tough problem, but not one that's so tough that we need to institute such draconian measures.
I guess it's a matter of perspective. From my perspective IP laws enforcement in the area of videogames is on the level of those "You cannot smoke naked on Sundays in Bumersville, TX" freak laws. DRM was a joke before PS3, it was just enough prevent a completely clueless person from downloading a copy from the net and running it. PS3 DRM was the first decent and it's the only one so far.
>Funny how norms and social techniques can work. Fighting with one's customers isn't productive. Never has been, and games are no different from anything else in the world.
Yes, and nobody fights with one's customers. I mean, do you honestly believe Sony is suing Geohot because he is a customer? Not because of copyright infringement?
>What if all those instances of piracy came with a opportunity to buy?
To me it appears like you want to persuade me that piracy is not the absolute evil (unlike Sony:)). There is no need. I know how Microsoft successfully exploits piracy to crush competition, for example. I can come up with 50 different schemes to control damage. Yes, not every pirate is a lost sale. Yes, it's free advertisement etc. etc. However the current MO in the industry is to fight it. The only way to change it is to show how you make more money embracing piracy. The same way how most of the Western PC developers switched from the PC to consoles when they've seen how much more console developers make.
Sorry about formating - apparently the options were set for HTML instead of text so my line breaks all have been eaten.
> The moral argument here is that without some checks on what SONY does with their OS, they can over exploit those using it. How do we know SONY is playing fair, for example?
Sure, there are no checks. Sony might not play fair. Same as anybody else. What is worst that can happen though? Sony will remotely brick my PS3? What are the chances of that and what are the chances of opening hardware preventing this already unlikely outcome? If anything opening hardware would put me at more risk of script kiddies bricking my PS3 through some exploit.
>What happens when the hardware gets old, or somebody wants to archive a game for later on?
Nothing exciting will happen. It would be nice if you could exercise Fair Use without obstruction and make backups and what not. I will tell you what would also be nice - people leaving their cars unlocked so in case of a natural calamity pedestrians could seek shelter in parked cars. I mean it's already illegal to steal cars so everybody will be respectful of everybody's property, right? Do you think your fellow citizens are criminals or what?
>Each instance of that is NOT A LOSS, as many of them simply would not have paid anyway, and the body of available entertainment dollars doesn't actually fund all those instances of free anyway.
Yet console games sell much better than PC games and I see no other explanation than the difference in the piracy rates. Same as PC games with DRM sell much better than PC games without DRM.
>So, it's not about that. It's about structuring things so that more of the people make more of the right choices more of the time, not locking them out, untrusted, assumed criminals.
For a rational person getting something for $0 instead of some other positive amount of money is the right choice most of the time. There is nothing a private business can do to change this choice. $0.99 games for iPhone get pirated like crazy (I've seen figures as high as 90% piracy rates) what else needs to be structured so people stop steal those?
>Rent them, and most all of the issue goes away.
So what would be different? People would not "jailbreak" their rented PS3s? Why would not they? Because it's illegal? Piracy (or what would you call this "jailbreaking") is illegal too or at least appears so to the judge who did not toss Sony's case.
I don't know what you imagined but my PS3 does not have any special level of access - I've bought it at Gamestop and I believe it's the same unit they would sell to anybody else. At work I do not use retail PS3s - there are developer units with different hardware and different software. I have been in game development since 1997.
You can re-purpose your PS3, your TV or your car, any hardware you own and nobody is stopping you.
But software is different - you don't own the software, you have been licensed to use it (unless you wrote it yourself or bought rights). Microsoft will license you Windows and will let you run your programs but won't give you modification rights (or maybe it will - I did not read their EULA), GPL will license you linux and will let you modify it as you please, Sony will license you their OS and will only let you run Sony programs. If you don't like it - don't buy Sony stuff, don't buy Microsoft stuff or don't buy anything with GPL in it depending on what you don't like. Or go ahead and violate their license but don't act all shocked and outraged when you get sued, especially after you documented what you did all over the Internet.
There is also a moral side. You think it's amoral to hide hardware and I can see your position. However I also see Sony's position - for every single person who wants to learn or tinker or whatever there are literally tens of thousands who just want to play free games. Hiding and protecting hardware helps to fend them off. Sony wants to sell games and will screw tinkerers over the sales but there are other companies that make completely open hardware for you to tinker. Like GP32 or what is it called now, have you seen a lot of homebrew there? There are probably already more CFWs, "package managers" and other piracy related releases for PS3 in the past few months than there were original games for GP32 in the past few years.
No, I make living coding games (for PS3 too) but don't play much so hardly am a gamer. Maybe I am a freak of nature but Sony never harassed me, hacked hardware I own or did anything else the real slashdoters seem to suffer on regular basis. My PS3 plays games, bluray, streaming movies (all that in 3D too) works nicely with a Panasonic TV so can be controlled with the TV remote. Could not care less to run Other OS (still have it on an old fat PS3 that I replaced with a slim for aesthetics reason) - I can run Linux on any of my PCs.
Geohot's release of modified Sony OS infringes on Sony's copyright. He does not own Sony OS, he has no rights to modify it nor does he has any rights to distribute the modified work.
In case of the current batch of PS3 hackers (Geohot et al) they are protecting the software that they already license and don't sell. If "tinkerers" and "innovators" did not distribute modifications to the Sony's OS Sony would not have a leg to stand against them in court. Also it does not seem that Sony cares about hardware modifications unless they are used to bypass copy protection, I've never heard about Sony going after anyone who modded their PS3 case or used accelerometers ripped from a Dualshock in a project.
I am not a lawyer but from what I understand it works like this: if you believe there is no contract between you and PSN then you are trespassing when using it because the only thing that allows your use of the service is the EULA (actually ToS in case of PSN). So by using it you confirm that you agreed to the EULA's terms otherwise it's your choice either to be liable for breach of contract or for trespassing. I'd choose former because the breach would still need to be proven while your own admission of the trespassing will need no further processing. Also, there is also no agreement to pay for services - the PSN is free (there are other, paid, services available through it but the PSN itself is free).
Sony could not care less about Linux games ruining PS3 games market seeing how well they perform on PC and other platforms.
Full RSX access was disabled because it would be to easy to bypass whatever memory protection the CPU has. It's basically another computer that can read/write your memory ignoring any access restrictions the CPU is trying to enforce.
Check out that video yourself - all the information they've got was through running the USB dongle exploit designed (or more likely stolen) by the Chinese.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot compensate for chromatic aberration in a zoom with glass elements (because a body of glass won't change its shape under normal conditions), this is the point. Rather you can move the minimum of aberrations in the zoom range. On real cameras it's usually at the tele end (because people usually use a zoom lens as a cheap alternative to a set of teles) on a camera with a fixed lens it's probably up to marketing where to put it.
Chromatic aberration is a property of every lens but is extremely apparent in zoom lenses (because you'd need to use flexible elements to compensate for this in a zoom). Most people don't notice them because they are pretty subtle on regular scenes, professional reviewers need to shoot sky through leaves or a similar scene with a lot of high contrast edges to make the aberrations apparent enough for their audience. Since the aberration is a function on a zoom lens is a function of focal distance it's also super easy to show/hide them for whatever camera the professional reviewer got paid.
It's not that I think Sony compact cameras are much better than Panasonic, just that blaming Sony for obeying laws of nature is rather silly.
Yeah, basically fair price is $0.00 or whatever. I just pointed that piracy rates at 90% levels are hardly could be described as "dropped like a stone".
Check out how much iPhone/Android $0.99 games are pirated.
The wise thing to do is to produce a new SKU of the PS3 designed for distributed computing and development which allows the Other OS option and has a special SDK but, for example, can't join PSN (and perhaps cannot even play PS3 games) or which uses a special PSN for this purpose.
How this SKU would be different than PS3 Dev or PS3 Test units already in production?
Lol. It's not DOS, it's a command shell running as a win32 process in the protected mode. DOS mode is the actual DOS running in real mode.
We probably mean different things. Win9x "OS" was a DOS program in the same way Win 1,2 and 3 were - you had to boot DOS then start windows from there. So it's DOS mode was just reverting to the initial DOS, unloading all the windows bells and whistles. Win2k was a standalone OS so such a mode of operation was impossible. I
Microsoft "removed" DOS-mode from Windows, it was there in 9x and then, poof, disappeared in XP!
It's the same way Sony "removes" stuff - it's just not supported anymore and not available in the new version of the OS. If the feature is important to you then wtf did you switch to the OS version that does not support it?
Not all trees are the Christmas trees, they don't get chopped down at the end of the year but instead they tend to live for decades or even centuries.
Some European "fuel-efficient" cars would be a hazard in the US trying to merge into 80mph traffic off an uphill ramp. Driving a smaller underpowered car to save fuel does not work for the most of the US - people have big families, 50 mile commutes, broken roads, snow, animals jumping on the road etc etc. The only sensible fuel-saving measure from Europe you could apply in the US is diesel but we won't get those in the US because of the environmental regulations.
Economy is the common explanation for this but I don't see how it works. Most of the goods there (at least in Russia, I have never been to China) cost much more than in the US and a bit more than in Europe. A car that costs X dollars in the US is 2X euros in Russia. An iPhone costs ~$1000 and plenty of people buy those. But even if people were really that poor and could not afford software at the US price - so what? People in the US earn less than people in the UAE for example, they pay less for their stuff and UAE citizens pay more for their stuff. "More" and "less" make sense only when you compare with another economy, inside it's irrelevant - somebody earns less making some goods or services and sells them for less so another who is also making less can afford it. Setting regional prices is trivial - very few people there speak European languages (including English) and very few people in the US/Europe speak Russian or Mandarin. Pirates translate the software that does not have built-in localization themselves.
Piracy and openness just killed local industry before it had any chance - why pay engineers to develop hardware when you can just rip off a design that somebody else paid billions for? Why buy v1.0 if some local software (or even pirate it) when you can as well pirate something that Microsoft/Adobe/Apple/etc spent billions of dollars developing?
At the end of the day somebody had to pay. You are saying you are not paying for this piracy so who does? It's not that you had to pay more, but you still had to pay. There is also hidden cost - without piracy there would be more money and more stuff would be made but since it's unknown to the general public what could have been made you can just say "nobody guarantees you a sale, a pirate is not a lost sale, live with it". Anyways, my point was that if nobody paid then geohots did not have anything to "jailbreak" any more and their own creativity does not seem to go beyond this. And most smart people would rather find a job that pays than develop stuff for geohots to "liberate". This is what actually happened in Asia, this is not some speculation.
Compare Russian and Chinese technology to the American if you think American IP laws are snuffing innovation. Heck, compare any technology to American. Somehow America managed to become the world's technology leader with the strictest IP laws in the world and the countries with inexistent IP laws just sell oil and slave labor. Some say American industry was founded on the lax IP laws in the 19th century but really, American technology of that period was nowhere compared to European. Another example is Japan, that unlike other Asian nations embraced strict IP laws after the war (it used to rip off Western designs just like China and did not drop this habit instantly even after the war). So now they make talking robot dogs, game consoles and music that TFA is so butthurt about, hey, why did not innovators and tinkerers hack a Chinese talking robot dog, Chinese game consoles or listen to some Chinese record labels? Those should be much better and cheaper than DRM-loaded crap from a Japanese evil corp, right?
The point of high production values you raised - there is no evidence that this model is inherently faulty. Hollywood has had the same model for ~100 years and does not seem to be anywhere near collapsing. It's true that you can also make money with low budget stuff. Somebody can shoot a wedding using a fraction of a movie budget and make good money, would you rather watch a silly Hollywood blockbuster or a wedding of complete strangers? I imagine you would watch wedding of your relatives but how many unmarried relatives do you have to provide you with continuous stream of entertainment? Low cost production and high cost production are different markets they can co-exist.
It's hard to tell how much money is made on PS3 vs 360: there are money that Sony and Microsoft make, there are money the third parties make and neither are reported. I have shipped two games for the "next-gen" so far - first sold much better on 360, second sold much better on PS3, however in both cases PC SKU completely tanked.
As for embracing piracy and the future full of geohots: check out Russia and China. Both countries embraced piracy in the most broad meaning long before broadband became available in the West. Street vendors had been selling CDs stuffed with the latest versions of the newest software at almost nominal margin over the cost of printing and selling a CD itself. Reverse engineering is not even illegal - almost all Soviet hardware was a copy of some American or Japanese device and most of the Soviet OSs were just "jailbroken" versions of some IBM or DEC OS complete with embedded copyright strings.
So what is the result? Where are all the Russian and Chinese inventors and tinkerers? Why, they are sending you the contents of your spam folder, they are stea... err sharing your CC# by "jailbreaking" merchant web-sites and the smartest are coding buggy software for the $59 iPhone look-alike you will by at Wall-Mart. Software industry there exists chiefly in form of outsourcing shops because developing software for domestic market is not profitable and it's very hard to compete in the international markets without a good home base.
I can see how this can appeal to Slashdot crowd though: nobody is making tons of money, everything is "fair" and the consumer is happy. However this only works because there are still markets somehow protected from piracy, mainly the US. So the US customers are paying for the piracy paradise in the Asia. But who do you think is going to pay for the piracy in US?
>On a rented system, just do what the cable companies do. Turn it on, it loads memory resident software, runs, and no physical media is ever used.
A company like Sony or even Microsoft does not own any networks so they'd have to pay somebody to send these data. However the main problem is the principal network availability. It's pretty easy to write a DRM system that would be at least as hard to crack as what you suggested if there were not fixed media and it would work nice even if you owned the hardware (same as you can own your cable box only better). E.g. make a CPU that can only execute encrypted code, set a unique public for each CPU by blowing internal fuses and send the game encrypted for this key. You can copy and backup it all you want, it will only work on the CPU you have paid for. But today's market requires fixed media because quite a few people don't have a network connection in their living room.
>The way to deal with piracy is to increase value for dollar, and attack it as a social problem. When it's not cool to pirate, there will be less of it.
Lol, I remember "Don't copy that floppy" song and dance. It might work eventually but I am afraid that even if Sony, MSFT, Nintendo and Google got together and spent whatever cash they have - it would not scratch this problem. And what the point to spend tons of money to fight piracy anyways? They are in business of making money, not curing social ills. It's the government job and if government provided adequate protection of copyrights nobody would ever bother with DRM.
>Piracy is a tough problem, but not one that's so tough that we need to institute such draconian measures.
I guess it's a matter of perspective. From my perspective IP laws enforcement in the area of videogames is on the level of those "You cannot smoke naked on Sundays in Bumersville, TX" freak laws. DRM was a joke before PS3, it was just enough prevent a completely clueless person from downloading a copy from the net and running it. PS3 DRM was the first decent and it's the only one so far.
>Funny how norms and social techniques can work. Fighting with one's customers isn't productive. Never has been, and games are no different from anything else in the world.
Yes, and nobody fights with one's customers. I mean, do you honestly believe Sony is suing Geohot because he is a customer? Not because of copyright infringement?
>What if all those instances of piracy came with a opportunity to buy?
To me it appears like you want to persuade me that piracy is not the absolute evil (unlike Sony:)). There is no need. I know how Microsoft successfully exploits piracy to crush competition, for example. I can come up with 50 different schemes to control damage. Yes, not every pirate is a lost sale. Yes, it's free advertisement etc. etc. However the current MO in the industry is to fight it. The only way to change it is to show how you make more money embracing piracy. The same way how most of the Western PC developers switched from the PC to consoles when they've seen how much more console developers make.
Sorry about formating - apparently the options were set for HTML instead of text so my line breaks all have been eaten.
> The moral argument here is that without some checks on what SONY does with their OS, they can over exploit those using it. How do we know SONY is playing fair, for example?
Sure, there are no checks. Sony might not play fair. Same as anybody else. What is worst that can happen though? Sony will remotely brick my PS3? What are the chances of that and what are the chances of opening hardware preventing this already unlikely outcome? If anything opening hardware would put me at more risk of script kiddies bricking my PS3 through some exploit.
>What happens when the hardware gets old, or somebody wants to archive a game for later on?
Nothing exciting will happen. It would be nice if you could exercise Fair Use without obstruction and make backups and what not. I will tell you what would also be nice - people leaving their cars unlocked so in case of a natural calamity pedestrians could seek shelter in parked cars. I mean it's already illegal to steal cars so everybody will be respectful of everybody's property, right? Do you think your fellow citizens are criminals or what?
>Each instance of that is NOT A LOSS, as many of them simply would not have paid anyway, and the body of available entertainment dollars doesn't actually fund all those instances of free anyway.
Yet console games sell much better than PC games and I see no other explanation than the difference in the piracy rates. Same as PC games with DRM sell much better than PC games without DRM.
>So, it's not about that. It's about structuring things so that more of the people make more of the right choices more of the time, not locking them out, untrusted, assumed criminals.
For a rational person getting something for $0 instead of some other positive amount of money is the right choice most of the time. There is nothing a private business can do to change this choice. $0.99 games for iPhone get pirated like crazy (I've seen figures as high as 90% piracy rates) what else needs to be structured so people stop steal those?
>Rent them, and most all of the issue goes away.
So what would be different? People would not "jailbreak" their rented PS3s? Why would not they? Because it's illegal? Piracy (or what would you call this "jailbreaking") is illegal too or at least appears so to the judge who did not toss Sony's case.
I don't know what you imagined but my PS3 does not have any special level of access - I've bought it at Gamestop and I believe it's the same unit they would sell to anybody else. At work I do not use retail PS3s - there are developer units with different hardware and different software. I have been in game development since 1997. You can re-purpose your PS3, your TV or your car, any hardware you own and nobody is stopping you. But software is different - you don't own the software, you have been licensed to use it (unless you wrote it yourself or bought rights). Microsoft will license you Windows and will let you run your programs but won't give you modification rights (or maybe it will - I did not read their EULA), GPL will license you linux and will let you modify it as you please, Sony will license you their OS and will only let you run Sony programs. If you don't like it - don't buy Sony stuff, don't buy Microsoft stuff or don't buy anything with GPL in it depending on what you don't like. Or go ahead and violate their license but don't act all shocked and outraged when you get sued, especially after you documented what you did all over the Internet. There is also a moral side. You think it's amoral to hide hardware and I can see your position. However I also see Sony's position - for every single person who wants to learn or tinker or whatever there are literally tens of thousands who just want to play free games. Hiding and protecting hardware helps to fend them off. Sony wants to sell games and will screw tinkerers over the sales but there are other companies that make completely open hardware for you to tinker. Like GP32 or what is it called now, have you seen a lot of homebrew there? There are probably already more CFWs, "package managers" and other piracy related releases for PS3 in the past few months than there were original games for GP32 in the past few years.
No, I make living coding games (for PS3 too) but don't play much so hardly am a gamer. Maybe I am a freak of nature but Sony never harassed me, hacked hardware I own or did anything else the real slashdoters seem to suffer on regular basis. My PS3 plays games, bluray, streaming movies (all that in 3D too) works nicely with a Panasonic TV so can be controlled with the TV remote. Could not care less to run Other OS (still have it on an old fat PS3 that I replaced with a slim for aesthetics reason) - I can run Linux on any of my PCs.
I am a witch, yes.
Geohot's release of modified Sony OS infringes on Sony's copyright. He does not own Sony OS, he has no rights to modify it nor does he has any rights to distribute the modified work.
In case of the current batch of PS3 hackers (Geohot et al) they are protecting the software that they already license and don't sell. If "tinkerers" and "innovators" did not distribute modifications to the Sony's OS Sony would not have a leg to stand against them in court. Also it does not seem that Sony cares about hardware modifications unless they are used to bypass copy protection, I've never heard about Sony going after anyone who modded their PS3 case or used accelerometers ripped from a Dualshock in a project.
Yeah, Sony sent a C&D to Chrono Resurectuion. Or Square did? Nvm, some yellow peoples, they are all the same - little evil monkeys.
I am not a lawyer but from what I understand it works like this: if you believe there is no contract between you and PSN then you are trespassing when using it because the only thing that allows your use of the service is the EULA (actually ToS in case of PSN). So by using it you confirm that you agreed to the EULA's terms otherwise it's your choice either to be liable for breach of contract or for trespassing. I'd choose former because the breach would still need to be proven while your own admission of the trespassing will need no further processing. Also, there is also no agreement to pay for services - the PSN is free (there are other, paid, services available through it but the PSN itself is free).
Doing any crime in a group adds more charges than doing it solo and results in a more severe punishment (I am not a lawyer, of course).
Sony could not care less about Linux games ruining PS3 games market seeing how well they perform on PC and other platforms. Full RSX access was disabled because it would be to easy to bypass whatever memory protection the CPU has. It's basically another computer that can read/write your memory ignoring any access restrictions the CPU is trying to enforce.
Check out that video yourself - all the information they've got was through running the USB dongle exploit designed (or more likely stolen) by the Chinese.
Mr. Kutaragi, you forgot to log in.