Just saw some details about PS 3, and felt rather sick:

At the heart of the PlayStation 3 lie two very powerful processors. One, the main processor, is a new chip called Cell that was developed for use in the console by SCEI, its parent company Sony Corp., Toshiba Corp. and IBM Corp. The chip is based on IBM's PowerPC architecture and will have seven cores, each running at 3.2GHz, to give the chip a total performance of 218GFlops.

Running alongside the Cell will be a graphics processor developed by Nvidia Corp. that is capable of handling full high-definition images and boasts performance of 1.8TFlops. Together, the two chips will give the PlayStation 3 a total system performance of 2TFlops

Maybe it's because of the way I was raised (no comics, no TV, certainly no game consoles) but unlike most people my age, I'm distinctly anti-gaming. At the very least, I tend to clump computer games in with sitting on your ass watching TV and other such mindless (mind damaging) activities. There's nothing wrong with it if that's what you want to do to yourself, but I find it an aweful waste.

So Sony is going to ship millions(?) of these high-performance computing units, which will spend an aggregate several hundred million hours of computing power, for uses that average out to (IMHO) negative human development. Imagine what it would be like if all these gamers went outside and played or otherwise did something useful/not-unhealthy, and used all that computing power on something useful. Imagine all the good that could do to mankind...

But, I think I'm just going to have to hope that I'm wrong on this one, and hope that there's some good in computer games. I mean, we wouldn't really spend so much time, energy, money, and brain power on something that's self destructive... would we?
[Tagged: ps3 ]

Brad (of livejournal of SixApart) announced Yadis today. From the site:

This is yet another distributed identity system, but one that's actually distributed and doesn't entirely crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business. A yadis-enabled site/blog lets you authenticate using your existing login from your homesite (whether that's on your own server or a hosted service) without giving away your password to the 3rd-party site you're visiting, or making a new account there, or giving away your email address.

It sounds like it may be able to solve part of the problem I described in my post a few days ago, or is at least a step in the right direction. I definitely plan on incorporating it in IlohaBlog. [Tagged: yadis distributed+identity+systems ]