Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 172 posts

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#131

Post by rasz »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #121
zanny wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't an appropriate analogy for IP based DRM because the real world doesn't behave like intellectual property. I was trying to come up with some convoluted analogy about making art on a gold plated easel that self destructs every decade and burns any canvas besides a specific size that is put on it, but just trying to formulate a physical analog hints at the absurdity of it all. Actually, wait. You buy a tract…

I thought the John Deere thing was only to the extent that they locked-down their users from tweaking their firmware - not that their firmware actively tries to frustrate use-cases like attaching a plow or disabling the tractor after 3 years?

Ever replaced a blown fuse? Air filter? oil? requires authorized service technician with special lets call the mothership to reauthorize tool.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#132

Post by wmf »

Narishma wrote: post #113
dehrmann wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a result, the PS4 and Xbox One have PC hardware. Does this mean the Xbox was pretty revolutionary for showing that you really can make a console with commodity hardware?

Didn't they have to kill it only a couple of years in because it wasn't cost-effective? IIRC it was sold at a huge loss that they never managed to get back.

The original Xbox had some contractual problems that prevented it from being cost-reduced. I don't think MS cared if they broke even since they were in it for the long haul. Everybody knows Xbox 3.11 for Workgroups was the first good Xbox anyway.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#133

Post by rasz »

redis_mlc wrote: post #123
callalex wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that the Air Force is in the business of making “offers that cannot be refused” especially to foreign owned companies?

Well, actually yes. Notice how there's very few military aircraft companies in the USA? That's because the little fish got a visit from Washington saying, "that was your last contract unless you merge." Northrop tried to resist, for a while anyway. Regarding foreign companies, the Avro Arrow was cut up after the US offered Canada a northern missile defense network. The Arrow was an early Mach 2 interceptor - think of…

actually https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/20/opinion/military-right-to...

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#134

Post by aibara »

chrischen wrote: post #41
MrMember wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll never buy another Sony console again after they removed the ability to run Linux on the PS3. It's one of the reasons I bought one and I used it a lot.

They didn’t remove it. They just ended updates for it so you couldn’t also use an updated console AND have linux support. Software isn’t free, so I people are over entitled if they expect lifetime updates.

Which crippled the console, because you couldn't play games online without updating. And if that wasn't bad enough, soon after you couldn't even play new games offline. I used my PS3 as a backup computer when I was at school (came in handy when my laptop died), so I didn't update it. When I bought Dark Souls, I found out I couldn't play it.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#136

Post by needle0 »

"Supercomputer projects needed the original PS3, not the PS3 Slim, because Sony had removed Linux support from the console in response to hacks — which later led to a class-action settlement. This article originally stated that it was because the PS3 Slim was less powerful. We regret the error."

Wonder what made the writer originally assume that? Mid-generation console refreshes would be the one occurence where much care would be taken to keep the performance not faster, not slower, but completely identical against the original hardware. I remember reading somewhere that the Xbox 360 refreshes had some hardware to intentionally add latency for inter-chip communications to keep performance identical.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#137

Post by danbolt »

rasz wrote: post #128
DCKing wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree any of them were underpowered. The PS1 and PS3 arguably produced the nicest graphics of their generations - the PS1 because its competition was compromised in their own way, and the PS3 due to sheer brute force. The PS2 for sure was less powerful than the more conventional architectures of the GameCube and Xbox, but it was released 18 months before either of them in a time when Moore's law was still extrem…

Did you just call wobbly fixed point vertex no subpixel precision no transparency no perspective correction mess full of gaps on PS1 a nicest graphics of their generations?

For what it’s worth, I do really enjoy the aesthetic of that sort of work in the same way that I enjoy a nice piece of pixel art with a limited colour palette.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#138

Post by grogenaut »

hyperman1 wrote: post #75
grogenaut wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm sure I'll lose karma for explaining Sonys side, since some people just want to be mad) Linux support was not removed due to Geohot. It was a driver and business priority issue. Geohot just sealed the deal. Having worked there during the kerfuffle, I can confirm their reason was valid for not supporting Linux going forward. It was a non trivial effort and they wanted those engineers to make it support the new har…

I am taken aback a bit by this characterisation: And then a bunch of the community responded as petulant children and Sony supported linux in public, people bought their hardware for it, and then, without warning, sony janked the rug from under them. Of course people tried to take back their hardware, for which they paid. The blame here is 100% on Sony. Sony has a massive internal conflict of interest by being both a…

When you have a legitimate beef or problem with someone, you don't take illegitimate and illegal actions against them. I'm all for reverse engineering. That's fine.

Extorting a company by threatening them with release of an exploit if you don't get your way is not legitimate, that's blackmail or extortion.

All of the hackers attacking Sony for months, disabling PSN, is not legitimate, and should never have been supported by anyone.

Just let the courts handle it like they should and did.

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#139

Post by milesvp »

ljm wrote: post #95
DCKing wrote: post #49

The Playstation 1, 2 and 3 are each in their own way Sony's take on an alternate history of computer graphics. It was Sony's intent with all three consoles to put the "special effects" (that in 2019 are performed using shaders) in the CPU , and not the GPU. As a result, the PS1, but especially the PS2 and PS3 were engineered to have amazing vector capabilities in the CPU. The PS2's Emotion Engine had extremely high p…

It's a shame in a way. I remember the reports about the Cell architecture for the PS3. By all accounts it wasn't easy to program for, but that was a hell of an innovation only to fall back to the standard PC arch. Impressive as hell but it took game devs a long time to make the most of it; and then they did in spades. You only have to track the trajectory of Uncharted in the space of a console generation to see what…

I got two big take aways from reading naughty dog’s blog about what they learned from the cell.

the cell really taught them the trade off between latancy and throughput. That by batching up computations they could do orders of magnitude more than naive pipelining. But, to get that good batching, they had to compromise on framerate.

Which gets to the second big takeaway, which was that standard deviation in the framerate was more important than the framerate and by keeping the framerate low they could also drastically reduce standard deviation in the framerate (Incidently I understand that this was something the amiga demoscene really understood, and low S.D. was a must for any text marquee to look completely smooth).

Re: The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers

#140

Post by easytiger »

grogenaut wrote: post #18
rvz wrote: post #8

This was the moment that Sony could have made something useful out of themselves here for allowing Linux to be used on a popular games console at the time, as in improving the accessibility of installing Linux on a computing machine. (Or even basing GameOS on Linux). Instead they cowardly remove it due to a 'hack' by Geohot and locked it down for 'security purposes' and potential researchers, scientists and those wit…

(I'm sure I'll lose karma for explaining Sonys side, since some people just want to be mad) Linux support was not removed due to Geohot. It was a driver and business priority issue. Geohot just sealed the deal. Having worked there during the kerfuffle, I can confirm their reason was valid for not supporting Linux going forward. It was a non trivial effort and they wanted those engineers to make it support the new har…

It's pretty simple. You pay for something with a headline capability. Capability is removed.

You no longer have the thing you paid for.

Honestly, your attitude is rather shocking.

Post reply on HN