PS3 Hacked?!

Image via http://hackedgadgets.com

It was bound to happen sooner or later. If there’s one thing I’ve learned all these years I mess with computers, is that nothing is unbreakable. Apparently, George Hotz believes the exact same thing. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, Hotz was the one who first managed to unlock the iPhone, so it would work with any carrier.

Hotz now, claims to have unlimited access to PS3 memory, which in short means he can do pretty much whatever he wants. He says that there’s still work to be done, but at this point it’s only a matter of time.

We’ll have to see how Sony will react (if they do) to this. However, it should be very interesting…

May we soon see homebrew apps for the PS3!

[geohot via Kotaku]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

Win7 Bug: Wallpaper better than solid color desktop!

In the old days, when every byte of RAM counted, I would always strip down every machine I built, removing all kinds of eye candy (well back then, it was eye candy) and leaving my self with only the bare minimum. I’ve never used active desktop, never had custom pointers or system sounds (I had tried WindowBlinds once but that was a tragedy) and most of the time I did not have a wallpaper. Yes, not even that. My PC would look something like the image below:

Windows 98 typical desktop

Not much fun right? Well, yes but as I said, every bit of RAM counted. All this did not change much later, with Windows XP. I would still use “Windows Classic” theme only (I still do whenever I set up a WinXP box), but I confess I did have a wallpaper 😛 Now, that I have Windows 7, I honestly did not bother with any of this. I did not even turn off Aero. See, when I noticed that it would run faster than XP without tweaking anything, I decided to keep all these little nice touches. So, I am not one of those that found out about a bug, that I personally consider to be more than ironic.

If you happen to chose a solid color for your desktop, you might find yourselves waiting for 30 or so seconds before you can log in and start working…

According to Microsoft, it has something to do with Window Manager Session Manager service, so if you do have a solid color background and do not experience the 30 second delay, this service is stopped or disabled. You can download a hotfix for this problem, or as people from LifeHacker propose, create an image with the color you want and set it as wallpaper.