I was a big supporter of Sony’s decision to allow Linux to be natively installed on the Playstation 3.  Many people thought this would surely be the immediate downfall of Sony due to piracy (not to mention their drastically misguided understanding of Linux and machine virtualization) and while the downfall of Sony may still be in question to some, it would appear completely unscathed by allowing Linux to run on the system.

My initial thoughts were of all the great things I’ve run across while enjoying Linux over the years and most importantly, the excellent Linux-inspired project Xbox Media Center (not to be confused with the commercially available and less spectacular Media Center Extender for the Xbox).  It’s not a stretch to expect great things if you give Linux tinkerers access to a high-def capable machine with lots of (potential) horsepower, gigabit networking, user-replaceable hard drives, etc.

We’ve just passed the one year mark of the system being on the market and, well, we now have a brute force password cracker that operates two orders of magnitude faster than what’s possible on current Intel hardware.

Really…  This is how we choose to utilize the power of the Cell processor and the flexibility of “officially sanctioned” Linux support?  Color me unimpressed.

Yes, I realize the current “holy grail” of Linux on the PS3 is getting native RSX graphics chip access, but why isn’t there any progress in THAT department?  Why aren’t we seeing enterprising programmers doing “amazing” things with the SPUs of the Cell processor?  I remember seeing documentation circulated some time ago detailing specifics of how to leverage the power of the SPEs.  Oh sure, I “get” that’s it’s complicated and all that, don’t get me wrong.  But there are people out there that have worked out tougher problems than this before.

I guess I’m just surprised that a device this powerful yet (relatively) cheap (when compared to, you know, full blown computers) hasn’t been leveraged more.  Maybe it’s the price point.  Maybe now that hackers can drop four Benjamins instead of six to own a PS3 they’ll be more inclined to leverage the system in ways we haven’t thought of yet.  I mean a media center is a pretty easy idea to come up with and (relatively) standardized hardware only makes the implementation easier.  I’m wanting something with a whole lot more “OMG” to it than a PS3MC.  If nothing else, the inclusion of Linux support has cemented the PS3 into history as something that will be useful to some even if it fails as a gaming (and movie watching) platform so I’m confident such a project will come along, I’m just clueless as to when it will be.

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