Sony has released firmware update 4.46 for the PlayStation 3 and also detailed how anyone whose console was broken by patch 4.45 can fix their system. A step-by-step guide explains how you can resolve the problem of the XMB not showing if you updated to version 4.45. In essence, you need to download the new patch to a USB stick or SD card by going to the above link. Once that's done, you can start your PS3 in safe mode and then manually install the new patch to solve the issue. Full guidelines about how to do all of this are in the guide. Other users who weren't affected by the problematic patch should be fine to update to firmware version 4.46 in the normal way. Source: IGN
They should give gamers who had the PS3 bricked some sort of compo maybe PSN points or something, I'm not on PSN or even have a PS3 but I'd be very mad if that happened to me