You think Sony didn't know the Airforce was doing this? It's not like they walked into Walmart and purchased 1,760 PS3s. It had to have been a direct purchase from Sony.
Walmart certainly had 1,760+ PS3s in their warehouses at one point. So the Air Force could have just direct purchased from Walmart (or Target, etc.) if Sony didn't want to sell to them.
2010: 2882 US Super Centers + 608 Sam's Club + 1578 Mexico stores + 321 Canada stores = 5389 stores
People underappreciated the scale of big box national retail. ;)
The article states that Sony disabled OtherOS before the USAF got their cluster built, and Sony was recalling and warehousing the PS3s that had the OtherOS feature. The USAF had to negotiate with Sony to acquire these older PS3s that still had OtherOS capabilities.
Almost 90 million PS3s have been sold, so it seems entirely plausible that they could have directly bought 2000 of them through some distributor. Doesn't the military industrial complex prefer to go through its inner circle of buddies anyway?
Having worked briefly in military procurement, I can tell you the system is set up in a very bureaucratic way.
Certainly there are companies that the military wants to buy from. For all the shit about the F-35, Lockheed Martin probably employs some of the greatest engineering teams on the planet.
The C-130, for example, is probably one of if not the greatest aircraft ever designed.
Anyways, there are certain companies that make things militaries want to buy, but for more mundane things like computers and pens and chairs, either there's a negotiated standing offer that legally has to be the first point of procurement, or it goes out to contracts. Unfortunately winning government contracts is a bit of a skill in and of itself and some firms have that skill and others don't.
> The C-130, for example, is probably one of if not the greatest aircraft ever designed.
One of the benefits of not being a "sexy" project is that you don't have everyone and their mother trying to be part of the design process. You can tell the team that designed the C-130 was given two numbers: range and payload, and every other aspect of the design was determined by the engineers.
I'm sure if you google around you'll find some articles but, from my perspective as an aerospace engineer who used to work on C-130s: It's an absolute workhorse.
If you've ever been up close to a museum fighter plane, they're in good shape. The leading edges are all smooth and polished, everything is sleek and in good condition. Line Hercs are not that. They're usually dented and covered in carbon from the exhausts. The leading edge of the wing is like three feet thick. It's a Mack truck with wings held aloft by furious amounts of horsepower.
It's dependable, reliable, and versatile. These things survive being shot at, being landed on gravel, ingesting birds into the intakes, ingesting sand into the intakes. You can start a Herc by putting another Herc in front of it and running the engines up so that the prop wash buddy-starts the aircraft behind, like bump-starting a car rolling downhill.
There are dozens of variants from the gunships to the EC-130 Compass Call and friends which carry serious business ELINT gear for secret squirrels to do secret squirrel shit with. You can put RATO pods on it. You can use it for SAR. You can drop bombs from it (and not even by throwing them out the ramp, which you could also do). You can use it to refuel fighters and helicopters aerially. You can put skis on it and land it in the show. You can parachute from it. It's not a jet, but despite being a draggy brick of an aircraft it'll still pull almost 0.6 of Mach while carrying two hummvees. Also, those hummvees can parachute from the aircraft.
There's a reason it's so widely-used [0] and that reason is because the Herc is groovy. It's the unsung hero of nearly every military operation carried out by NATO and friends since the 1960s.
The Air Force maintains many recreational centers. I have a buddy that ran these for the Navy. Lots of game consoles, etc. I'm sure they could have explained the purchase that way.
