You make a funny joke!

 OK, Sony....we haven't had words in a while. It's about time we had one of "those" talks again.

 As you see here, Sony has announced that they will be removing the Other OS feature found in pre-slim PS3 systems. To be fair, a large amount of people think that this is an April Fool's joke, as the removal will take place on April 1. So let's take a look at this from two perspectives.

 If it's an April Fool's joke, then Sony has somehow managed to figure out what the opposite of "funny" is. It's a terrible joke, and a horrible thing to throw out at your fanbase. You can only do yourself harm by showing the public how willing you are to give them the finger and dance on your mountain of cash. The fact that this news is on the official blog and has been featured on every major gaming website BEFORE April 1 is also not how you set up a joke.

 I'm just indulging at this point, because if you know anything about Sony, you would know that IT'S NOT A JOKE. Sony is the one company that goes out of their way to piss off gamers in the current generation. Their idea of good business is to convince you that the PS3's price will not be dropping under any circumstances, then to drop it anyway after you already bought it while replacing backwards compatibility with Facebook integration. Sony lies to customers all the time as if it's the company policy.

 It all comes down to the company's trust in the consumer, of which they have none. There is no control over the hardware you buy from them. The PSP, for instance, was a terrific piece of hardware that would have benefited from mobile apps. I've seen people rig a GPS to these things, and the ability for gaming outside of what Sony approves is amazing. If there was any ability to make the PSP useful, Sony went out of their way to kill it off, despite having a great product on their hands. I probably would have bought one years ago if I imagined that it would be as useful as the hardware suggested, but instead I waste my money on a PSP-3000 that is basically a brick to me. It's useless except for the two games I wanted for it. All that hardware ended up being wasted, and I have to sit there and wait for the thing to be hacked again just so I can turn it into a tool worthy of my pocket.

 The PS3 has it's Other OS, and given a little bit more control over the hardware, the open-source community would have gone nuts. Want a fully featured computer? Well, that's a two way street. If you're not a serious computer geek that absolutely needs features, you still have a computer on your hands that costs $300, doubles as a Blu-Ray player, has wireless capabilities, and will generally interface with your printers and similar devices. If I were sending a kid to college, then this is a terrific buy for a parent, as it gives their child everything they could possibly need in a gaming system as well as a computer for research and contact. Now, if you actually want to access the good hardware, you're out of luck. Sony has never allowed anyone to access the PS3's most powerful features.

 Throw all that out the window, because it's going away. I was actually wanting to install an Other OS on the box the very second I purchased a bigger hard drive for it. There's a lot of practical use I can get out of it, and given that the PS3 has almost the exact same components in every box, the open source community has the ability to tailor make the best possible Linux for the hardware. Sony, in their infinite wisdom, is now telling me and the fans that this is impossible.

 The thing I wonder is...can there be a lawsuit involved? The company straight-up lied! In competing with Microsoft and Nintendo, one major thing that Sony could hold over their head was that they offered a practical computing solution for their consumers. People were buying these things in clusters for supercomputing. Now, I don't think that Sony is going to leave those people high and dry, but giving a 3-4 day notice for everybody doing real work with the consoles needed to avoid the internet like the plague while they backed up their data is kind of a douche move. Trust me, it's a plague. If you've ever used a PSP or a PS3, you know that there are certain kinds of walls when it comes to updating the system. If you're plugged into the internet, you can't even play some games without being forced to download a patch. The simple trick is to just unplug the cord and be done with it, but I can only imagine how annoying that sort of thing has to be for people with a slow wireless connection.

 Joke or not, I'm actually considering giving my own finger to Sony, not just selling the system, but making a profit off of it. All I'd have to do is avoid updating the system at all and selling it on eBay when the cracking is done, much like the PSP. This is getting beyond stupid. There are some of us that just don't pirate these games and would like the opportunity to use the hardware that we paid for. I don't give a rats ass about annoying people on Facebook every time I switch games. For those who paid the premium to get the first couple of PS3 generations, they should get what they paid for. I understand that Sony can do whatever they want in the XMB because there's nothing forcing them to provide the Other OS option, but this constant downgrading is just plain insulting.

 It only underlines the fact that there is no trust when it comes to Sony. They put out a way overpriced, unnecessary system to begin with, then they remove backwards compatibility, then they made the false claim that their $399 price tag would remain for the distant future, then they lie about keeping the Other OS option, and now this. Really, even if they were joking, Sony is pissing all over the people that bought their hardware. I don't care if I'm using the options or not. I bought the hardware, I was promised certain things from it, and this is no longer the system I paid for. You should have just put out a next-gen gaming/Blu-Ray system, but promising "everything" is turning out to be the real joke here. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit