Ps3mfw With Gitbrew.org Tasks For Mac

Nov 02, 2018  During the weekend Sony PlayStation 3 developers Cyberskunk and evilsperm released Rebug CFW 3.41.3 and 3.55.2 for PS3, Rebug CFW 3.41.3 and 3.55.2 for OtherOS++ Custom Firmware users and a 3.66 Version Spoofer 2.0 for the PS3 entertainment system. And also a related video. Description: Add the rebug_patch_privacy.tcl file to the tasks folder of PS3MFW Builder 0.2. It will appear as Patch all self/sprx to secure privacy for REBUG in the task list. It will appear as Patch all self/sprx to secure privacy for REBUG in the task list. Windows and Mac OSX. The drive is to be formatted from the list above to display the instructions. If your PS3 is frozen, you can perform a manual reset.

• Ps3mfw With Gitbrew.org Tasks For Mac

Hann1bal writes 'The next system software update for the PlayStation 3 system will be released on April 1, 2010 (JST), and that was available on the PS3 systems prior to the current slimmer models, launched in September 2009. This feature enabled users to install an operating system, but due to security concerns, Sony Computer Entertainment will remove the functionality through the 3.21 system software update.' Updated 3:49 GMT by timothy: An anonymous reader writes 'This comes as something of a surprise. Particularly because only a month ago Sony Computer Entertainment management on the PS3.' I'm a flaming PS3 fanboy, I think the games on the PS3 are awesome and significantly better than the 360's, and I really love the full functionality of this machine. But this really has me seeing red. I've been using my PS3 for all kinds of shit.

It's got firefox and open office and all kinds of productive capabilities. In linux, the Cell rips DVDs much faster than a conventional CPU can.

I understand that the black hat community is actively trying to hack the PS3 because it's proven to be very well protected from pirates. I realize Sony is a business and they are simply trying to protect their rights. But this is removing functionality I paid for and own. Telling me this is my option, my choice, but I can no longer log into the Playstation network (which is required to play many games I downloaded for a fee. You have to be connected to their network or the game won't work. Which I didn't know until I had a period without a connection) is no option at all. They are taking away something that belongs to me.

I am really pissed that they couldn't figure out a better way to thwart hackers. Even their own version of Linux, some new version of YDL, that they control, would be better than completely taking away this feature. I sold my 360 after it was fixed from a RROD (I still play my SNES and don't need a gimp machine that can't last 20 years).

I won't go back to xbox. But I am probably not going to go back to PS4 or PS5. Once this generation is over, I'm back to PC gaming. Fucking Sony. Once again, you've gone a little too far in fighting pirates. Like that root kit thing that was ages ago. People have a hard time forgetting that shit.

I don't like pirates. They suck profit out of a tough field and generally make the world a worse place out of their selfishness. But I pirate games all the time just as a demo, and buy the ones that don't suck.

I guess it's okay if you do it. I quote: 'just as a demo, and buy the ones that don't suck' I do exactly the same as the GP, so I'm really interested to know how exactly can we otherwise evaluate if a game is good enough to buy. Please let us know. We're past the time when demos were freely available and representative of the game as a whole, commercial game review sites and magazines are pretty much in the pocket of the industry (two words: 'grade inflaction') and will hype POSes harder than anybody else and 'user review' sites are full of fanboys and 'grassroots marketing'.

How often have you seen a game review which actually heavilly criticized a game from a major publisher due to bugs? To add insult to injury, consumer legislation is such that in many countries you'll be hard pressed to get a refund if a game doesn't at all work in your system. As a mater of fact, pirating games before buying them has saved me lots of problem with games that wouldn't work at all or were just too buggy: try getting a refund from any game store (especially an online one) on a game because it crashes every 10 minutes and see how far you get. The day when I can go back to the store and get my money back on a game because it's buggy and/or sucks is the day I'll stop downloading games before buying them. Do you need a free lunch to evaluate if a restaurant is worth your money?

How do you evaluate if a movie is worth the ticket without seeing it? If I eat at a restaurant and the food is only halfway cooked, the water glass has a hole in the side, and my chair has an exposed nail in the seat, I generally get my money back.

If I go see a movie and it is horribly spliced and random scenes are replaced with photos of cardboard cutouts, I generally get my money back. If I buy a game and it crashes constantly, seems to be missing several scenes, and the ending consists of shooting at a bat-thing in the middle of an otherwise empty skybox like it was just tacked on when the money ran out, I would expect my money back. But it isn't likely to happen. Given the mention of PC.there's a good reason why it's #86 on PC (4 times lower than San Adreas), instead of #1. The PC port was just unjustifiably buggy and lame, with Rockstar withholding fixes for months at a time.

Given that it's based on critic (not popular) review, you could even say that the 86 position is too damn good for it, especially since USERS give it a mere 4.6/10. metacritic.com That, is a freaking trainwreck, especially given that it used particularly invasive form of SecuROM DRM which was the principle reason generally agreed upon (perhaps wayback has archives of the GTA4 forums just after release) for it performing so slow. pcgamefuntime.com You could throw a monster machine at it, and get 14-20FPS, even on low detail and low resolution.

If you point to how well received console versions were when somebody references the PC port, you clearly don't know what the hell you're talking about. I agree with your sentiment, but I think you exaggerate. If we stop buying software for 24 months, corporate heads will wake up, and make a lot of concessions - but that won't end proprietary software. And, in fact, I really don't want to see all proprietary software eradicated. Hey, even Windows would be a decent buy, for twenty bucks, if they stopped with the WGA nonsense, end their stupid call-home validation processes, and whatever other idiot crap they have in mind.

They never should have cared about small time dummies who download a ripped ISO. The only piracy they should EVER have gone after, are OEM's who use pirated Windows, and the mass producers of pirated CD's. I think almost everyone can get behind that sort of anti-piracy. Twenty bucks for a legal Win7 CD, and I can re-install it as many times as I wish in my own home, and I'd run right out to buy a copy.

At ten times that price, it's nothing but a ripoff, and I will never buy it. I agree with piracy in some respects, I think it's a great tool to get what you want while protesting some aspects such as DRMs, aggressive pricing, inconvenience, etc. And this is why we have no effective protests anymore. If you're protesting, it's really only effective if you sacrifice something to do so. Otherwise it's shallow, and the corporation/government/whoever you protest against knows you can be pushed around because you don't really care. If your principles aren't important enough to you to sacrifice while fighting for them, why should they take them seriously?

You obviously don't. Imagine if the Civil Rights movement had its members get up and leave as soon as they were threatened with arrest?

What if they got up from the seats they were occupying in a whites-only cafe because they were hungry? What if they picketted, but only until they were threatened with fire hoses? What if they continued to use public transit during the boycotts, just because it was a long walk? Do you really think anything would have changed? By pirating, you let the game publishers know that you can't do without their game, so all they need to do is hold the line, increase the DRM, and eventually they can get you (or others like you) to buy it without giving into your 'demands'.

Look at Modern Warfare 2. There was a 'boybott' group on Steam filled with players in MW2 on launch day.

It's no wonder IW didn't care that people were upset, they still got paid! So don't blow a bunch of smoke up my ass about piracy being a useful protest tool. It likely does more harm to protests than good.

Using the word 'protest' is just a convenient justification for 'I don't want to pay for this, but I also don't want to feel like I'm doing anything wrong'. Well, the case in point is that if/when people do protest by stopping purchasing (and even stop pirating), it doesn't matter because the publisher/distributors simply BLAME PIRATES for the loss of sales and put MORE INVASIVE DRM on the product, which is the very thing you are PROTESTING AGAINST! But the very point is that they don't need to.

They see higher piracy numbers, and the CEOs make the only conclusion that makes economic sense, particularly for a publicly traded company. As a secondary effect, if even the serious protestors are seen as hypocrites ('I don't like their measures to stop piracy, so I'll pirate it'), no neutral 3rd party will take their side. Rather than evoking sympathy at injustice, they are seen as a bunch of stuck-up middle-class white teenage thieves, and Ubisoft and Act. I dislike it when people degrade protest for human rights by comparing it to a protest for fair value on entertainment. How did I degrade them?

I'd say the degrading thing is those who use the same word 'protest' to describe their anger over a luxury item not being suitable to them, while simultaneously selfishly consuming the very thing they disagree with. My comparison? Civil rights activists were brave and willing to stand up to injustice. Pirates are children who justify getting what they want without paying as 'sticking it to the man'. It's close minded people like you who think there is only ever one way to go about something that devalue the actions of anyone that disagree with your point of view that is enabling the corporations and government to get away with murder. Calling it 'murder' to overcharge for a video game seems a bit excessive.

Nobody died because they couldn't play a brand-new AAA video game, and anyone who spent too much or regretted a purchase on a luxury item has only themselves to blame. I'm also not sure what the government has to do with any of this, let alone how they benefit from aggressive DRM on video games.

Personally, I think it's the people who buy and play these luxury items regardless of the cost, DRM, and ramifications that allow the companies to take advantage of us. They're the ones that reward the game producers for the status quo, so they're the ones to blame for the lack of innovation and fairness to the consumer.

And all you have to do, is just use only Free Software for 24 months The article is about PLAYSTATION 3, a device whose primary advertised features are to play non-free major-label video games and to play non-free major-label high-definition movies. So during these 24 months, how do you propose funding the creation of high-quality video games and feature films under a free software and free cultural works license? And every time I restart a PC running Ubuntu, I use non-free BIOS software. Where can I find an affordable computer that runs coreboot?

If you want Linux so badly, install it on a PC. I installed Linux on my PS3 for fun. I got bored after a couple of minutes (I already use Ubuntu 100% on my machines at home and work, apart from when I need to remote desktop into Windows servers). It's meant to be faster these days, but still it's rather pointless unless you're writing multicore research programs, or don't have a PC with Linux. If they had included access to the 3D graphics capabilities then I'd be saying something completely different here, but the capabilities that they built in are pretty worthless, and only having 256MB (I think?) of RAM limits what apps you can run usefully.

I suspect there will be a crack soon anyway, that's why Sony are currently trying to lock things down. Maybe they will succeed.

I don't really care either way. I probably wouldn't risk bricking my PS3. It's too useful to me as a games and multimedia machine.

We'll soon be at the stage where you will be able to build a faster PC for less money anyway. Hopefully they will include a decent 'Other OS' setup for PS4, but I doubt it. Especially considering they were making a loss on the early units and thousands of them were being bought up just for Linux based research projects. Well, it is a bit of a dick move on Sony's part, but I guess I just appreciate not having cheaters on PS3 games much more than I do being able to mess around with the Cell. Someone was getting close to creating a full crack for the hypervisor and this is their way of trying to slow him down.

You still would be able to install Linux and play PS2 games if you bought one of the original PS3s. I think simply wiping the HDD should reset it back to the factory OSS and you wouldn't ever need to run a system update. Well I would love to see the Hypervisor cracked.

I would love to have access to the GPU in Linux. Sony doesn't because then people could write good games that run under Linux on the PS3 As for the stopping cheaters. Great fine just don't take away a feature to do it. Frankly I doubt that will stop them for long and will only cripple access to those that want to access the Cell. If Sony had allowed access to the GPU through they hypervisor then the only reason to crack it would be to copy games and cheating.

So yes I agree that you are defending Sony too much. I liked the PS2 but felt the PS3 was too expensive for what you got at the time. You can like the PS3 hardware all you want. It does look like a nice piece of kit. However again this policy just sucks and is really annoying. If Sony just updated the Hypervisor to stop people from cracking it while allowing people to still run Linux I would not complain.

If Sony added access to the GPU I would praise them and go and buy one. I did not even get too bent when Sony came out with a new model that didn't support Linux. That is their right to change a product BEFORE I BUY IT.

It is the post purchase crippling that is just evil and frankly I feel dishonest. Odd, none of the games I bought lately had any. I admit, it takes a little effort to make sure you only buy games whose creators treat you like a customer rather than a criminal that first has to prove their innocense before you're allowed to play their game, but these companies exist. Stardock is one of them, for example. 10 years ago, your task as a computer gamer has been to read reviews and previews to spot the gem amongst the lemons. Today, your task is to read boards and online discussions to see which games don't infest your computer with malware in disguise and essentially only allow you to rent instead of buy your game. It hasn't really changed, you just have to read different information material.

It's no longer the game reviews that tell you which game is 'awesome', it's the user boards and DRM watchdog pages that tell you which games you can safely buy. Nobody was forcing you to install the firmware. Wrong, Sony is forcing you all the time to upgrade the firmware. Using new games might require a firmware upgrade, using the shop requires firmware upgrade, using Home requires firmware upgrade, using DRMed videos requires firmware upgrade and so on. Of course you can say 'no' to the upgrade, but then you have basically a brick, as you can't do anything that requires a firmware upgrade.

Sony gives you basically the 'choice' to play games or run Linux, to bad that what I bought from them was a machine that could play games.and. run Linux. Stuff like this really should result in a lawsuit, as you shouldn't be allowed to remove features that the costumer payed for. Wrong, Sony is forcing you all the time to upgrade the firmware.

Using new games might require a firmware upgrade, using the shop requires firmware upgrade, using Home requires firmware upgrade, using DRMed videos requires firmware upgrade and so on. Of course you can say 'no' to the upgrade, but then you have basically a brick, as you can't do anything that requires a firmware upgrade. None of this actually forces you to install the firmware.

It might be a very strong encouragement if you want to play games, but there are an awful lot of people here who would buy a console and never use it for gaming. Those people are not going to be forced by any of the stuff you mention above. The original poster was just talking about buying a console to run Linux on, he did not say he was buying one to play games and run linux so the guy you replied to had a valid point.

I see this sentiment a lot whenever class action lawsuits are discussed, but as a lawyer that has absolutely nothing to do with class action lawsuits, I would like to point out that one of the biggest purposes of class action lawsuits that people normally overlook when complaining about them is the deterrence effect. Class action lawsuits are basically one of the most, if not the most, expensive form of litigation a company can endure. Even though due to the number of plaintiffs, in the end each person might only get a $10 gift card, the combined cost to the company of that are staggering. In this case, it would be taking Sony to task, and hopefully Sony would see the error of its ways and back down. Even if that is not the eventual outcome, it sends a message to all the other bad guys out there, if you engage in this type of shenanigans, you should think twice because it will cost you dearly. In a way, the lawyers who bring the suit are acting as private attorney generals, punishing wrong doing that may not rise to the criminal level, but affecting large swaths of the populace in a tortious fashion nonetheless.

While no doubt the lawyers involve need to be incentivized to engage in this activity somehow, whether they should be rewarded as richly as they are for it currently is another issue entirely. It might have amounted to something yesterday. Now it's just another fringe platform. In the long story of computer history there have been many processors that have been marginalized by their vendors when they really did rock. The Cell is one, and now it's lost. The thing is, I expected that from Sony because that's what they do - so I never bothered to master programming for Cell.

They just don't get it. They never did and they never will. They've got some world class engineers and the poor bastards are restrained from ruling the world by the idiots they have in marketing and the executive branch. To be fair, Toshiba and IBM (who participated in the Cell design) don't get it either - they'll never release a Cell platform that normal people can afford, and so they'll avoid the synergy that takes it from the fringe to dominance. It'll live and die in their mainframes and that's it - and they'll make a mint migrating their customers to the next fringe platform because God & Everybody knows you can't run mainframe OS's on x86 harware (right?). No, I expect this from Sony. Some people will find a way to break their DRM and run any OS you want on the thing now - but it's too late.

That's too marginal and conditional for people who build stuff. Dammit Sony: we have enough stuff that doesn't work with our other stuff!

Will you quit with the breaking flexibility please? Yesterday it wasn't a fringe platform? X86 hardware has basically caught up with the Cell in power, whose major innovation was an architecture that reduced loss due to chip imperfections. It's not a bad chipset, and it poses interesting questions. But the only non-fringe main chipsets right now are x86, ARM, those people still using 68000's, and MIPS. OK, there are a few others mixed in there for embedded applications. But the Cell definitely has very little going for it compared to other platforms.

You not only hit the nail on the head, you drove it in with a single blow Daniel-san style. This is why I've avoided Sony hardware like the plague for years now. It's not that they don't release some EXCELLENT stuff.

It's just that they're such control freaks that they eventually decide to take their ball and go home with it. Never mind that they're killing their own product. Never mind that they're destroying a potential developer base. Never mind that some of the things being developed on said platform are incr. Terrifying that they thought this was a good idea.

That said, AFAIK, Cell was never part of the POWER architecture in any way; their mainframe integration amounted to a coprocessor card to which specially-written apps could offload work. No surprise that it got few takers; most code probably ran faster on the POWER6. With vector optimizations turned off. And the CPU scaled back to half its normal speed. And all but one core disabled.

Not to mention that IIRC, Cell basically only does one thing well: single-precision floating-point math. For certain tasks, that's great, but then again, my GPU does a good job of that, too, and I can stick several beefy ones in a computer for a whole heck of a lot less than the cost of an IBM mainframe.:-).

The rampant chipless/modless piracy didnt help either. The Dreamcast died because Sega needed to get 10 million more units sold and they didn't have the capital to build the machines.

There are a few people that like to claim 'piracy' had anything to do with the Dreamcast's death because geeks like you and me went on an IRC channel and downloaded a game or two and burned it, and found it played just fine. Then we asked a friend with similar interests and PC capabilities and they said 'yeah, I did that too!' , and mentally we turned that into a baseless statistic. It's not totally implausible that the feature allows some sort of exploit, but I can't seem to find anything about one actually existing, or it having come up in the past as a security concern. Is that just a cover to remove it, or are there actually security concerns?

I think it's a huge security concern that Sony is trying to plug up without anyone noticing. Linux has access to all the hardware of the PS3 when it's the OS being ran (implementation isn't perfect yet though).

Including it's blue ray disc reader that a lot of people don't normally have access to. This is how the Dreamcast was hacked even though it ran special 1 gig discs. People figured out how to hook the Dreamcast to a computer and make the Dreamcast become an external drive to read the discs and send them to the computer allowing everyone to pirate the games. Now we have the first signs of the PS3 being hacked, removing the Other OS feature removes one problem of Linux no longer being able to be used to install/flash the BIOS for the future cracked firmware (a la PSP style hacks), but it also removes the option of having the PS3 being turned into an external drive to read possible 'hidden' disc data that would only be read with PS3 firmware code. As someone who used to buy exclusively Sony products this is just one more reason for me not to buy their products anymore. Lets recap shall we.

They buy draconian laws from clueless congress critters?. They want to ban consumers from possessing devices with a record button?. They want to proprietize the marketplace with proprietary DRM infected media formats?. Check They lobby lobby lobby for broadcast flags?. They lobby to close the analog loophole. They lie to politicians (about piracy killing profits) for more draconian laws while turning record profits?.

They want to disable you ability to record CDs on you computer with rootkits while lobbying for a piracy tax on blank media? They sue their customers?. Yep They are pro DRM, ACTA, DMCA, Slapped red handed giving payola to radio station DJs to skew the song charts.' Anti fair-use?. Yep And they support the view and by proxy have told Congress that countries that support open source software as part of a gov.

Procurement policy should be on a watch list. Hmmm did i miss anything? When I take all these things into account a disturbing pattern emerges hence, when it comes to their products I'll take a pass.

Some new games require newer firmwares, they have them on disc. If you don't upgrade you don't get to play. While that won't happen for a few months with this version it would prevent me from playing games or running Linux. The other issue is that many of the games I have advertise PSN which I won't be able to use.

I said backslash because if it effects 1% or 100% of the user base people are going to complain. Depending on how much they complain results in x amount of dollars Sony has to spend. I wonder how the HPC community is going to respond; there is a not insubstantial umassd.edu who heard '150Gflop/$400' and 'Linux' and decided to build clusters from PS3s. Those machines can probably just have updates held back, but it makes replacement a problem. To forestall the inevitable 'that isn't a serious use' argument, US Airforce owns computerworld.com PS3s for compute work. Killing Linux on the PS3 also presents something of an issue for the other Cell 'partners', who seem to be looking at the PS3 as a low-cost Cell development starter kit. The other Cell machines on the market are.much.

more expensive (an IBM QS22 blade is $8-20k, depending on configuration, and Mercury Computer Systems doesn't even like talking about how much their Cell boards cost). Given that Cell is an enormously difficult architecture to target, having relatively inexpensive systems to test and train on is very desirable for the other vendors, especially now that so many of the HPC folks are fixated on GPGPU, which is also terrible to program for, but has a far lower cost of entry. It could be that theinquirer.net is how it became politically tenable for Sony to kill off Linux on the PS3. I went to the National HPC conference about 2 weeks ago. Read hpcc-usa.org. The director of the research lab in Rome, NY with all the PS3's stated that the new slim PS3 won't support Linux and answered your question - selling Linux boxes lowers the attach rate, so they are looking at other options.

I was representing one of the vendors at the show, and he stopped by our booth and asked a bunch of questions about the hardware we had on display. The AF doesn't mess around. If game hardware has cutting edge performance, they use it.:^) GPUs are some of the most interesting devices to code for - most people write programs for one core, where a thread is a big heavy weight thing. In GPUs, threads are your basic unit of computation, and the world is upside down. Want to make a loop 100X faster - in some cases you can do it by creating more threads and synchronizing them with a barrier to keep threads going. Don't hold onto calculations for long - recomputing them can be order of 50X faster vs making a lookup to global memory and recomputing frees up the registers so you have less register pressure/can get more threads executing simultaneously. Between the ATI Cypress (1600 cores) and the new GF100 based chips (448-512 cores), writing code that runs on these devices makes C seem like child's play.

And the development environments are all V1. There would be an uproar heard in Congress if General Motors used their OnStar download links to remove a feature. Suppose GM did something so that third-party audio players like the iPod couldn't use the car's speakers. This isn't totally unreasonable.

GM's onboard entertainment system has a port for connecting a CD changer. If you didn't buy the CD changer option, that port is unused. There are crutchfield.com for connecting an iPod to that port. The dashboard CD changer controls then control the iPod. GM could probably download an update to change the interface so that this would no longer work.

GM would prefer that customers buy a GM audio source; they remarket XM Radio. Arguably, the iPod is a device for pirating music, and removing that capability would enhance the security of the system. It would also eliminate the possibility of unauthorized iPod software interfering with the car's networks, and perhaps the OnStar system. So why shouldn't GM do that? When the Cell was first announced, I was very excited about it - I do signal processing and protocol simulation for a living, and having something with 8 powerful signal processing engines plus a dual core CPU to run the protocol stacks was just about a perfect fit. So I got my boss to approve buying a PS3 to begin evaluation on, and we began trying to find a vendor for the Cell chip (we can do our own PCB design and fab if needed).

After many talks with IBM, we found that unless you were willing to buy millions of parts, they didn't want to talk to you, didn't want to sell you the chips, didn't want to support you, here's a nice mainframe blade, isn't that good enough (NO! I need something like microTCA, not a big ass blade!).

Add to that how the PS3's Linux had really crummy support for graphics (because rather than being SMART and making the PS3 have the best OpenGL implementation out there, Sony crippled the system with a dumb framebuffer). Recently, IBM has announced they are end-of-lifing the Cell blades, and moving everybody over to the newest Power series CPUs. So, you can pretty much bank on the Cell only being in the PS3, and maybe one or two TV sets (and even there, I would not hold my breath - until those TVs are shipping the vendors can and likely will change their minds). While I would still recommend anybody wanting a Blu-ray player buy a PS3, and they are a decent video game platform, I would NOT recommend anybody even think about trying to support the Cell outside that platform - it will not happen, IBM has moved on, Sony doesn't want to support it. And while there is much typical slashbot dick-waving posturing about 'I'm gonna SUE! CLASS ACTION BABY! I'm gonna DESTROY SONY!'

- good luck with that. You are taking a minor feature that most PS3 buyers don't even know about, that is periphery to the main function of the device, and trying to say you are in some significant way harmed by this? You expect an attorney to take on a major class action like this, for what - lulz?

Ps3mfw With Gitbrew.org Tasks For Mac

Against a multinational with a large army of lawyers? At best, you will get US$10 off your next Sony purchase. What needs to happen is all the companies that bought PS3s to explore Cell programming need to start pressuring IBM and their limited set of third-party vendors like Mercury Computers to release the next generation Cell (with double-precision SPUs) on something reasonably sized and priced. Meanwhile, flood eBay with all the now-useless PS3s they had in their clusters - drive the price down and cost Sony money. As I understand it, for a class action to happen, you have to have several preconditions: 1) there has to be an easily identifiable group of people to belong to the class.

This would NOT be 'the set of all people who bought PS3's that could run Linux' for reason #2 below, but rather 'The set of people who bought PS2 to run Linux.' 2) There has to be a harm to the class. Thus, just having bought a PS3 that could run Linux would not be enough - you would have to have bought the PS3 to run LInux. Moreover, the h. No, it doesn't seem that Sony ever gave you anything, if they can take it back whenever they want without you having any say. You are a serf who was granted some small favor from his lord.

That small favor was taken back because one of you dared to question him; but sooner or later, for any reason or no reason, lord Sony might have changed their mind anyway. Either the PlayStation 3 was secure, or it wasn't. If it was, then there is no reason to take any functionality away. If it wasn't, then it was simply a matter of time before someone, somewhere, by some method, did something that Sony didn't like. Either way, it's all because of Sony. They knew what kind of game they were playing; they've played it a dozen times before, and lost every time. As for him achieving nothing useful, and as to whether he had any damn good reason; you have no idea precisely what he achieved, nor what could yet be achieved by him or others as a result of what he achieved.

So you're the guy who made some law firm crazy rich in exchange for no benefit to the community whatsoever? Successfully suing DRM-happy publishers is a great service to the community, because it prevents fraud (you buy the game, and it doesn't work - that is fraud). The pay-out in this case is a punishment for bad business practices, and its value lies mainly in that, not in someone receiving a $10 cheque. I can certainly thank GP for doing what he did, since it makes a difference for me as a gamer who buys (and not pirates) games, as well. Let's face it, the only real reason Sony gave the feature in the first place was because they wanted to bolster their case for passing the PS3 off as computer rather than an entertainment device for import tax purposes. Other OS was just a tax dodge, one that failed in court, and when it did Sony decided to stop supporting it, that's really what it comes down to at the end of the day.

I've no doubt that you're right, GeoHot's actions are a major reason Sony have now decided to remove this feature retroactively too because keeping the feature meant they now had to use resources to ensure the feature was secure. The real blame, the majority of the blame must really go on Sony for telling their users this feature exist for the user's benefit, rather than the reality which is that it existed for Sony's benefit as an attempted tax dodge. Sony is the real enemy for implementing a feature for the wrong reasons, and then deciding to give up supporting it when those reasons bore no fruit for them. Blame them for only ever implementing the feature for their benefit, and not the users benefit, but half-arsed pretending it was for the users benefit giving users a very misleading impression of the likelihood of continued support for the feature. Some people claim that Sony supported 3rd party operating systems in order to prevent the homebrew community from hacking the PS3. A lot of effort went into hacking the original Xbox in order to run homebrew on the device (the key part done by Bunny).

Once this was opened up, it was only a matter of time before people could easily pirate games for the console and circumvent all copyright protections. Therefore, if Sony had not allowed a 3rd party OS to run from the beginning, then more people would see a. Well, you buy a console with X functionalities, and then Sony decides to remove some of them. If you paid for a console which can install other OS, will they return the money to you?

Figure that they want all consumers to buy the new PS3 and in the next update, they close the functionallity of playing games. Would it be acceptable? Is it acceptable to have functionlities removed after you paid for them? Idiot is thinking that because some people abuse something, you can remove it from legal users. Even if a class action suit is filed and they are found guilty or w/e ill receive a coupon in the mail for something i didnt want and have to pay real money to get anyways. Thanks alot Sony. I dont use my Linux on my PS3 whole lot, but i didnt give up 10 GB of precious HDD space for nothing.

Small claims court is a great thing, and will quite often let you recover the full value of damages rather than getting a coupon or some similar crap from a class-action suit. File for the full value of the thing, claiming that whether you accept the update or don't, irreparable damage will be done to functions you purchased the system to perform. Quite often, they won't even bother to show up and will just quietly pay off what you win. I'd strongly encourage you to look into the small-claims rules in your jurisdiction, and you can also find some basic information nolo.com.

As tablets and computer-phones flood the market, the headlines read: 'The Personal Computer is Dying.' But they are only half true: an artifact of the PC is dying, but the essence of the PC revolution is closer to realization than ever before, while also being closer to loss than ever before. Certainly one way to define the Personal Computer stems from the era of the IBM PC: a gray box with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard (or a laptop). But the idea of the Personal Computer dates back quite a while — back to Alan Kay's, the, etc. The Apple Knowledge Navigator provided a vision of personal computing.

Although still a pale comparison, tablet and phone platforms are beginning to look awfully similar. The essence of those pre-PC Personal Computers was that of the user controlling the device. You control the data, you control the software; the Personal Computer is a uniquely personal artifact that the user adapts to his own working style.

One consequence of this is that creating is as easy (perhaps easier) as consuming content. Another nice side effect is that your data remains private by virtue of local storage. In many ways, then, a tablet or phone comes significantly closer to a personal computer than that dull gray box under your desk. For example, on Android, the screen ceases to be a place to throw icons and becomes a rich canvas of widgets.

Additionally, my phone fits into my pocket and is always there. Ubiquitous cellular coverage gives me access to my data from most anywhere. The touchscreen and interface conventions make shine in a way you just can't get from a screen two feet away on a desk. And, those are just superficial improvements over the desktop. Albeit tied to proprietary services, Google's voice search and Siri are inching closer to the dream of personal Intelligent Agents reminding us all that our mothers called us earlier today and want us to pick up the birthday cake for the surprise party With a few taps I can search basically all of my data, not to mention the of mankind. But the software running on these devices has a dark side. Want to access your music collection the go?

You have to get it from Google Play. Want to have lightweight instant messaging? You have to use GTalk. Or take ebook readers (certainly personal devices): that book you just downloaded to your Kindle is! That intelligent agent? Apple you bark at her and can take her away at a moment's notice.

Furthermore, the software on these devices is geared almost exclusively toward content consumption. You can listen to music all day long, but. That ebook reader is great for reading, but you can't scratch notes in the margins of any of your books or sit down with one and scrawl out your latest manuscript. Clearly, some of this is from the youth of these new systems, but it is distressing to see them geared first toward consumption (the Newton, for example, was geared from the start as a device for creation). The 'cloud' as implemented by Amazon, Google, Apple, et al.

Is a distinct threat to the personal computer. Loss of control over our own data is perhaps the worst part of the cloud. We're easily seduced by genuinely useful features like access to our contacts and music from any device without having to manually sync anything. It's certainly more convenient to purchase a digital movie on Amazon Prime than to hunt down a DVD, and Netflix is definitely nicer for most people than cable television. But when you buy a movie on Amazon, you don't really own it. Underlying many of these cloud services (especially media-related ones) is Digital Restrictions Management. Whether it be the files themselves or the used to transmit data, DRM is used to control what you can do with your data, restricting even what programs you can use to interact with seemingly neutral files.

Worse, networked DRM services can and when it is no longer profitable for the company to run the verification servers. The only copying that DRM discourages effectively is the. And, given that the sneakernet has existed since recordable media has existed, it doesn't seem like the sneakernet is really much of a threat to creative business. I might lend a friend a CD (or even let her copy a few files), but just as I don't unwrap that CD and torrent it through The Pirate Bay, I'm not going to download a movie from Amazon and do the same. There's really no incentive to do so, for most people — most people pirate because that's what you have to do to get the media you want, not because you have a compulsive desire to share things with your closest 10,000 friends.

In order to prevent what is effectively sharing between actual friends, pushers of DRM-infected data want us to completely cede control of our own data! And they have made people accept it: Steam, Netflix, and Amazon Prime are wildly popular. All of those services are great ideas, but all of them treat you as if you were a criminal. Worse yet, the spread of Software-as-a-Service is returning us to the bad old days: that powerful PC in your pocket is quickly becoming no more than a. The open peer-to-peer network is being subverted from an enabler of collaboration never before seen into yet another scheme to tether users to proprietary, centralized services. And, as SaaS expands, privacy recedes. No longer is it implicit that your documents are yours alone; now you write and store things using Google Docs and have (legally), despite expecting privacy.

Amazon knows what you read; Netflix knows what you watch; Google knows what you visit. Control over the programs you run, and more importantly can write, is key to a personal computer being personal. And it seems absurd that that right might be taken away, but behold: the iPhone and soon are these mythical walled gardens. You have to to gain real control! And the natural path for Apple is to restrict Macs similarly to iOS devices. And so we are all-too-near an Orwellian nightmare where vendors dictate what we can do with and how we can use our own data.

But what about the hardware itself? It could be argued that a device isn't really personal for some set of people if they can't change all of the software. Here too we see some promise, and some pitfalls. The shift to tablet and phone hardware has meant a shift from x86 machines running PC BIOS to thousands of ARM boards, each with its own peculiar way of being programmed.

Things you take for granted on x86, like being able to even boot, require custom code. And let's not even begin talking about all of the DSPs and co-processors. Vendors aren't always forthcoming with documentation for their boards, and, even worse, those that do port Linux to their hardware often and do not distribute kernel sources. This restricts the utility of perfectly fine hardware: often to the detriment of the user and to the benefit of the manufacturer.

Anyone who finds they can't upgrade to the latest version of Android because their vendor won't support it, and the community cannot support it because of non-free drivers, knows what losing control over their hardware is like (RIP HTC Dream). It might seem like a minor setback ('I guess I have to buy a new phone'), but the lack of specifications or support marginalizes alternative operating systems. There's Meego, Tizen, Open webOS, Firefox OS, etc., but experimenting with them on your device is a non-starter. Imagine if the x86 were so closed (something we much longer): it is doubtful that GNU/Linux or the multitude 'alternative' OSes would exist (Atheos, Haiku, L4Linux, even the Hurd). Ever more closed hardware is putting us into a position where two or three companies will dictate everything about the computing experience going forward, with no room for freethinking tinkerers to revolutionize how we interact with our devices. We are staring at a bleak future, and living in a bleak present in some ways.

But there is hope for the battle to be won by the Personal Computer instead of the Terminal. The Internet is not yet merely glorified cable television.

Hypertext, email, instant messaging, trivial file transfer, etc. Have revolutionized how mankind communicates (understatement of the decade).

Once upon a time the dream was that everyone would be a first-class netizen: your IP was publicly routeable and with a bit of know-how you had a server. Instead, thanks to grossly asymmetric pipes and heavy NATing, it is rare for any individual to run their own servers. Instead we turn to Google, Amazon, et al and cede control over our data. But now broadband connections are spreading fast (I've gone from 100Kbit/s to 2Mbit/s upstream in three years just with basic service), and software is being written to challenge the centralized 'cloud' model being pushed on us from above. We've had a few victories already: SMTP is still in use, XMPP is the dominant chat protocol (and IRC refuses to die), RSS/Atom aggregation decentralizes news, and the core network protocols are developed in the open.

But Google still controls Android, and myriad services control your data. Part of this is because they have easy client and server interfaces; sure you could run gallery2 and Wordpress on your own server, but I can just snap a photo on my phone and it's up on Facebook 40 seconds later (well, if their app worked, it would be). Luckily, there are on making easy to use 'cloud' services. In particular,. OwnCloud provides a framework for hosting and syncing data between your devices and sharing data with others. The important part is not so much the central server, but the clients they are writing.

Eventually, it should be possible to e.g. Replace the Google contact/mail/calendar sync and Google Drive, while adding these features to the desktop. Integration in KDE is already underway. Imagine, instead of being tied to Google you could move the central server to the hosting provider of your wish (or pack up your data and move it to greener pastures if you're not running your own). And, perhaps more subtle (but the real liberation): Your data would be freely movable between all operating systems (interesting that you have to go through hoops to sync your GMail contacts with anything else, and Abandon All Hope Ye who wants to share between an Apple device and anything else).

Additionally, the server is designed to respect your privacy (you can e.g. Only store encrypted data server-side). On the hardware side, projects like are very important: having a 'mobile' Free Software OS developed in the open might be essential when the dominant open platforms are developed monolithically by corporations with no interest in protecting user control of data. And then for developing the next generation of devices, folks like Rhombus Tech are pushing for the development of for embedded devices, and the FSF is expanding their focus to.

There are two serious threats that would undermine any resistance: IPv4 exhaustion and draconian content policing. The former issue is technical and likely to solve itself: in the long run multi-level NAT would be too costly, switching hardware will be replaced as it is obsoleted, etc. The latter is political and represents the most serious threat of all. If we cannot communicate freely and the pipes are owned by the very organizations whose business interests will be harmed. We've already seen how, and it will take vigilance on the part of many to prevent them from having their way. Where will we be in ten years?

If Google, Amazon, Apple, and Old Media get their way, in a new dark age of computing. Certainly, you'll have a fancy tablet and access to infinite entertainment. But you will own nothing.

Sharing data will be controlled by a chosen few entities, the programs you can run or write will be limited in the name of, and privacy will be dead. History shows that personal computing survived despite Apple and Microsoft in the 80s and 90s. So, I'm hopeful that other forces will win: the forces of Free Culture and Free Software. If they succeed (or are at least not crushed), the future is much brighter: most content will be available DRM-free, users will control their computing environments, and the egalitarian promise of the Internet will be realized (in no small part thanks to IPv6). The Palm Pilot and Apple Newton never achieved the success the iPad has or the iPhone. The problem with comparing the Past Systems was the fact they while they look similar, that new feature of multi-touch is the real game player. Before we needed to use a stylus or one finger to just push a button on the screen.

Doing things such as zooming in was very clumsy. The simple feature of the pinch zoom is a massive game changers. During Newton and Palm Pilot Hayday. PC's were in a get a really big display phase. 17' - 19' - 21' get as big of a CRT that can fit on your desk. Because you had so much information, you wanted to view but smaller screens didn't have the resolution or were too small to see it.

For the most part on the screen we only focus on a couple square inches on it at any moment. But using the mouse to scroll and zooming was choppy, made it so you need to use a desktop if you want to get real work done.

With multi-touch you can see scroll and zoom much faster and naturally then before. The next problem during the Palm Era. Was we didn't have too many good enough CPU's to do the job. During the Pentium 2 Era. Your Palm Pilot had the power of an 8088 (10 year gap).

Today We are closer to a 5 year gap, and our need for personal processing power has diminished. We can play a movie in High Definition on our phone and it will run smoothly. Programs are responsive and quick. While not as fast as the desktop, we are by no means suffering. The third problem was network infrastructure.

The old devices you needed to sync with a PC. Today they are self updating and work by themselves without the need for the PC. And they have wireless internet that means it is actually handy if you want to look up something. The fourth problem was culture. Technology gadgets were not cool back in the late 90's. You would have been a major nerd or geek in the negative term if you were caught using one.

Cell phones getting smaller and cheaper means more popular people were getting the technology thus allowing more high tech to be more common across the 'normals'. We had a bunch of horseless carriages designed before the Model-T too. It just needed the right situation to get them to kick off. But the reason Palm wasn't the end of the PC era is the same as the reason The Tablet (you seem to like apple) wont be either. They are toys.

While the PC can be used for entertainment, its primary purpose is as a tool. While I'm sure there are use cases you can come up with where a tablet can be used as a tool. There were for Palms as well, the fact of the matter is, real work is done on PCs. And will continue to be done that way for a the foreseeable future.

Will desktop PCs go away? This is a major reason why pads, pods, and phones are eating into PC sales. Maybe, or maybe it's because PC sales have been over-inflated since sometime in the 90's. Just my opinion, but I think we should step back and take another look at this - TBH I'm not entirely sure that what we're seeing is such a bad thing - and that it's completely natural.

Most people aren't tinkerers, inventors, hackers, or scientists. Most people aren't curious about their world, investigative of the way things work, interested in science, or even all that intelligent. Most people don't have a scientific mind or any desire whatsoever to use technology for any more than canned entertainment (which, by the way, is also what they use most of everything else in their lives for).

Not because they're inherently a sub-species - but because they just don't care. All respect to the author of the original article above, but I think he's missing something important - PC's are losing ground to tablets, etc in the market because most people don't have any use for PC's - and they never really did. PC's were always FAR more complicated than they were able to appreciate or take advantage of - and they don't have any use for them because they can perform their stupid, meaningless, and irrelevant tasks quite adequately on a phone/tablet/whatever.

They also don't give two farts who legally owns the movie they just paid $9.99 for, as long as they get to watch it right now, and have never heard of DRM (and wouldn't understand it if you explained it to them). Jobs was a genius - he understood that, and by simplifying the PC down to a glorified toy, he knew that the entire world would throw their money at him - and they did. And I say, more power to them. I don't care.

Let them do their thing, and let Apple and Google and Amazon make bank off of them. I'll always have a PC of some kind, and a hundred other hacked and frankenstein'd gadgets - because my nature isn't to just consume, it's to create and arrange things to make them better. It doesn't really matter to me if Apple quits making Macbooks, or Microsoft quits writing operating systems that work on regular computers - at worst, it's a minor inconvenience, because I and many others like me will step in to fill the void - just as we created the beginnings of all this stuff to begin with, way back in the 80's and before. This move toward DRM and non-ownership of public entertainment is meaningless.

Jobs and Gates and the rest took what was originally created and commercialized it; made it accessible to the masses - and the masses, because they don't know better or don't care, will eventually be controlled by draconian corporations or governments, or both. Those of us who care enough to invent, create, and make the world a better place, will not.

Most people aren't curious about their world, investigative of the way things work, interested in science, or even all that intelligent. Most people don't have a scientific mind or any desire whatsoever to use technology for any more than canned entertainment (which, by the way, is also what they use most of everything else in their lives for). Not because they're inherently a sub-species - but because they just don't care. In fairness, it doesn't require a computer to be 'curious about the world,' 'investi. We had a bunch of horseless carriages designed before the Model-T too. It just needed the right situation to get them to kick off. I have to point out that while I admire the appeal to cars, that this is a flawed analogy.

The horseless carriage was capable of reproducing every single feature of a horse-drawn carriage (except the pooping), which made it an obvious successor. There are a myriad of things that touch-based devices can't do that a mouse/keyboard can. And there are a lot of things a little ti. Remember when the Palm Pilot and Apple Newton heralded the 'end of the PC era'? It was a stupid statement then, and it's just as stupid to suggest that tablets will be 'the end of the PC' now. To be sure, tablets are going to replace PC's in a lot of places, but anyone whose computing tasks involve any serious amount of input knows that a table is very poor substitute for a keyboard. The same can be said for those tasks that need multiple displays, etc.

Those users will absolutely not be replacing their PC's with tablets. When I got (built) my first real PC, it wasn't about 'content.'

It was about doing things. I had BASIC (tiny), an assembler, an editor, and a way to store stuff. I wrote all manner of software. Simple stuff at first, then more crazed as I caught on to how things actually worked. As the years went by, I built or bought more powerful machines, and my library of stuff grew. Content became relevant as I could.create. it; I painted pictures, made music, wrote articles, books, wrote and received uncounted numbers of emails (and I still have them all.

I was able to dig up a letter I wrote to my stepmother on my 6800 machine in 1975 last week, startled her a bit.:) I designed PC boards, all manner of hardware, even wrote PCB layout and schematic capture software. Not so much, although I did write a few, especially as the 80's arcade frenzy came and went and I was employed in that area. Computers were niche devices for people with special interests, really.

When I started out hand-coding 8008 instructions, it's not like I was a member of a huge crowd. Today, the start isn't the wowie-zowie of having 'a real computer', it's just Other People's Content. You get a closed box like an iPad, it doesn't come with 'hey write your own stuff', although you can add apps like that for cheap. You can add an editor (leaving out the PITA of that on screen kbd for real writing), a perfectly serviceable spreadsheet.

On the desktop, developing stuff is still 100% possible, but again, that's not usually why people go after a machine; they want twitter, they want IM, they want to download music. For them, it is an appliance, and neither the environment that enthused me about computers (suddenly, you could have one, whereas before, you could not) or the vast unknown of 'what can I do with this' really serves as the entryway or inspiration for most people.

True enough, the general purpose machine on my desk can address either type of person; me, or an inveterate content consumer. But the current market is the latter - not me. In fact, I might not buy another machine - I'm pretty happy with what's on my desk. 8 cores, 3 ghz, terabytes of storage, 6 monitors, USB widgets everywhere, LAN, WAN, WIFI, bluetooth, SD radio, MIDI, Logic Pro, all manner of dev languages. I feel pretty good about this puppy, frankly. If that's to be the pinnacle of personal computing. Yeah, I'm good with that.

Thing is crazy powerful, from my perspective. I'm just not sure that the needs of us dinosaurs represent the needs of the marketplace today. That's really what I wanted to say, I'm just maybe way too windy about it. So if the PC 'dies', maybe that's ok.

It'l die slow, and probably a niche market will arise again. The pendulum swings all the time, for just about everything. The percentage of the world's population that can and do what you (and I) did in the 1970's is massively greater. No, I disagree.

There are still very few who can do what we did back then - no more than existed then. The idea that there are more now is an illusion - crutches exist that allow them to think they can really create something meaningful, but they can't - and they don't. I think the parent poster got it right - maybe the PC will due, but that's ok, and it will give way to a niche market, just as it was in the beginning. I personally don't have a problem with that; in fact it's kind of exciting to me. Also good for people who value their time (not having to worry so much about fraud and malware, research, etc.) more than their ability to do things with a device that they would never bother doing anyway. It's perfectly fine for tinkerers on Slashdot to have the opposite preference and express it verbally and in the market with their purchases, but to presume that their preference - which is shared by an extremely small minority of people - is ideal for everyone else is a bit silly. I fully support people who want to tinker - I used to be that way myself.

But as I've gotten older my interests have shifted and I simply don't want to spend my very limited time on vetting everything that goes into my mobile device, and the limitations imposed by the 'walled garden' don't really affect my interests. It's a simple trade-off. I agree with you here. But I think that Android has reached a better balance between walled garden, and letting the user run whatever they want. I like that I can easily go and buy apps for my phone from a reliable source. But I also like that I have the option to install third party software, or develop my own software. I realize that for most people, you can't have it both ways.

Give them an inch, and they will take a mile. Give them the ability to install software from unknown sources, and they will install all kinds of crap software which will wreak havoc on their system. The only thing to really stop most users from doing this is to outright refuse to run software from unknown sources. Also good for people who value their time (not having to worry so much about fraud and malware, research, etc.) more than their ability to do things with a device that they would never bother doing anyway. Only if those people are content with things staying the way they are i.e.

If they do not want the next technological revolution to occur. Disruptive technologies do not happen in walled gardens; that is the point of walled gardens, to protect their curators from the fate that buggy-whip makers faced. The World Wide Web could not have happened in a walled garden; if everything was locked behind walled gardens in the late 80s, we would have never had a web, we would still be using online services and the. Locked down devices don't do what people who actually use them (as opposed to just play with them) need them to. Locked down devices do exactly as much as the people who sell them want them to do, everything from a G-rated kids tablet to to fully automated and unvetted signing with only a banhammer lurking. I think you meant to say 'The current locked down devices don't do what I want' because what that means isn't fixed and most people get a lot of 'real work' done on business computers even more locked down than the Apple, no jumping on the app store and installing random software there. In fact you're the equivalen.

Letting them remain ignorant is the fastest way to ensure the propagation of DRM and walled gardens and the demise of unrestricted devices. Case in point, that Apple line commercial that I can't stand. Anyone who cares about it already knows the entire iOS/Android debate.

But it is pretty amusing to me how they went about the pitch in that commercial. There is tons of ammunition if you want to argue about why an Android phone is better (and I am talking in terms of advertising.

I don't personally give a shit), but when you only have a few minutes to get the lowest common denominator's attention.you have to stick with cool/uncool-pretty/not p. At least for the general public. The whole idea of a 'computer' is simply a result of how primitive they are. That the software that controls them requires the user to understand concepts such as operating system and application, networking and device drivers. People don't really ever want to know they are 'running a word processor' or 'launching a web browser'. They want to accomplish specific things, like writing a note (or video chatting) with a friend, looking something up or watching a movie.

The technical crowd loves to complain about Apple's walled garden, but this is exactly the genius of Apple. They get that. They get that they have to evolve the thing called a computer into a thing that people don't ever have to fiddle with. That simply exists to provide useful services for their life.

The other computer manufacturers understand that to a smaller degree and then wonder why their tablets aren't as successful. The personal computer, as technical people know it, is going away. It's growing up into what the vast majority of people really want. And thank God. I'm glad I don't have to stand in front of my car turning a crank to get it running.

But all is not lost for technical people. There will always be ways to have your own device. The free software and maker movements will ensure that.

In some ways things are better today than ever. In the 1980s (some consider the heyday of the open personal computer) we had the 8-bit IBM PC. Today we have a gamut of programmable devices ranging from Arduinos to $35 linux computers to set top boxes to multi-core, multi-cpu computers more powerful that super computers of the last century. All totally accessible. The technical crowd loves to complain about Apple's walled garden, but this is exactly the genius of Apple.

Apple is only able to create a walled garden thanks to layers that have been built before by the tinkerers and technical folk. So I think that while Apple's strategy may work well in the short term, it will likely be their downfall long term. When you create the walled garden you allow developers to focus on apps, but exclude them from the areas that may have a large impact. Apple needs to do it themselves for the newest innovations. That fancy new, revolutionary FS or networking will need to be ported.

At least when it comes to software and computers, innovation will happen at a glacial pace. Look at cars - the same basic design, the same set of features, and only moderate improvements in fuel efficiency (and only when the government demands it). You have the big corporations designing your car, making the parts for it, and decided who is allowed to do maintenance; now just shut up and go about your life, because cars are always going to work this way. Is that really what you want to see happen with.

The difference with cars is that cars are expensive, so it's worth your time or money to fix it. However, with computers, things are so cheap that it isn't worth your money to get someone else to fix it for you. Mechanics cost about $80 an hour, so if your car was only worth $300, you wouldn't bother paying the mechanic when your car broke, you would just buy a new one. With computers, the repair guys also charge similar rates.

Maybe a bit less. If you only paid $200 (tablet) to $500 (laptop) for your co. Perhaps not on the desktop and perhaps not now.

I thought that a mouse was great, but now I use a trackball. But basically it is all the same difference. If you use a mouse, a trackball or the screen to point, it is all pretty much the same that you are doing. A lot of the times I would love to have a touchscreen. Not in front of me, but next to my trackball and keyboard. Mufti-touch to my main screens.

Then teh ability to take it with me wherever I go. So not instead of a desktop, but next to a desktop. I had a small trackball for my Amiga which I stuck to the keyboard, it was convenient to have it there but I never found it as quick / precise / easy as a mouse, which I have yet to find a better alternative to for GUI control. Touchscreens certainly have their place (phones/tablets etc.) but they are no match for a keyboard+mouse in many situations - just ask the gamers.

The laptop & USB touchpads with multi-touch are pretty nice to use; two finger scrolling instead using the edges of the pad, three. I've been in personal computers over 40 years, seeing them from the kilobyte/kiloflop era to the threshhold of the terabyte/teraflop era. There have been both surprises and disappointments at every turning.

I dont see why this would not continue for another 40 or 100 years. My two biggest mispredictions were: (1) In the mid 70s I wounder why anyone would buy a store-made computer. They were so fun to solder together yourself. (2) The sudden rise of the world wide web in 1993.

Everyone knew cycberspace would eventually happen, but probably another decade or so. That was a huge victory for open source: thanks Tim! So do I, but it's a Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC w/ a Wacom digitizer and pressure-sensitive stylus. I draw, sketch, create plans for woodworking projects, design typefaces, do some light programming and typesetting using (La)TeX and keep several decades worth of notes on it.

The slate form-factor is well-suited to design work, and it's nice to be able to do this pretty much anywhere (Fujitsu has a history of offering daylight-viewable transflective displays, which my ST-4121 has). It also makes a very nice. Up until recently, there was one style of computer, the classic desktop box It had many diverse uses Some used it as an embedded controller Some used it for CAD design, video editing, music production, science, etc Some used it to read email and surf the web Since there was only one style, lots were sold, so they became very cheap Now, we see the market segmenting Many people can have their needs met by a smartphone or a tablet, but not all Some, like CAD designers, video editors, music producers, s.

The bad news for us is that since the masses will probably move to the alternate devices, volume will go down on traditional computers This means prices will rise Is it a terrible thing? I mean, the problem is the 'general public' cared about cost and we ended up in a race to the bottom, where margins are thin and we're seeing the results in low-res screens, integrated graphics, and basically a lot of sameness as everyone builds to a price.

Let prices rise a bit - clear out the low end crap. If you wanted a dec. The PC will never die. These attention seeking whores are fucking technology morons.

They use their computers for facebook, jerking off and youtube. Computers are more than a jerk off machine and a twitter device.

Yes, for the average idiot who was destined to sweep up shit for a living, they probably dont need a real deal pc workstation. Because they'll never create or do anything.

PCs are for people who USE pcs. PCS are for people who work, create, manage, code, program, animate, draw, paint, record, do research, study. PCs are for real users. The general public doesnt need roof ladder, but everyone has a fucking ladder still. 1) Not one of these locked down devices is hard for a 'free thinker' to put a new OS on.

No one is making nor planning on making devices that are actually secure against a knowledgeable owner that wants them to do something different. They are looking to add some security that is impossible without hardware support. No one is actually advocating the position your essay is opposing. 2) When PCs started they used to come with the OS (and arguably sometimes more than one OS) on ROM. People still booted different OSes on them.

3) There is wealth of content creation tools for all these platforms that already exist, so concerns about consumption / creation are overblown. 4) DRM is obviously popular with content creators to avoid sharing, and larger entities to allow for distribution and control. It comes in and out of fashion and has for long time. There is no long term trend in either direction. For example in the last 5 years virtually all music is sold DRM free while previously music companies had required DRM.

5) On the consumer tablet / phone devices there already exist a wealth of services to setup alternative 'clouds' including both Android and iOS. They are cheap and easy to configure.

Instead of whining about them not existing for consumer just set one up. They are all significantly harder than a current PC, and end up only partially functional when you do. But current PCs are pretty darn easy. They weren't that easy when Linux was thriving as an alternative to Windows.

I'd say it is likely easier to install iPhone Linux today than RedHat in '97. As for partial functionality that's not the fault of the device manufacturers.

The Linux kernel was tuned mainly for Microsoft / Intel / Western Digital (i.e. It has expanded to other platform. I'm not sure that this statement makes any sense. It might make sense for Blizzard (Diablo 3), or any new games from Ubisoft, all of which apparently requires a persistent connection to play your games. Netflix is basically a movie rental service with no due dates, and you can watch the stuff you want at any time as many times as you want. I'm not under any illusion that I own any of the content they have available. I have Steam, and I usually only buy games that are on deep discount whenever they have.

Some very good points made there, and I completely agree that the main concern for the future is ownership of data, not what your PC looks like. I have been rather luddite in my avoidance of cloud services. In fact the only exception is Steam, which is perfectly fine and convenient for now, but I can foresee potential issues in the future. In particular when my 3 yr old son gets a bit older and wants to play games from my collection at the same time as I want to.

I think the solution would be a bit torrent. The theory behind the cloud is that your data is available on multiple devices wherever you go. This is only a reality if you stay within your own connectivity area. Anyone who travels quickly understands that access to the cloud either becomes prohibitively expensive (data roaming) or limited. Streaming music on a beach in Mexico, and for example, if requires paying huge data roaming fees or requires the purchase of a local SIM card and an unlocked device.

In my opinion the cloud will not become useful un. The editorial hits the main points, but perhaps understates the importance of US ISPs being controlled by non-competitive private companies. This is a disaster. Aside from Verizon Fios (which - surprise! - has stalled), Americans haven't put new pipe in the ground in ten years.

Google shouldn't be making headlines with a modest proposed fiber-to-house project in Kansas. In the 1990s, backbone providers had to sell bandwidth to all last-mile-ISPs at the same rate. There were literally tens of thousands of ISP. It costs under $5 per month to avoid the 'free' services. I have a low-end $9/month HostGator account for my minor web sites. This allows multiple domains.

If I want to publish a picture, it goes in a directory there. Another domain has Wordpress loaded for a blog.

Mail comes into my own domains, is filtered, and dumps to an IMAP server at sonic.net, which I can access from all my devices. Sonic DSL has no ads, no filtering, no caching, no 'deep packet inspection', no data caps, and no nonsense. What I keep wondering is, when I put all my cherished memories into the cloud and over years I allow that collection to grow with no means of extracting it or migrating it in a useful way, what will stop the cloud from taking full advantage of the worth of those memories to me? I can't imagine why they wouldn't eventually tell me that I must pay them to be able to see the media from Christmas 2012 and that is that? I believe that is the real lurking danger here.

Right now we are the kids in the school yard. On yesterday's PCs, I could just write raw machine code in Hex, save it to the 1st sector of a drive, boot the disk and be in full control of my own hardware with my own code.

Many new-ish PCs now use EFI. To boot from EFI I have to write my machine code within a FAT (32) container, which means implementing MS's proprietary and patent encumbered File Allocation Table format. Tomorrow's PCs will use UEFI to boot, which requires a cryptographically signed EFI boot process. That means signing my own bootloader and installing my own keys, or paying for a key for each bootable from MS (some UEFI systems allow booting w/o signature via special boot mode, some do not) - On ARM platforms shipping Win RT, MS has said the option to boot unsigned code or install user specified keys must be removed.

So, you can see how it's slowly gotten a bit harder to play with my own new hardware thanks to the increasingly high hoops I've got to jump through. If Microsoft has their way you won't be able to boot any OS that doesn't fork over the cash to them. In fact, even linuxfoundation.org so you can still boot your own software on UEFI hardware. I think that's horrible.

I understand they want to make it easy for users to run free software but IMO, paying MS one red cent to give us back the freedom to use our own software with our own hardware is just vile and disgusting. Instead, I'll buy from vendors that respect my freedom. The subject line say MS + Secure Boot PC Death, but really Apple, and many other vendors who don't let us unlock our devices to run arbitrary code are equally as evil in my book. Recently a longing for the good ol' days of unfettered computing led me to creating vortexcortex.com. It's a 512 byte boot sector that contains a Hex editor. With it you can edit raw memory then execute the memory you just edited.

Using only this minimal tool you can extend the program's features (eg: disk I/O), write any other program, even create a whole new Operating System - Indeed that's exactly slashdot.org None of my hardware or software hacking hobbies will be possible if the OEMs get their way and lock us out of our own hardware. It's all under the guise of Security, but that's not really the reason. Think about it: OS code is huge and bug ridden; If there's even one kernel level arbitrary code execution vulnerability then the whole effort is useless. If the OS makers could write secure (read: bug free) OS's they would be just as secure with and without secure boot! If they can't write secure OSs then secure boot is pointless! Truly, I can use known exploit vectors against every modern OS, secure boot or not, to run my own unsigned machine code, and so can malware writers. So it's not a boot for normal end user security, it's just digital shackles.

The real reason Secure Boot Chains exists is to keep you from tampering with your own computer. Now, what I do find hopeful is the cool work in the embedded systems fields.

There are several projects that strive to be as transparent to the user as possible, and get their code up and running controlling everything. Unfortunately you don't always get to run plain machine code on all of the hobbyist devices. Open hardware initiatives give me a warm fuzzy feeling - That's what will save the 'PC' (Personal Computer) in my opinion. Protip: If you can't personalize the machine code and/or hardware, then it's really an Impersonal Computer - An impostor of the worst kind.

Here's a fun aside: Since I write software in machine code, I could release it under the GPL and provide no other 'source code' but the binaries:-P Conversely, if you know Machine Code, every (non encrypted) binary executable is Open Source! Which in PC parlance means they have to be thrown away every 12-18 months. Plain and simple. When your Andoid tablet or iPad accesses a typically horrible bloatpage with 3 different animated popups, a banner or two, 5 layers of Javascript and the rest, it grinds to a halt.

And when the hardware engineers make a tablet that's twice as fast, the marketing douchebags tell the software developers 'We need 7 more popups, a dozen more animations, twice as many switches and buttons for that 'us.