Re: Wrong security model
"That was 100% Sony's fault from start to finish, from the poor engineering effort to pulling the plug on a legit feature that customers paid for"
When this originally happened there was a massive flamewar here on el reg with people moaning about all the people that would be affected by Sony removing OtherOS in a firmware update and it turned out that most of the people declaring it was the end of the world and Sony would burn in hell for what they had done A: had no idea what the OtherOS option allowed (restricted access to run a limited Linux environment) B: had no idea what they would do with OtherOS if they had to come up with a reason why they needed it C: had no idea why you would actually want to use Linux on a PS3 opposed to commodity hardware. The few people that used OtherOS for anything but a nice toy to say "look guys I can runs linux too" were a few places that had built PS3 clusters to get their hands on affordable Cell hardware.. and those clusters had already been built and they had no reason to update the firmware and lose the OtherOS option. So the end result is: People made a massive noise about it but in reality no one gave two shits about it.
>In essence Sony is punishing their customers for their poor engineering and business model.
There was a toy feature called OtherOS which was seen as harmless. Someone came along and showed that it wasn't harmless and could have allowed stuff that would (if you believe that piracy makes much of a difference) hurt Sony's bottom line i.e. sales of games. They considered the 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of PS3 users that would instantly explode the moment the OS update was pushed out and guessed it was a simple fix for a major problem that would affect almost no one. So instead of constantly playing cat and mouse fixing issues with the OtherOS feature they removed it. I suspect someone's boss was a little bit less pissed off about the whole thing when they suggested "It's not worth the effort, let's just remove it for fucks sake".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
