

FreeBSD now supports the Playstation 3 - requinot59
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2011-January/022104.html

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veb
I thought the whole thing was hilarious. The pirates couldn't crack the
console, so they told everyone not to buy the PS3 because they wouldn't be
able to play pirated games and stuff. But then Sony did something stupid and
removed the ability to use Unix on the PS3 so those guys (homebrewers) were
like 'RAWRRR' and cracked it.

Lesson learned: Never mess with the guys who know what they're doing!

~~~
iheartmemcache
You're making a pretty egregious (and insulting) mistake by conflating pirates
(i.e., those just want to steal games) with homebrewers (really intelligent
electrical engineers, mathematicians with PhDs, tec).

That's not to say that those who crack things (essentially "pirates) like
SecureROM and SafeDisk aren't intelligent, but the fail0verflow is on a whole
'nother level.

~~~
SimonPStevens
I read what veb said as there were two different groups.

"Pirates" who were unable to crack it. "Homebrewers" who didn't want to
(because it previously run Linux so they could do homebrew without cracking
it).

Sony remove the Linux ability, so the second group ("Homebrewers"), now had
motivation to crack it, and succeeded.

If anything I think veb's comment was complementary of homebrewers. He is
saying they succeeded where the pirates failed.

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potatolicious
More and more it seems that removing Linux support from PS3 was one of the
worst moves of 2010.

~~~
burgerbrain
Or alternatively, one of the best moves.

All a matter of perspective ;)

~~~
ellisd
I totally agree with you on this being a matter of prospective... I was on the
verge of dumping PS3 for media playback from my file server since dealing with
transcoding + the PS3 is IMHO a huge pain in the ass.

With the root key cracked and homebrew soon exploding I'm scheming a quality
XBMC port to GameOS... sooner than never ;-)

~~~
xelfer
Which part of transcoding is being a pain in the ass? I find fuppes (
<http://fuppes.ulrich-voelkel.de/> ) to be working perfectly. If you're trying
to transcode high def mkv/ts/etc, I agree.

~~~
harisenbon
Transcoding is a pain in the ass because it requires another computer with a
decent CPU to decode in realtime (which means you can't run it off a NAS or
some other server-based disk backup, unless you want to shell out the bucks
for a really overpowered backup solution).

If I'm going to go through all that trouble and cost, it makes more sense to
buy a low-cost ION GPU HTPC ($300) that can just run the video (even HD)
without transcoding.

~~~
th0ma5
got one of those ion pcs, i recommend it, and your sentiments about how this
all fits together. i think a machine really can only do one thing really well
(especially something high performance) at a time, and often MPC software
tries to do too much at once.

~~~
ZoFreX
I had an ASRock NetTop 330, measured the wattage draw while playing a 1080p
film, it was pulling about 15 watts from the wall. Pretty damn impressive.

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retube
How does a PS3 compare spec-wise with a regular PC? Alternative server
solution?

~~~
pmjordan
It's tight on RAM (only 256MB main memory + 256MB VRAM, a large portion of
which can be used as fast swap space, at least on Linux), the SPUs will sit
mostly idle unless your software is specifically written to utilise them.
Especially older models consume a lot of power, even when idle. A cheap Atom-
based Nettop or NAS is probably better for home server type stuff.

