Air Force may suffer collateral damage from PS3 firmware update

“When Sony issued a recent PlayStation 3 update removing the
device’s ability to install alternate operating systems like Linux,
it did so to protect copyrighted content—but several research
projects suffered collateral damage.

“The Air Force is one example. The Air Force Research Laboratory
in Rome, New York picked up 336 PS3 systems in 2009 and built
itself a 53 teraFLOP processing cluster. Once completed as a proof
of concept, Air Force researchers then scaled up by a factor of six
and went in search of 2,200 more consoles (later scaled back to
1,700). The $663,000 contract was awarded on January 6, 2010, to a
small company called Fixstars that could provide 1,700 160GB PS3
systems to the government.

“Getting that many units was difficult enough that the
government required bidders to get a letter from Sony certifying
that the units were actually available. Dirt cheap computing

“Another grotesque waste of taxpayer dollars?”

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