Wasn't a thread made yesterday about this? Sony will no doubt repair these ps3's (if needed) for the airforce and they will KEEP the other os feature.

Whereas it is highly likely they will get this firmware downgraded to a version they require it is certainly not a given and as time goes on may well become impratical.

It is also likely that Sony may not want to provide anybody with the ability to have previous versions even the US military. After all these are games consoles.

What the patch has done has forced them down the path of obsolesence earlier than they maybe had hoped, again and inherent risk in Commerical Off the Shelf.

Can someone explain to me why they need to update the firmware if there only using the machenes for the hardware?

They don't, people are making this whole os crap bigger than what it really is.

If you are running a large cluster, invariably you are going to have a large number of nodes with hardware failures. They can't replace broken machines with new ones and they can't send them back to sony for repair without getting the new firmware.

^ oh..... well they can always sell the broken ones on ebay :P

They are the US Airforce they can just ask Sony not to upgrade the firmware, is it really that hard to understand?

Its more than obvious that for a contract of this magnitude and the publicity it gives to sony all mighty console, there are going to be a lot of ways for AirForce to get linux enabled PS3 and Sony to deliver them .

This is a little crazy but it is extremely cool.

I doubt they had any special contract; they probably just went out and bought a bunch of PS3s like our lab did.