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Sorry to burst the bubble but Sony only released this to try to get tax benefits in the European Union, by claiming the PS2 wasn’t just a console, but a computer, which would mean lower taxes.
I’ve decided when/if ps6 comes out I will probably turn my ps5 into a Linux PC. My experience with Ps5 has mostly been playing games I already own on PS4 but with a much smoother experience.
Video games have very much plateaued anyways. Unless ps6 makes VR fun and can attach a fleshlight to the controller (joking but that’s actually not a bad idea) I don’t think I’ll be missing out.
That idea is related to my very favorite word: Teledildonics.
Teledildonics
lmao instant top 10. Nothing will ever replace #1 defenestration for me tho.
A show that really nailed it was the Cyberpunk anime. The way people got addicted to VR masturbation and just laid on the streets like we see with drugs today.
I remember seeing a prototype of basically a pair, a pneumatic dildo and a pneumatic fleshlight that would record force applied in various places on their working surfaces…somehow, and then transmit that data across the internet. The insurmountable problem was latency.
The wonders of technology
What is this? What am I looking at?
when Sony released the HDD for the PS2 you could get Linux with it. there was a complete package that came with the Linux dvds, a keyboard, and the 40GB HDD. it was a Playstation 2 branded distro which was a fork of a japanese distro named “Kondara” which was a based on Red Hat. the DE was Window Maker.
I had it, it was pretty dang good in all honesty. The second disk had a bunch of packages on it in case you didn’t have a decent internet connection. There’s still an community for it today that is still making packages and what have you for it.
You could get an official Linux install on your PlayStation 2. That support was later removed which prompted a class action lawsuit.
The lawsuit was about the PS3 removing the OtherOS feature. Which, while handled poorly, made some sense.
The system was initially sold at a significant loss, with the software making up for it. The cell architecture made it excellent at distributed processes, so with the OtherOS feature suddenly the cheapest way to build a supercomputer was buying a bunch of PS3s being sold at a loss and linking them together. Any systems built that way were essentially subsidized by Sony.
What they could have done is have the option to pay to unlock the bootloader for the OtherOS install.
No, what they should’ve done is made Sony eat the losses from its own business screw-up, and send execs to prison for hacking and fraud. Sabotaging people’s property to disable functionality they paid for should’ve been considered a felony violation of the CFAA on a massive scale.
I’m pissed, too. They should have pressed more so I don’t have to pay $150 for one.
I remember some teacher at school saying that selling something below cost was illegal in Germany. Unfortunately I don’t know if that is true and I never got to ask him about consoles.
Could have made a huge difference on the console market if enforced.
A quick Google suggests selling at a loss in order to undercut competition is illegal, but selling at a loss to be a loss leader, or as a temporary sale (e.g. to clear inventory) is allowed. And apparently this is why Walmart failed in Germany; undercutting competitors until they go out of business is their primary tactic.
So German supermarkets can’t sell us €4 rotisserie chickens at a loss just for the foot traffic? Damn.
I think the lawsuit was with PS3, not PS2.
It was the PS3 that got support removed, the PS2 Linux support kept around for the entire live, and the Japanese exclusive BB system that the PS2 got is based around it
Yeah I believe the PlayStation OS at the time got hacked by another OS that they allowed to be installed… so they said well shit we can’t have nice things. I used to have Yellowdog running on mine
It’s so cool, it even has goddamn OpenGL and drivers to exposed the full Emotion Engine to Linux
Emotion Engine
The marketing for the PS2 was so absurd…
Fun fact Sony lost millions of dollars due to there Linux support
No? That’s not a fact?
pff wake me when they port Windows 11 to the PS2
Wake me up when they make a proper desktop port for windows 11
Wake me up when they make a proper Windows 11.
I say as someone who has used windows products since 98, wake me when they make a proper windows OS.
(also I’m fiddling around with mint on a vm to make the switch for my next computer easier)
2000 and XP SP2 were pretty good. 7 too, and 8.1 kind of
Blame the organizations that built out PS3 server farms just for crunching numbers.
Edit- Aight y’all throughly convinced me it was actually Sony that screwed up linux capability for everyone by trying to subsidize their hardware. And actually those unrelated businesses were very smart to take advantage of sony’s pricing. If the PS3 released at $1000+, it definitely would have sold much better and we’d have a linux-desktop only PS6. No more need for additional replies thanks.
‘you can do whatever you want with your purchase’
does whatever I want with my purchase
‘wtf no fuck you not like that’
"We built this consumer focused device and included a function that allows them to run Linux. Supporting it doesn’t add to our revenue, but maybe someone will like it! "
The US Government buys 1,700 Playstations and builds a supercomputer for 5-10% of the cost of an equivalent system
“Wtf wait why are we supporting linux we’re losing so much money”
Annddd this is partly why we can’t have nice things. Geohot hacking through the hypervisor is the other part.
Technically the US government is still a consumer, so the fault still remains with Sony. If they wanted to prevent this then they shouldn’t have made their product a loss-leader. Being thrifty isn’t a bad thing…
Heard loud and clear, the next console will cost $1,350 and won’t include a controller, but you’ll be able to load linux on it. Now everyone’s happy!
That’s cheaper than my current gaming PC was and I bought it before the RAMpocalipse, so…sold!
Much better to buy the cheaper storage option and swap it yourself. Like +300 for an extra 1.5tb is yikes.
Oh no. They used something they owned in a different way than the manufacturer foresaw. How evil!
Evil is a bit strong, but they’re selling the console with the expectation they’ll make up more in games sales, yes it kind of jams up the business plan.
So blame the dumb business plan?
Are you arguing the PS3 should have released at $1000 when everyone thought $600 was already laughably astronomically high? Or would you have preferred an underspec system?
If the choice is between that and letting Sony defraud its customers by sabotaging their property, then Hell yes, Sony should’ve been forced to charge $1000!
What the fuck is wrong with you that you think Sony’s literal crimes were OK?!
I’m not defending them removing the functionality and I agree it was sold with a feature, that should have been supported. I just think we didn’t see the Other OS option continue through the generations because the hardware’s price point was taken advantage of.
Sony could have imposed a fee to unlock Other OS, but I don’t think anyone would have felt better shelling out an additional $400 to use it. Situation becomes then home customer gets no value from it, businesses are no longer incentivized to buy playstations, and Sony has to continue supporting this thing that few people are paying to access.
Sony could have imposed a fee to unlock Other OS
No, that’s extortion, which is also a crime.
First of all, I think every “pay to unlock the capabilities of the hardware you already bought” is literally criminal (and by “literally” I mean “actually literally, not figuratively, and the FTC is failing to do its job by not prosecuting it”) no matter how much it gets normalized. Second, in this particular case it was unlocked from the get-go by default, so Sony would’ve had to forcibly lock it first and then try to charge for it, which would’ve been somehow even more blatantly criminal!
The real alternative here would’ve been for Sony to take the fucking L and comply with the law. They could’ve revised future units to not support OtherOS (as they, in fact, did), but forcibly removing it from units that had already been sold was absolutely beyond the pale and should’ve been stopped.
Their plan was to make up the difference in game sales. You were paying full price with the cost shifted to the games to trick you into thinking you got a bargain.
If I sell you a hot dog for $1 with a business model that you will buy an overpriced soda 5 minutes later at the stand next door, I don’t get to take that hotdog back after sale when I see you didn’t also buy the soda.
Selling products as loss leaders is not some absurd esoteric strategy, and it was quite normal for consoles to be subsidized with that exact goal. They needed systems affordable enough to get into homes, otherwise there’s no user base. No user base means no opportunity for game sales. No game sales, and it ends up as the Dreamcast.
So it starts to sound like their big mistake was ever allowing Linux and general computing to begin with? Sony were the only ones doing that even while the competition was an actual x86 machine running some form of Windows. Users still had to buy a PC to use office.
Companies (and governments) saw an opportunity for cheap computers that outperformed traditional servers and took advantage of it. Now no one gets Linux.
Selling products as loss leaders is not some absurd esoteric strategy,
Selling at a loss is fine. What isn’t fine is coming back later and grabbing the hot dog, a hot dog you already paid for, out of your hand because you didn’t buy the soda a while later despite nothing in the hotdog purchase that required the purchase of a soda.
They sold it with Linux and then later grabbed it out of the customer’s hand.
If that’s the real price and the games are then also $25 cheaper, sure. They’re not giving you that money for free, the average consumer spends the same amount on the system+games either way. If they decide to use a misleading pricing strategy to manipulate people they don’t get to complain when people use products they bought differently to how they were intended.
The ps3 was an oddly specd system with little documentation for developers. It was overdeveloped and under utilized. Could have saved on r&d with the cell processor and gone with normal architecture eg ps4 and 5.
Edit to add that the cell processor was best at floating point calculations rather than raster graphics pipelines. So the best use case scenario were things like folding@home or the Linux os server stream.
I think I’d rather things cost what they need to cost, rather than games being expensive because the console was cheap. That way the manufacturer won’t be so invested in what you do with it after the sale, and you’re not getting scammed on the software pricing.
Okay well you go try convince the general public to pay $1000 ($1700 today) for a toy. Your primary competitor is using games to subsidize their hardware too at $300 but completely locked and unable to perform general computing. Good luck.
The organizations using computers to compute you mean?
