US Air Force All Played Out

If ever there was a time to be concerned about where your tax dollars are going, it’s now.

The US Air Force is up in arms because the new Sony Playstation 3 firmware messed up their high score on Halo 3.

The last organization you’d hope were messing around with consoles is the Air Force, but apparently they serve a higher purpose than taxing the WoW skills of our boys in green. The Air Force has 1700 PS3s hooked up into a 500 TeraFLOP processing cluster (Can anyone say SkyNet?).

Thankfully, the Air Force doesn’t simply integrate household electronics into the national defense grid without any modifications. The consoles are adapted to run Linux, which is where the new firmware becomes an issue – Sony has removed support for running third party operating systems.

The damage has been minimal since only Playstations sent in for repair are upgraded automatically, but you can see why the Air Force is concerned. I mean, what would happen if the Nintendo 64 in the corner running the security system for all US nuclear weapons silos crashed?

Source: Wikipedia