The article mistakenly refers to an SPE as "the group of all SPUs", which is incorrect. An SPE is a single element that contains an SPU, a MFC, and some RAM.
It (Geohot's work) is an impressive achievement but the magnitude of what's been achieved has been blown completely out of proportion, including by Geo himself. It's akin to picking the lock on a bank door - you might be in the bank but there's a whole host of bigger locks waiting before you even get to the vault.
But most of the money isn't in the vault. It's on the computers. I agree that most of the work has been way overblown. Geohot even lists some of the reason why he's not getting involved in hacking other aspects of the system. You don't need to decrypt the BD drive unless you are trying to bypass the encryption on games. Some commenters are asking specifically on how to run pirated copies and this undermines the value of the platform.
Access to the HV, memory, and GPU are things that are wanted and don't involve pirating. It would be great if their was an alternative DLNA controller/renderer available. Frankly, browsing hundreds of albums and videos sucks with the XMB. Using 100s of different BT devices would be great.
This could open it up to a bigger development community than the one sony sactions. Similar in ideas to the iPhone jailbreaking.
When it was launched, the PS3 could be a nice general-purpose computer. If Sony decided to reinvent the NEWS workstation series with a usable OS (Linux, BSD, a port of OpenSolaris, AIX, whatever) on top of Cell BEs with expandable RAM, a decent GPU and non-subsidized prices, I would have used it. Heck... I would buy one even today. I would help port software to it.
you're forgetting that sony was taking a loss on each PS3 sale when it first came out. they make it up on game licenses so they absolutely did NOT want to be selling to people who would buy few games.
It (Geohot's work) is an impressive achievement but the magnitude of what's been achieved has been blown completely out of proportion, including by Geo himself. It's akin to picking the lock on a bank door - you might be in the bank but there's a whole host of bigger locks waiting before you even get to the vault.