Sony Agrees To Pay Millions To Gamers To Settle PS3 Linux Debacle (arstechnica.com) 232
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After six years of litigation, Sony is now agreeing to pay the price for its 2010 firmware update that removed support for the Linux operating system in the PlayStation 3. Sony and lawyers representing as many as 10 million console owners reached the deal on Friday. Under the terms of the accord, (PDF) which has not been approved by a California federal judge yet, gamers are eligible to receive $55 if they used Linux on the console. The proposed settlement, which will be vetted by a judge next month, also provides $9 to each console owner that bought a PS3 based on Sony's claims about "Other OS" functionality. Under the plan, gamers eligible for a cash payment are "all persons in the United States who purchased a Fat PS3 model in the United States between November 1, 2006, and April 1, 2010." The accord did not say how much it would cost Sony, but the entertainment company is expected to pay out millions. On March 28, 2010, Sony announced that the update would "disable the 'Install Other OS' feature that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models." This feature, Sony claimed, would be removed "due to security concerns." Sony did not detail those "concerns," but the litigation alleged piracy was behind the decision. A gamer can get the $55, but they "must attest under oath to their purchase of the product and installation of Linux, provide proof of their purchase or serial number and PlayStation Network Sign-in ID, and submit some proof of their use of the Other OS functionality." To get the $9, PS3 owners must submit a claim, at the time they bought their console, they "knew about the Other OS, relied upon the Other OS functionality, and intended to use the Other OS functionality." Alternatively, a gamer "must attest that he or she lost value and/or desired functionality or was otherwise injured as a consequence of Firmware Update 3.21 issued on April 1, 2010," to get $9.
Lawyers get millions (Score:5, Informative)
So, basically, the lawyers get a fee of millions, but they have made it so hard to actually register for the fifty-five dollar rebate that pretty much all the users will get: zero.
Horray for America.
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:5, Insightful)
This is injustice handed to the people by the state. Once again, the state settles problems for corporations at the expense of the average citizen.
The cost of actually doing all the things they are asking to the user is greater than $55 in terms of time and effort. Most people will not do it.
So instead of claiming $55 from Sony, I will pledge never to give them another dime. I have so far paid them probably in the range of $2000 or maybe more? But I won't buy anything else from them until they pledge and prove they are a company that places a higher value on users than on their own authority over users.
Users > Companies.
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:5, Insightful)
You hadn't already done that six years ago, when the removal of OtherOS happened? Or before that, when they released the rootkit CDs? Or before that, when they pushed proprietary DRM'd MemorySticks instead of MMC? Or before that, when they pushed proprietary MiniDiscs?
(I might have gotten those out of chronological order, and I'm sure I missed a few entirely... Sony is evil in so many ways it's hard to keep track!)
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing to notice is that the evil stuff they did didn't really start until after their management was swallowed by Hollywood. Prior to that Sony was an excellent company producing superb technical goods.
So, to me, this is another example of why you should never trust anyone associated withe either the MPAA or the RIAA. And that explicitly includes SONY.
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:4, Interesting)
https://www.wired.com/2009/04/obama-taps-fift/
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Don't worry, I am sure Hillary will be different.
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That sure is a laundry list of things companies should never do.
PS4 looked really good at first though... but yeah I'm not buying one now. It's not worth the hassle when some manager at Sony decides it's a good idea to try to brick the consoles so you have to buy the next one, or some other shady move.
I am a PC gamer so I don't need consoles really. It's not like Microsoft is any better than Sony at ethics.
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The ps3 has a better range of games, can play ps2 games -
The number of PS3's with PS2 backwards compatibility is quite small. Basically one specific SKU of the earliest versions of the console.
Besides that though the PS3 and PS4 are very similar when it comes to network connectivity and updates. Only real difference is the requirement for PS Plus for multiplayer on PS4. Given that I don't really like multiplayer though it doesn't effect me. As a matter of fact that seems to be why PS4 did so much better than XB One at launch: Microsoft was busy trying to make
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The number of PS3's with PS2 backwards compatibility is quite small. Basically one specific SKU of the earliest versions of the console.
You must be over in the UK or Europe? Because it is 3 SKUs/models in the States
CECHA 60GB deluxe launch model with the chrome, card reader, 4 USB ports, and wifi,
CECHB 20GB basic launch model, 2 USB ports, no card reader, no wifi
CECHE 80GB deluxe model, chrome trim, 4 USB ports, card reader, wifi, only available as a bundle. MGS4 bundle were the first machines shipped with the Dual Shock3. CECHE models have "slightly reduced" PS2 compatibility. They have PS2 Graphic Synthesizers but lack Emotion Engines.
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does not require to be plugged into the internet to work,
Neither does the PS4, why do you think it does?
does not require gb of updates,
I'm laughing at you because you're obviously not a serious user of PS3 since there ARE PS3 games that have large multi-gig updates.
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Or before that, when they pushed proprietary DRM'd MemorySticks instead of MMC?
Secure Digital cards didn't exist when Sony created MemorySticks. MS was created with the intent of selling digital music (this was pre-iTunes) and wanting some way of protecting that music. Also they aren't "quite" proprietary since 3rd parties make them.
Or before that, when they pushed proprietary MiniDiscs?
Not proprietary, Sony DID license MiniDisc to other manufacturers...however said manufacturers often didn't release said products in the States.
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Like I said, evil. Records, cassettes, CDs and even MP3 downloads have proven over and over again that selling music does not require "protection."
If it requires a "license" then it's still proprietary (unless said license qualifies as FRAND [wikipedia.org]).
It's better than we usually get (Score:2)
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which is nothing. We've recently had even this taken away from us. Corps can now force us into arbitration. Want it to stop? Start voting for economically left wing candidates.
I'm sure we will get into the No True Scottsman argument but as a country we have been voting for left economically wing candidates. The more we try to get government to control businesses, the more intertwined businesses and government get.
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This is injustice handed to the people by the state. Once again, the state settles problems for corporations at the expense of the average citizen.
The average citizen never gave a dawn about Linux on the PS3. Best guess I heard at the time was about15,000 --- based on downloads of a PS3 distribution. That is why you take SONY into court on your own. But you are bound by the way you frame your case and the remedies which are available. If you are suing for damages you have to prove you've been damaged. I'm sorry you can't do that, but now it's too late. You're stuck for it.
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"The cost of actually doing all the things they are asking to the user is greater than $55 in terms of time and effort."
That means your 'loss' due to the change was a frivolous one, at best.
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Devil's Advocate time: How would you have handled it? To claim the $55, the user would have to show real proof, and a "uhhh yeah, your honor, I totally bought this with the intent of using OtherOS" isn't going to cut it.
I'm eligible for the $55 (I am pretty sure I still have the OtherOS image installed on my PS3 hard drive), but I'm not yet sure how I'm going to prove it, and I know that they can't just take my word for it.
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:5, Insightful)
False dichotomy. You act as if I have to buy something else.
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how it's meant to work. A class action is not for making money - it's a way to challenge a company's behaviour without spending years of your life in court, without spending a fortune in legal fees, and without assuming personal risk. You're barely involved at all, while the lawyer does all the work, takes on the financial burden and isn't even guaranteed to get paid at all. If you're looking into making profit from suing people then you have plenty of other options to use instead.
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:5, Insightful)
- Sony loses lawsuit regarding a change they made in 2010
- Six years later, you have to show proof that you bought a game system probably 7 years earlier... which you didn't keep because you bought the slimmer model or a PS4 or traded it in for something at the game store.
- The terms required to collect the $55 recompense are more or less unachievable except for that one guy who got the PS3 for Christmas and his mom actually saved the receipt for her accounting.
- The amount of time required to earn the $55 is about the same as McDonalds pays their french fry cooks.
So... for the $55... who would give a shit? This will cost Sony $2,000 in recompense and $1,000,000-$10,000,000 in legal fees.
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- The terms required to collect the $55 recompense are more or less unachievable except for that one guy who got the PS3 for Christmas and his mom actually saved the receipt for her accounting.
"Or serial number", seems doable to me.
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The point is that Sony gets punished for these shenanigans. A better resolution than Sony sitting back and thinking they can do whatever they want with those suckers who buy their products.
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Where do they get punished? This is even WORSE than the settlement for when they distributed rootkits where they were required to give everyone who bought the content with the rootkit a rootkit-free version. Provided they asked for it, of course.
This time they get to pay pennies provided you play the circus lion for them and jump through impossibly high hoops.
Where the FUCK do you see any kind of punishment?
You know what a punishment would be? Give everyone who provides proof of purchase of a PS3 a new PS4
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Where the FUCK do you see any kind of punishment?
Having to put up with lawyers waltzing in and out, hoovering up fees and distracting execs for years. See, lawyers do have some beneficial purpose, I am sure that there is some beneficial reason for roaches to exist too.
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So, basically, the lawyers get a fee of millions, but they have made it so hard to actually register for the fifty-five dollar rebate that pretty much all the users will get: zero.
Yep. That's the way virtually all of these class action lawsuits work. The lawyers make millions and the victims get some shitty coupon for a free car wash or basket-weaving class.
The car wash is only valid on alternate Tuesdays from 2am to 3am in months that end in "S", and the basket-weaving class requires you to travel to Namibia twice a week.
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:5, Funny)
"Dear Diary: Today, I installed Linux on my PS3. It was a glorious day."
Re:Lawyers get millions (Score:4, Interesting)
"Dear Diary: Today, I installed Linux on my PS3. It was a glorious day."
Dear Diary, day 2. The RSX is locked out, and the PS3 Linux is utterly crippled and unusable as a general purpose machine. I guess I could muck around with some cell programming, but that's pretty much PPC which I did years ago. Ho hum.
Dear Diary, day 3. Oblivion arrived today.
Dear Diary, day well into the future. Completed Ob', well, it broke when I reached the end of the grey fox quests. Let's see what exciting things are in this mandatory OS update.
Dear Diary, day +=1. Turned on the PS3 today, and noticed OtherOS option has gone, and I can't released the partition it used without a complete wiping of the system.
Re: Lawyers get millions (Score:2)
why are you playing a port of a PC game? This doesn't make sense.
Re: Lawyers get millions (Score:4, Insightful)
why are you playing a port of a PC game? This doesn't make sense.
Because some people can't justify the cost of building/maintaining a gaming PC so they buy a console at a much lower price (that they'll get 7+ years out of) and play games there instead?
I've got other stuff to worry about than dumping $700 every other year into a PC just to play the same same games that are available on a $350 console that will last nearly a decade.
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Granted, I could of bought half a console for the upgrade but then it would be obsolete in under 2 years
In what world are your consoles going obsolete in 2 years?
The PS2 was released in March of 2000.
The PS3 was released in November of 2006.
The PS4 was released in November of 2013.
That's a 6.5 to 7 year span between releases. Now, take into account that generally for the first year or so of any new system they still release most games on both the old and new version you can usually stretch out your older system another year or two past the introduction of a new one if you want.
As to having to buy more than 1
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Let's see what exciting things are in this mandatory OS update.
Dear Diary, day +=1. Turned on the PS3 today, and noticed OtherOS option has gone, and I can't released the partition it used without a complete wiping of the system.
Hold on there, 3.21 is only mandatory if you want to connect to PSN. If you want to keep OtherOS you can. And 3.21 (and later) updates warn you VERY specifically what they will do if you if you start them on a PS3 with OtherOS in use. It will also require confirmation not once...but TWICE before it will perform the update removing OtherOS functionality.
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what you say is codswallop. 3.21 and above is mandatory if you want to play any games that came out after 3.21.
Mea culpa I should have been more verbose. I thought that was covered by my "connecting to PSN" It does depend on the game. Some games that came after don't require 3.21 or later.
Each newer game disc contains a mandatory firmware update you need to install to play the game you bought.
That's not quite true. Only those games that require a minimum firmware include an update on disc.
On top of that, without 3.21, I lost online multiplayer access to all my existing games.
Which is what I said with "connecting to PSN".
There is nothing optional about the update.
Sure there is. You and I just have different definitions. The update isn't forced, you can keep OtherOS. But you lose access to PSN and any game that requires a later firmware. Th
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My plan is to submit my low(wish) numbered Slashdot userID as combo proof of existence/nerdidity.
Not to mention a snap of the cover from Hacking the Xbox" [amazon.com] as proof of general intent. By the way that is a really interesting book to read on the topic of electronics analysis even if you do not want to hack an Xbox.
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Today it would be easy, everyone and their dog makes videos of unpacking stuff, videos of installing stuff should be next.
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As I posted above, I can prove it fairly easily, having saved the outpuf of cat /etc/redhat-release, cat /proc/cpuinfo. And having e-mail with PPC64 x-mailer headers posted to the YDL mailing list no less....said e-mail is gpg signed.
I could also prove I ran LInux on a PS2, but that's easy I have the discs with their case. (in addition to gpg signed e-mail with mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu x-mailer headers)
And the fact that I've mentioned running Linux on teh PS2 and PS3 many many times on Slashdot.
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Easy! Well, at least it is easy for me.
[CronoCloud@wutai ~]$ cat ps3_info.txt
[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ cat
Yellow Dog Linux release 6.0 (Pyxis)
[CronoCloud@mideel ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported
clock : 3192.000000MHz
revision : 5.1 (pvr 0070 0501)
processor : 1
cpu : Cell Broadband Engine, altivec supported
clock : 3192.000000MHz
revision : 5.1 (pvr 0070 0501)
timebase : 79800000
platform : PS3
Also from 2008 to 2010 I read and composed my e-mail on t
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Well tell the court that you want sony to re-enable linux capabilities as its more valuable to you because with linux you can commit crimes with it.
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In the US for instance, media shifting is legal, but circumventing the copy protection to do so isn't, so you're still screwed.
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Whether it affected them or not, I'd bet they can "attest under oath to their purchase of the product and installation of Linux, provide proof of their purchase .... and submit some proof of their use of the Other OS functionality"
Looks to me like Sony owes the USAF $96,800
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Oh they will certainly rejoice at the prospect of getting 100 grand after spending roughly a million plus the expenses for the people that built the supercluster.
If I had built this, it would sure feel like a kick to the nuts after being insulted first.
YDL 6.1 on the PS3 (Score:5, Interesting)
Installing YDL 6.1 on my PS3 was my first Linux experience. I ran it over composite RCA to my TV so it wasn't much to look at, but it was step one in me becoming a computer guy.
I latter put YDL 6.2 on it and that had a much easier install, as I recall.
I went without upgrading to the OtherOS firmware for a year or so, but eventually some game I wanted to play required a newer firmware so I bit the bullet and installed it. I manually removed the Linux partition before the upgrade so I can't confirm whether the tales of the system not reclaiming the Linux partition if upgraded with it still in place were true.
Still have my PS3, only replaced the original 60GB HDD a few months ago. Didn't realize at the time I bought it in January 2007 I would be getting the most capable version of the hardware... early adoption went well for once. Only real downside compared to the newer models is how loud the cooling fans are.
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I still have my PS3. I used YDL at one point then I had the insane idea of installing gentoo. The emerge world command took over 24 hours from what I remember due to Sony locking out most of the CPU cores. I won't bother trying to get my $55. Not sure what kind of proof I could come up with. I damn sure don't have my receipt from when I bought it or any proof it had Linux on it at one point, besides the fact I am not sure it is worth my time...
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The emerge world command took over 24 hours from what I remember due to Sony locking out most of the CPU cores.
Sony didn't lock out "most of the CPU cores", the PS3 has only ONE PPE that's hyperthreaded. You've got full access to that.
You're thinking of the SPU's which are not "generic CPU cores", a gentoo "emerge world" wouldn't use them anyway.
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Installing YDL 6.1 on my PS3 was my first Linux experience.
Installing Sony's wacky Kondarized Red Hat on the PS2 was mine.
I ran it over composite RCA to my TV so it wasn't much to look at
I feel your pain, having run PS2 Linux via composite/s-video. I ran YDL on the PS3 via HDMI.
I went without upgrading to the OtherOS firmware for a year or so
I only lasted a couple of months.
I manually removed the Linux partition before the upgrade so I can't confirm whether the tales of the system not reclaiming the Linux partition if upgraded with it still in place were true.
They're not, it reclaims.
Still have my PS3, only replaced the original 60GB HDD a few months ago.
I upped mine to 320GB in 2012, game caches were killing me.
Didn't realize at the time I bought it in January 2007 I would be getting the most capable version of the hardware... early adoption went well for once.
I wasn't a quite so early adopter. I bought my CECHE in 2008, knowing it would be the last of the backwards compatible models. But I also got the DualShock3 as part of that. The CECHE MGS models were the first to ship with the DS3 inste
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There are other reason to never buy anything from Sony, but this is a good one. Never buy anything from Sony.
Since then I won't even buy blank CDs with their logo, because I'd be ashamed to be associated with them.
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So you're never buying any laptop from any company, right? Because a lot of laptops have Sony batteries in them. They could also have a Sony camera.
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I rarely buy a laptop, but thanks for telling me a couple of more things to check. I'll probably just try to avoid getting one with a camera, as I wouldn't want that for anything anyway. (I have a usb camera I can plug in when I choose...but I rarely do so.)
What Did They Lose (Score:2)
I'll bet Sony wish they had stuck with Linux. What with M$'s major missteps on Windows huge invasion of privacy, a Sony playstation computer with Linux running for all you other needs, Libre Office et al, would have quite a good marketing advantage but of course the morons got stuck on the idea of how to charge console licence fees for free open source software, so went full blown greed driven stupidity and killed the idea. They could have actually sold playstations for a profit and eased up on licence fee
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Sony uses FreeBSD now. And after stuff like this, it probably makes them glad they have nothing more to do with Linux or allowing anybody to do stuff with their own hardware.
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Sony uses FreeBSD now. And after stuff like this, it probably makes them glad they have nothing more to do with Linux or allowing anybody to do stuff with their own hardware.
And I'm glad, too, because we don't need them.
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Sony uses FreeBSD now. And after stuff like this, it probably makes them glad they have nothing more to do with Linux or allowing anybody to do stuff with their own hardware.
Sony uses Linux (Android) on their handsets, so there goes your troll.
How about we reject the settlement? (Score:4, Insightful)
Get all PS3 owners to Object to the settlement and demand the remedy of Specific Performance. Sony will be ordered by the court to restore 100% of the OtherOS functionality present before the update, which we paid for.
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It is 2016, the IBM cell is horrible compared to any machine out there. Do you really still care about running linux on a PS3 ?
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Cell is still a hellaciously-capable performance CPU architecture.
The 1st-gen PS3 Cell had almost 300 GFLOPs performance.
To put that in perspective, the i7-4770K is ~100 GFLOPs. The i7-6700K is ~113 GFLOPs.
So, no, you add a better GPU and more RAM (which is clocked at the processor's base speed,) and the Cell-based PS3 would still stomp the shit out of any PC system built today for the most part.
Re:How about we reject the settlement? (Score:4, Informative)
You see, the Cell is RISC, while the Intel chips you mentioned are all CISC.
If you don't know the difference, look it up.
Short version, they do very different things well, so a pure measurement of flops is pretty useless to compare.
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"while the Intel chips you mentioned are all CISC"
Intel has a RISC-like micro-core translating x86 instructions and has had it since the Pentium Pro. It has not been a CISC processor for AGES.
" PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves a theoretical maximum of 230.4 GFLOPS in single precision floating point operations and up to +15 GFLOPS double precision using iterative refinement for the solution of linear equations."
With the right programming, Cell will still stomp the shit out of current-gen processors.
I progra
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The 1st-gen PS3 Cell had almost 300 GFLOPs performance.
To put that in perspective, the i7-4770K is ~100 GFLOPs. The i7-6700K is ~113 GFLOPs.
What are you talking about ? The cell in the PS3 gets about 250 Gflop/s single precision.
a i7-6700K comes with 4 cores at 4 Ghz, support AVX2 and FMA extensions. There are 2 (?) FMA unit on that thing. so you should get about 4(cores)*4Ghz*2(FMA)*2(2units)*256/32(AVX registers)= 512Gflop/s.
And in case you wonder, yes you do get about that in gemm computation.
If you are looking at the memory subsystem, a skylake processor has almost has much L4 cache as the PS3 got in main memory. And a skylake machine wll
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Can you not sue them individually now? In the UK people were getting over $100 for the loss of this feature directly from the retailer. For example Amazon paid £86 without too much hassle or need to sue them.
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Not sure about contempt of court, but if they can prove you lied I guess they could counter-sue for fraud.
And I'd bet they'd go for a lot more than $55.
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Yeah, but they don't have my gpg signed e-mails/USENET posts that show I'm running Linux on a PPC in addition to the output of /proc/cpuinfo and screenshot of my desktop (running fluxbox by the way)
what will the us air force get for there settlemen (Score:2)
what will the us air force get for there settlement?
I have to wonder (Score:2)
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I doubt the total running cost to date is anywhere near an appreciable percent of even a quarter's profits.
Skipped at the shareholders' meeting? (Score:3)
Pretty sure this mid-sized fiasco wasn't mentioned at the Sony shareholders meeting on the 17th. Unfortunately, my Japanese isn't that good, so I could have missed it, and I've already discarded the documents.
Only memorable thing at this year's meeting was the late start. Some old fellow charged the stage and got in a shouting match with the CEO for several minutes before they could persuade him to leave. Not sure, but he might have been the same crackpot who was blocked about 5 rows back two or three years ago. I was seated on that side, but around the 12th row that year. In between, there were two minor ruckuses (ruckii?) at the meeting last year, but this year the overall tone of the shareholders seemed to be much more placid, if not downright bucolic.
Actually, one more thing comes to mind. Seemed rather more intensely Japanese this year than in some past years. Still no gift for attending, but they did bring back the exhibition of new products.
(I attended the NEC shareholders' meeting yesterday, and that one was seriously forgettable. Used to be that all of them were on the same day...)
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No, I do NOT speak Japanese, but was there any point to your so-called reply other than showing off you don't read very well?
(Actually, I was quite annoyed that I couldn't even figure out what the heckler and the CEO were shouting at each other. There was a key word that I didn't recognize. However, their argument seemed much more focused that the similar event of two years ago, which basically seemed to be an argument that Stringer should retire immediately to take responsibility for the problems of that t
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You're a douche. Who attends stockholder meetings?
I'm guessing... stockholders?
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Ok, I actually do have a sincere (and off-topic) question for you.
Why do you go to these meetings?
I present for my company at meetings. It seems phone calls are much preferred to face to face meetings unless there's something really critical (bad) going on. Certainly, we don't get anyone who isn't fluent in English. So... why do you go to the Japanese shareholder meetings?
Maybe they're entertaining? I've never seen any ruckii at our meetings. To have that happen almost annually would be incredible. No
In other settlement news check your Amazon account (Score:2)
June 21st was the day Amazon calculated how much of an eBook credit you get for Kindle books, paid for by Apple as part of the settlement...
The fact that Apple has to specifically provide credit for Kindle books brings the tragic nature of that trial to a whole other level. Apple was basically trying to prevent a Kindle monopoly, now required by government to re-enforce it...
My sadness over the result doesn't mean I won't use the credit though! Free books!
Asymmetric Punitive Damages (Score:2)
When an individual is sued by a multi-million dollar conglomerate of sorts (Music / Movie / Software industries), they demand hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When it's the other way around: "Here's $55... we're all good?"
Removing OtherOS was probably bad for piracy... (Score:2)
When OtherOS support was removed, a lot of people who were using it for Linux suddenly had an incentive to break open the copy protection in order to run their own code.
I suspect if Sony had not removed OtherOS then the number of people interested in cracking the copy protection would have been limited only to those looking to pirate games and it would have taken a lot longer before piracy became an issue.
on bended knee TOS (Score:2)
When cell came out, I was enthralled by using it for certain GPU-like computations where it would have been pretty much ideal for my purposes. But the more I looked into the security architecture, the more my gut twisted in dismay, so I never ended up buying one.
When corporations retain these broad powers (most appliances, almost all cloud services) it's almost invariably exercised to make you less happy at some point down the road.
If I could go back in time to offer my younger self some sage advice, it wo
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Re:yet really.... (Score:4, Informative)
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Well, the cell was hot shit. Now it is just old shit.
No one serious about computing would do anything on a cell processor. Too hard to program, small memory. And you get what in performance? 200Gflop/s? Any modern beefy laptop crush that before breakfast. Why bother with an archaic outdated fringe architecture?
If you are a computing historian, then it is a different story. But the cell was a dumb idea...
Re:yet really.... (Score:5, Funny)
It was still strong enough to defeat two androids.
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It was still strong enough to defeat two androids.
That's when it became perfect.
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Look shit head, the Air Force built a supercomputer cluster [wikipedia.org] out of 1700 PS3s. The Cell is hot shit if you know what you're doing (which excludes you, of course).
The Air Force, if they weren't complete idiots, disabled updates. Any big cluster system does zero upgrades because they just break the codes that run on them. Unless the Air Force is operated by morons, this never affected them.
Until one or more machines blinks out. Then i'ts a 1699 cluster, or 1698 etc. Unless they can find and old one on craigslist that hasn't been updated they're shit out of luck when it comes to replacements
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My guess: less than 20000. Realistically, this was never more than small fraction of an already small fraction of users.
Sony sold about 30 million PS3s [vgchartz.com] in North America. Subtract Canada, and the PS3 slim and super-slim models and you're probably down below 20 million. How many PS3 owners really put Linux on their PS3? 1 in 500?
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Why does it matter? The PS3 ended up with less-functionality than what it had when it was purchased. Considering how connected our devices are getting and how dependent they are on software updates, you really should be taking a stand against this sort of behavior.
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If you read the Slashdot comments at the time, it was probably over 9000 users.
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If I were in the US, or could be bothered, I would be lining up for my $9 as I intended to "One Day" get linux installed on mine.
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Everyone running Kodi and console emulators are running Linux on it, even if they don't know it.
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How many people still have the requisite model of PS3 that works?
/me looks up at CECHE model PS3 that is still working....upgraded the hard drive.
Between YLOD and selling to upgrade to a PS4,
[joke] Selling? What is this selling you speak of? Is that like the "trading in" of games that some Madden-ites and brown-shooter-dudebros speak of? REAL gamers don't "trade in" Why if it wasn't for a flood, I'd still have a working Colecovision/Commodore 128/Atari 2600 with the faux wood paneling! Now get off my lawn![/joke]
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Actually, the reason they left out PS2 emulation was because of how error-ridden it was. There's a compatibility list of all PS2 games somewhere, and the compatibility varies wildly between the first five PS3 models. The ones with the actual PS2 hardware in them support some games but not others, and the ones with the software emulation support games the hardware-based ones didn't but then don't support some of the games the hardware-based ones did. What "non-compatible" means can also vary wildly: I specif
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"Actually, the reason they left out PS2 emulation was because of how error-ridden it was."
Wrong, the first PS3s were literally stuffed with a micro PS2 inside them. It was full hardware and I had zero issues with Persona 3 (I didnt even get FES until I had stepped on my old P3 disc.)
It was eating into their still-steady PS2 slim sales.
Buggy shit didn't happen until they went to half-hardware half-software emulation.
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Buggy shit didn't happen until they went to half-hardware half-software emulation.
IIRC there were a few (very few) games that had trouble even on the first PS3's because the PS3 tries to implement a "perfect TRC exact PS2" so that games that break the TRC's and use various tricks, have issues. Which are worse on the models without the EE like the CECHE I have.
There are also PSone games that have issues when run on anything other than an actual PSone, that includes the fully hardware compatible PS2! One example is the X-files graphical adventure game, the graphics glitch out and it is u
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IBM was going to provide cell processor blades for data centers.
They DID!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Yeah, they brought the world Betamax, MiniDiscs, MS flash, CD rootkits, Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune, MafiAA persecution, and exploding batteries. How could we survive without them?
I do remember LONG ago when Sony popularized the pocket transistor radio, and somewhat more recently when their excellent 7600 portable SW receiver took the world by storm, but not much other positive c
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You forgot memory sticks. [wikipedia.org]
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Hey, you weren't using FAT32 support in Windows were you? It's a useless feature, right? We'll just patch that out so your USB sticks no longer work, and you can't just open devices that people use.
Sure, only the occasional granddad and IT department will be affected, but you can just buy another OS that does FAT32, right?
The answer: BECAUSE YOU BOUGHT AND PAID FOR IT. And then it was removed. That's a breach of the sales contract. And if you didn't punish it, quite literally companies would take ever