At first glance, an article about Sony that implicates them with a little issue regarding their firmware upgrades hardly seems appropriate for an environmental blog. However, decisions like this by Sony and other companies can have far reaching impacts going all the way to the waste of materials and all that is involved with their life cycle.

Imagine for a moment, a company produces an electronic device, runs it to market in large quantities, the product is made obsolete within a year and those devices are processed straight to e-waste before their second birthday. What is the impact on the environment? This is hugely wasteful.

What Sony is doing is not intended to hurt the environment. However, their decision may have significant impact if the current issue is not cleared up. Let me summarize the situation and then I will do my best to explain it.

The Air Force originally purchased 300 PS3s for a special project. Next an order came through for 2,200 more, it seemed something serious was afoot, and sure enough the armed force was aiming to use them as a cluster for high-def video processing. Naturally that's quite dependent on the machine's Linux capabilities, capabilities that Sony has since disabled. You might think this doesn't matter, since the units will never play games and so don't need the crippling firmware update. But, hardware fails, especially when stacked as close as these units are and according to the Air Force's Research Laboratory, Sony takes the liberty of applying the latest firmware even to refurbished units.

As shown in the photo above, a cluster of computers can be wired together to work as one big computer. This is done with an advanced operating system like UNIX or Linux. As Linux is a widely used operating system in advanced systems and devices with specific functions it is used as the backbone of our military forces. So Linux is the choice for this project and in itself presents no problems that can't be resolved by the techs working on the project. However, Sony, in an attempt to protect their game machines from running software that is not Sony approved, has disabled very specifically the ability to run an operating system other than the one they supply with the machine. This means the Air Force will not be able to use their own software on the computers even though they own the computers after the point of purchase.

You can imagine why this is a complicated argument for both sides. As the owner, you should have the right to do as you like with what you own but as the producer, you have the right to modify the product to better suit its intended purpose and market.

If this is not resolved, we know there are 2,500 PS3's that will have a very short useful life. I don't want to see perfectly good electronic hardware go to waste over situations like this. In my opinion, Sony should embrace the military customer and recognize the added revenue stream as well as advertising zeal it may provide. At the same time, doing this and allowing the use of outside software for special cases would ensure the long useful life of the machines keeping the waste to a minimum.