Comment by Sesse__
6 days ago
> Probably could have been avoided if Sony kept the Linux version of the Playstation still alive.
The causality here is backwards; Sony removed Other OS support precisely because the first jailbreak (a glitching attack) relied on it.
More like it only happened because Sony restricted hardware access under Linux. If they had allowed GPU access, there would have been no motivation to attack the hypervisor.
It only ever was present because Sony wanted to cheat EU import tariffs - by allowing other operating systems, it could be imported under the lower general-purpose computer rate.
IMHO, removal of this feature should have triggered Sony having to pay back the amount of taxes cheated.
I recall they lost a bit on selling the consoles to the USAF that were used as computer cluster. (The consoles afaik sell/sold? at below cost and rely on games to make up the extra cash) So they lose money on consoles that aren't having games bought.
The consoles were reportedly selling at a profit (at least in the US) by 2009. Reports about the USAF condor cluster surfaced in 2010.
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OtherOS existed for import tarifs reasons. Got removed when the need was gone. When the SCEA CISO warned Kaz Hirai removing it would lead to piracy, she got fired. Then it happened. Where do you have your bs from ?!
I thought they removed it because people were buying PS3's in bulk for datacenter use with OtherOS because the hardware was being sold for less than the cost of the parts with the expectation of getting their money back with game sales.
Is there any reason in particular you think this? Sony only removed the feature, citing "security concerns" mere months after George Hotz released the exploit. They would later go on to sue him. https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2010/03/29/ps3-firmware...
On the other hand, the Ps3 clusters were around since basically the console's launch. Additionally, the console had been selling at a profit, at least in the US, by 2009, before they removed the other os feature.
All this happened 16 years ago. If you're curious about stuff that has happened so recently, you can research it online.
> Additionally, the console had been selling at a profit, at least in the US, by 2009, before they removed the other os feature.
Also, there is no evidence that the PS3 clusters were particularly widespread. The largest single PS3 cluster I know of was the USAF 1760-machine cluster; the second largest was about 200 machines at EPFL. With 87M+ PS3s sold, that's a drop in the ocean. The PS3 just wasn't very good as a general-purpose server, and it also didn't have good interconnect at all (people struggled to even reach 100Mbit/sec on it, so it's also not a very good general HPC server); if you didn't have a problem that mapped really well to Cell, it just wasn't for you. There's no evidence any significant amount of companies bought tens of thousands of PS3s for their datacenters.
So even if Sony _did_ lose money on each sold PS3 used for servers, there simply can't have been a lot of money in all.
I think this because it was all over the tech news outlets at the time that the primary reason was due to Sony losing money because of console hardware being sold below the price of the components themselves.
A company press release is not necessarily the be-all end-all full story when it comes to justifying something extremely unpopular with their customer base.
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Only Iraq did that
They already removed it from slim models when they launched.
Only the original ones ever supported the feature.