Sony PS3 in the days before Other OS feature was removed from the Playstation 3. This allowed you to have a very fast and reliable system that could be networked into a supercomputing cluster using the Cell processor in the Playstation 3. That was a good system, still available if you have a PS3 that does not have the latest updates and still has the Other OS feature. But due to the recent PSN scandal surrounding the Sony Corporation at the moment, it does not look like they will be getting much respect anymore. But Sony had some great games like PSX Doom and Wipeout 2097, the best racing game ever, period. The network went down for Lent and millions of Xbox gamers rejoiced. Now that Sony are a global laughing stock and there are countless parody videos of PSN on Youtube, they are finally more entertaining than ever. People have lost money from their accounts and are understandably upset by this whole affair. I did not get a warning E-mail about this at all and I am very unhappy and upset about that, but large corporations do not care about the lowly users after all, just the bottom line.
I have just installed Ubuntu 11.04 just to test it out and it is working better than I expected. I just ran sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras and then I had mp3 support and flash out of the box. The Unity desktop is OK, but I have installed the Gnome 2 desktop, to have a classic desktop without the annoying Gnome 3 components and the applications menu I have posted about before. It did not take long for the updates to download and install, then I typed sudo apt-get install mplayer audacious to install a movie player and the audacious mp3 player application. Ubuntu 11.04 comes with Gnome 2.32.1 and the kernel version is 2.6.38-8-generic. Libreoffice 3.3.2 is included for word processing and spreadsheet duties. If you install Ubuntu 11.04 like I did, then install the Gnome desktop through synaptic and then you will have a Ubuntu classic menu option in the GDM login screen. Just select that to load the classic Ubuntu desktop. And Ubuntu is more secure than the Sony network any day. And unlike a certain network failure, the Ubuntu software repository will not steal all of your details to sell on the black market. That is what happened to the details of most of the unlucky customers of the evil Sony fail corporation.
But maybe in the future another company will come out with a network that will be more secure and reliable than the Sony attempt. The Xbox network may be more secure, but I prefer to play online games like Unreal Tournament that do not cost anything to play online and you do not need to enter your Credit Card details to play on the Internet, you just enter a nick and game away. That is fun. Whomever took down the network has had quite an impact on the Sony gamers, now that the network is down indefinitely. I do not know how this will impact Sony in the long term, but surely will impact gamers that is for sure. Not being able to play a game you paid for will upset anyone. Storing passwords in clear-text is the height of stupidity, when a salted hash is easy to create. Even my website is far more secure than that, the MySQL database stores passwords in a MD5 encrypted hash and that is how you should do it, not the brain-dead Sony way. Where they even using a LAMP web-server or did they just make something up in-house like the HB Gary webmasters? The HB Gary webmasters were sharing passwords between servers making the job of cracking into the systems very easy, as well as having simple passwords that were too easy to crack. Here is a good article about this topic: http://blog.escanav.com/2011/02/24/hbgary-password-md5-hash-crack/, it goes into detail about how passwords are stored in a MySQL database and the necessity of having strong passwords for each of your accounts.
