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Life With PlayStation and Folding@Home Will Not Be Missed | PSNStores

Life With PlayStation and Folding@Home Will Not Be Missed

Posted by on October 22nd, 2012 | 27 Comments | Tags: ,

Stanford University started its distributed computing project Folding@Home in the year 2000 with networked PCs. The objective was to utilize the idle processing power of multiple computers to collabor…never mind, because its ending on PS3 with firmware 4.30 and will not be missed.

Chances are you’ve already read the PlayStation Blog post about firmware 4.30 coming to PS3 tomorrow, and it’s moving the Trophies icon from the Game column to the PlayStation Network column. While that is interesting, what’s more interesting is that the bloatware apps Life with PlayStation and Folding@Home will finally be removed from my XMB?

When PS3 joined Folding@Home I created a team called SonyFPQA where myself and 40 other fellow testers would allow our PS3s to idle 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. While it felt like we were contributing to something great, we had hoped that our team would be responsible for discovering how a particular strand of Alzheimers was misfolded.

My team had folded thousands of proteins and not one was cancer causing. We were very greatful to Stanford for including the PS3 in the project. I mentioned Folding@Home daily during my arguments with a coworker about the strengths of PS3 versus Xbox 360, even while it was always clear to me that Xbox ruled at the beginning. There were no trophies, no chat features, and the games were first generation quality.

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After nine months of giving birth to both the PS3 and Folding@Home, my first gen 60GB PS3, the one I stood in line outside the Metreon for three nights to get, that was handed to me by the CEO of PlayStation and my boss Jack Tretton, had shown its true color: yellow. It was the yellow light of death as the internet called it. And I blamed it entirely on Folding@Home. The theory is had I played games on it instead, it might still be around today.

Also omitting itself from the XMB is Life with PlayStation, Sony’s answer to the Wii’s Weather and News Channels. It was a beautiful thing to watch, all integrating itself with loads of options, but what purpose did it serve to the avid gamer that wasn’t already attainable on weatherchannel.com or modern cell phones? And if the appeal was directed toward the casual gamer, they would just stare at the 3D rendering of Earth until it was bed time.

All in all, we are very pleased to see this bloatware be removed from the PS3 once and for all. It will still be a short wait until November before its a final farewell for existing participants of Folding@Home, while potentially new participants shouldn’t be offered the apps. Folding@Home was a welcomed edition and had its time on PlayStation 3, now let’s get back to the games.

[Source: PlayStation Blog]