US Air Force enlists 2,200 PS3 for their Cell processors

Engineers outside of the game industry continue to find uses for the powerful Cell processors housed within Sony's PlayStation 3. Last week, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center said that it had begun using networked PS3s to crack encrypted caches of child pornography. The console has also been used as part of the Folding@home disease research project.

This week, it's the US Air Force that has begun to expand its current network of PS3s used for supercomputing research. As reported by Information Week, the Air Force plans to purchase 2,200 PS3s to add to its current network of 336 systems, which is housed at the Air Force Research Laboratory's information directorate in Rome, New York.
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PS3 the new crime-busting tool

The PlayStation 3 has been used for a variety of altruistic tasks following its launch in 2006. Perhaps the most high-profile of these ventures is the Folding@home project, which uses spare processing power from idling, networked PS3s to undertake the arduous task of simulating protein folding in order to study the causes of various diseases.

The latest effort to harness the PS3's processing power for good comes from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Cyber Crimes Center. As reported by Axcess News, the Cyber Crimes Center (C3) is using networked PS3s to capture sexual predators by cracking passwords on computers suspected of containing child pornography.

The report notes that while law enforcement agents can execute a warrant to secure the physical computers, the Fourth Amendment protects suspected predators from surrendering passwords and other encryption material. As such, the agency attempts to crack the passwords by using a program that tries all possible key combinations. The report notes that a six-digit password has nearly 282 trillion possible permutations, and the networked PS3 can attempt 4 million guesses per second.
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Xbox 360 Wi-Fi adapter gets speed boost

Microsoft has a whole host of features it plans on jamming into its fall Xbox Live dashboard update. The firmware revision will introduce to the Xbox 360's online platform such features as Twitter and Facebook integration, a Music Marketplace for listening to recommendation-radio service Last.fm (which is owned by CNET parent CBS Interactive), and a News section offering information from Microsoft and NBC Universal's joint venture, MSNBC.com.

The Xbox 360 update will also introduce 1080p high-definition video content through the Xbox Live Marketplace. To facilitate that new offering, Microsoft this week released the Wireless N Networking Adapter which it confirmed as existing in September following widespread rumors. Microsoft noted that the new wireless addon will improve the performance of other online functionality in games and content downloads.
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Nintendo president admits "Wii has stalled"

Though it once appeared to be a tiny sales juggernaut, Nintendo's top-selling Wii console has struggled in 2009. In July, the Japanese publisher reported April-June revenues that slid 40 percent from a year prior to 253 billion yen (US$2.81 billion). Nintendo didn't fare much better during its July-September quarter, saying Thursday that sales fell 34.5 percent to 548 billion yen (US$6.09 billion) during the first half of its fiscal year.

Nintendo's slipping performance has not gone unnoticed by the publisher's president. As reported by Japan's Mainichi Newspaper and translated by GameSpot, Nintendo executive Satoru Iwata told analysts and investors as part of a post-earnings Q&A that a weak software lineup has contributed to the Wii's sluggish performance.
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New Wii and controller could arrive by 2011

In August, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata explicitly stated that a successor to the best-selling US$249 Nintendo Wii won't "happen any time in the near future." However, given Sony's recent introduction of the US$299 PlayStation 3 Slim and Microsoft's US$199/US$299 Arcade/Elite strategy, the Wii has lost its pricing advantage. Further, even if Nintendo makes good on the increasingly likely US$50 Wii price cut, the system remains the least technically proficient of the bunch.

As such, many industry watchers believe that Iwata's "near future" could be a relative term. Speaking to the Financial Times (FT) over the weekend, Square Enix CEO Yoichi Wada said that he expects Nintendo to release an update to the Wii by 2011; one that will bring the console's technical capabilities more in line with the Xbox 360 and PS3. Wada also stated that he believes Nintendo may possibly introduce a new controller along with the console update.
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