Sony drops otheros feature from new PS3 Slim
On August 18th 2009, Sony unveiled the new PlayStation 3 (PS3) computer entertainment system to be available in stores beginning from September 1st, 2009.
The new system is reduced in size, weight, power consumption, and price, which should be good news to most gamers worldwide.
But for hackers who began the adventure of Cell programming on the PS3, or simply Linux supporters on the PS3 platform, a single sentence at the end of the official announcement changes the good news into a nightmare:
The new PS3 system will focus on delivering games and other entertainment content, and users will not be able to install other Operating Systems to the new PS3 system.
What this simply means is that Sony arbitrarily decided to stop supporting the otheros feature for this new hardware, sentencing PS3 Linux and amateur Cell programming to become underground.
This is really sad news for the supporters of the PS3 system, which seems to be percieved as a simple betrayal by people who have been spending days of free time mastering the achitecture and developing tools and libraries in the objective of a future public release.
This really disappointing decision from Sony will encourage hacking that leads to piracy. It also removes an important development environment that allows new developers to learn how to write software for the Cell architecture. This leads to a larger pool or resources available to build software for the system.