

Update will also make changes to the trophies section







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By bug77 on 10/22/2012 10:02:40 AM , Rating: 2
I just love it when companies tell users what they can and can't use on their hardware. Well, it's not actually the user's hardware and this is a reminder of that.

RE: Excellent
By xti on 10/22/2012 10:39:51 AM , Rating: 2
are you down to pay for them to keep supporting it?

RE: Excellent
By bug77 on 10/22/12, Rating: 0
RE: Excellent
By FaaR on 10/23/2012 3:55:14 AM , Rating: 1
Then what are you whining about?

RE: Excellent
By Argon18 on 10/22/2012 1:59:59 PM , Rating: 4
Huh? "supporting" what? Stanford University provided all the code. And Sony did not provide any technical support for the FaH application. So I really have no idea what kind of "supporting" you think Sony was doing here.

This Sony being their usually corporate bully self, forcing their idiotic choices onto consumers. Just like when they removed Linux boot support from the PS3 firmware. Or any of the asinine copy-protection schemes they've forced on people over the years (remember the root-kit?)

RE: Excellent
By Wolfpup on 10/23/2012 10:55:50 AM , Rating: 4
Yeah...this really sucks. Bad enough when Sony pulled the ability to install other OSes from it and (worse still) backwards compatibility. Now they even kick out Folding @ Home?!? Why? Does the new model have horrible thermals or something and they don't want people to find out? This really sucks...I really respected that Sony was involved with this!

RE: Excellent
By OnyxNite on 10/22/12, Rating: -1
RE: Excellent
By bug77 on 10/22/2012 11:54:24 AM , Rating: 2
What if newer games require the new firmware? I know they do that on Wii.

RE: Excellent
By BZDTemp on 10/22/12, Rating: -1
RE: Excellent
By batjohn on 10/22/2012 12:35:00 PM , Rating: 5
He's talking about Sony selling hardware and changing the things you can do with said hardware at their whim. You say people have the choice... When people bought the original hardware it was sold with the option for linux AND being able to connect online to play or buy games/content. If Sony updates then those people are effectively being forced to choose to either never be able to play online again or buy online content or never be able to run linux on their PS3 again. Same goes for folding@home or any other option the system was sold with.

Sony should not be able to remove abilities their machines are sold with and say deal with it or never get online again. Nor should any company.

RE: Excellent
By dark matter on 10/22/2012 3:10:16 PM , Rating: 3
How hard can it be to leave it on and let the CONSUMER decide?

RE: Excellent
By FaaR on 10/23/2012 4:04:05 AM , Rating: 1
All things must end. It's a fact of life, but I know that bashing Sony - even for the most patently ridiculous of reasons - is the "in" thing to do with some people.

If a feature is inpopular, then companies cut them, it happens every day. The PS3 is not an efficient folding client, it hasn't been for years. The PS3 doesn't have enough RAM (or processing power) to handle the more advanced work units that are neccessary to further this branch of science. Not sure what exactly you're yelling and screaming over, except making a ruckus just for the sake of it.

Do you even use the Life with Playstation feature yourself? I've only bothered with it a few times, it really wasn't all that great. Who's gonna miss it, REALLY? Fire up your preferred web browser, you'll easily find information ten times more useful than you would in that app, in 100 times greater quantities.

RE: Excellent
By NellyFromMA on 10/22/2012 1:14:04 PM , Rating: 1
Dude, it IS your hardware. However, if you want to use their SERVICES, your hardware needs to be up-to-date. Don't care? By all means, jailbreak or don't update. It's your hardware. Just don't think you're ENTITLED to access to their services without complying to the most rudimentary part of network access: compliancy!

It's free for crying out loud, you just need to be up to date. Non-issue.

RE: Excellent
By dark matter on 10/22/2012 3:11:55 PM , Rating: 2
It's not their services to give away. It's YOUR services. You're the one providing the PS3, the Internet Connection.

Unless you don't actually own your PS3.

RE: Excellent
By FaaR on 10/23/2012 4:12:10 AM , Rating: 2
How can they be YOUR services when you're not paying for them? It's a value-added freebie Sony's been throwing your way, and now they've decided to stop (because you can easily find the same stuff any number of other ways.)

What a bizarre sense of entitlement you murricans seem to have about yourselves these days.

RE: Excellent
By NellyFromMA on 10/23/2012 3:42:30 PM , Rating: 2
If the service in any way utilizing any resource from PSN, including an ID of any sort, you are in some manner routing through PSN services, therefor you are using their services. Hard to imagine a standalone 'app' that runs on the PS3 without interaction with PSN in some way unless you are running homebrew with jailbreak.

RE: Excellent
By Aloonatic on 10/22/2012 1:53:18 PM , Rating: 2
I'm with you, I don't go along with the usual know-it-all crowd on here who will argue with even the pretty basic point that you're making.

If they really want to play the "don't update then" game, then Sony should release 2 streams of updates. 1, security and stability updates, 2 additional software/feature updates.

To say "don't update then" is pretty pathetic, seeing as updates aren't just for adding and taking away little things, which FaH is really.

To be honest, it doesn't matter to me, my PS3 died a while ago, but I'd long ago decided that the PlayStation brand isn't for me any more. If I do bother with a console next time around, I find it hard to imagine that it's going to be a Sony device to be honest, and this adding and then taking away of features at a whim is just one of the reasons why I wont bother with them.

Blame it on the RAM
By quiksilvr on 10/22/2012 10:03:20 AM , Rating: 2
The biggest reason why Folding@Home wasn't as widespread as it should have been was because of the serious RAM limitations on the PS3. You can't multi-task worth a damn on it and you couldn't just have 10% of the power running Folding @Home while 90% of it ran a game, or a browser, or Netflix, or anything.

I really do hope the PS4 will have a decent amount of RAM(at least 4GB) so I don't have to close my browser just to hop onto Amazon Instant Video.

RE: Blame it on the RAM
By Guspaz on 10/22/2012 12:19:54 PM , Rating: 2
Folding@Home on the PS3 only ever ran as a dedicated process (although it shared resources with the rest of Life with Playstation later, IIRC).

Neither the PS3 nor GPUs ever made all that much of an impact on Folding@Home in terms of compute power (CPUs did and still do dominate the stats), but it was nice to be able to contribute. I believe there were also some classes of problems that ran significantly more efficiently on a DSP-style processor like the PS3 has, so its contribution may have been more significant than that.

In any event, Folding@Home seems dead as a project, since their homepage just returns "page not found", so ending PS3 support would not seem to be a problem...

RE: Blame it on the RAM
By Guspaz on 10/22/2012 12:21:53 PM , Rating: 2
Replying to my own comment to mention that I was mis-reading the graphs. I was looking at the "total number of processors", not the "flops" graph, so the GPU and PS3 were actually contributing far more than I implied. GPUs were 76% of x86 FLOPS, despite how few of them there were relative to CPUs.

RE: Blame it on the RAM


RE: Blame it on the RAM
By Mortando on 10/22/2012 12:32:05 PM , Rating: 2

Loads fine for me.

RE: Blame it on the RAM
By Cheesew1z69 on 10/22/2012 1:21:26 PM , Rating: 2 comes up to "page not found"

RE: Blame it on the RAM
By MaulBall789 on 10/22/2012 3:46:04 PM , Rating: 2
Seems you have your browser's redirects turned off or otherwise blocked. I checked your link and it came right up.

Current PS3 folding numbers
By DanNeely on 10/22/2012 10:55:38 AM , Rating: 2
Is anything available on how many PS3's are still folding, and what fraction of the work they're doing? I'm curious how much of a hit the project will take from this?

RE: Current PS3 folding numbers
By SuckRaven on 10/22/12, Rating: -1
RE: Current PS3 folding numbers

RE: Current PS3 folding numbers
By trisct on 10/22/2012 3:53:08 PM , Rating: 2

Still has PS3 but it is at the bottom of the list.

RE: Current PS3 folding numbers
By Ringold on 10/22/2012 6:16:07 PM , Rating: 2
But by bottom of the list, you also mean "absolutely crushes all other non-GPU categories" despite the Windows CPU category being 10x as large.

Looks like they'll lose about 18% of their rated x86 tflops.

Laid Off
By fic2 on 10/22/2012 12:54:10 PM , Rating: 3
From the PS3 website:
Considering the contribution PS3 has made to the project, we decided to retire it as a result of discussions with Stanford University. Vijay Pande, Folding@home research lead at Stanford University, had this to say about your contributions

Sounds like F@H is getting laid off - because you have done such a great job you are longer needed. I can understand that GPGPU is the majority of the computing but it does look like the PS3 contribution was not insignificant. Maybe they will bring it back with the PS4 with more memory and better hardware.

RE: Laid Off
By Integral9 on 10/24/2012 10:46:19 AM , Rating: 3
In other words, Sony booted Standford's project because they feel that they should get some kind of monetary compensation for the 100,000,000 hours of computing time the platform has provided.


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