The PS/3 offered a way to test out code sequences and try code optimization techniques on something just about as different as any mainstream PC can get - big endian integers instead of little endian, 64-bit registers, in-order pipeline - long before the recent revival of the Pentium processor (in the form of the Intel Atom) or the ARM processor which powers today's cell phones and iPads.

I myself have been running Fedora on my PS/3 since the Fedora 8 days. Sony did much the same, dropping the 'Other OS' option in the PS/3, locking people out of the one truly useful reason to own a PS/3 - it's ability to run Linux, surf the web with Firefox, and function as a terrific development platform. Fedora 12, Ubuntu 10.04, the new Debian 5.05, and a handful of other older distributions such as Yellow Dog remain as the solely supported Linux releases for the great PowerPC processor. The Fedora project officially dropped PowerPC support from the recently released Fedora 13 Linux release. The PowerPC processor, the microprocessor of the Sony Playstation 3, the Xbox 360, the Wii, and many generations of Apple Macintosh computers, has been demoted to second class citizen status.

This is the most shocking and disappointing news of the year so far for me.

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