$
Schrade said:
missile, can you please stop hitting the carriage return/enter key please? Wait until the end of a paragraph to do it.
↵
Error: does not compute xD
Sorry, but reading a text in a more column-like fashion is much more
efficient and also more pleasing (despite you have to scroll a little) than
those badly-formated-oversized HTML layouts. For some very good reasons
I write my text with <= 80 characters per line. There exists only one
typesetting system which really does its job,
LaTeX (
wiki)! The rest is simply
a sh!t load of crap, you name it; Word, HTML, whatever. LaTeX is
Gutenberg
in a digital form, thanks to Donald E. Knuth.
There is a long way to go to bring an efficient typesetting system to the
internet. Each research article, each book, and each newspaper is far beyond
what can be seen on the web. The problem is that some people got used to
the internet to a degree that they now claim the way the board-software does
it is the right way to go. lol
Fafalada said:
... But aside for that, the most that I see coming from this is marketing becoming more paranoid about how they advertise, and a guarantee we never see a feature like this in a console again (though this was already obvious the moment Sony released 3.21).
More paranoid? It was / is their job to align everything from the get-go. I
think nothing will change at all, because they always advertise a product to
maximize profit. And if they would decide to be more strict on the
advertising front, they may lose against their competitors. Only a huge
feature list can separate you from the pack. They will take whatever they
got. What is advertising anyway? Roughly speaking, the idea behind
advertising is to attribute a quality to a product it doesn't have, nobody
needs, and isn't worth the money. So with respect to advertising you do
whatever is needed to get the crap out of the door.
Fafalada said:
and a guarantee we never see a feature like this in a console again (though this was already obvious the moment Sony released 3.21).
I'm not sure about this. System utilization is a key factor in the future.
The whole concept behind hypervisor software (a big industry comming up) is
to consolidate system resources and to allow secure execution of different
environments on one and the same hardware. Future consoles will be a lot
more powerful, esp. if we consider that they will support 3-D, which requires
about two times the rendering performance of standard 3D systems, as you
know. Even today, if we give a PS3 2 - 4GB of main memory and free access to
the RSX, then there would be no argument that a PS3 couldn't serve as a
desktop replacement for the average Joe. That is to say, a future system could
be used for a lot more than just games. And this is where the trend goes.
Hypervisor software make this possible. The OtherOS was just a forerunner of
all of this. So in the future you may have just one hardware (kinda of a
Media Hub) running different logical partitions managed by a hypervisor
increasing the effectivity of the whole system. This is much better than
trying to build one software which will integrate all features required.
That means, the GameOS will never reach the scale and usability of Linux, or
Windows for that matter. And it wouldn't make any sense at all to replicate
Linux or Windows. On a possible Media Hub one can have a DRM partition where
all the protected stuff like games, movies, etc are running and another
partition where one could do stuff like browsing the web, calling friends via
skype, write emails, etc, running on a free operating system like Linux. So if
you ask me, the concept behind the OtherOS could be a key factor for next-gen
consoles. And if Sony takes it much more seriously next time around,
everything could turn out just fine.
frontieruk said:
I'm pondering trying the not fit for purpose route with play in that the security flaw would appear to be a flaw with how the hypervisor responds to calls about memory locations allowing for memory bus over flow attacks with some extra hardware, this flaw was there when Sony shipped the systems, advertised the feature and used it as a way to set their system apart. ...
Well, it's pretty obvious how the hack works. The hack became possible
because Sony didn't obeyed the strict rules of the PowerPC specification.
IBM wrote that a hypervisor software must assure that the valid bit of an
entry of the hashed page table (HTAB) was set as intended. But Sony's
hypervisor doesn't check it. The bit is set in a fire-and-forget fashion. And
this is where the hack kicks in, i.e. the write operation to invalidate a
certain HTAB entry to memory is glitched and the hypervisor doesn't know about
it because it doesn't check whether the entry was really invalidated or not.
The HTAB is a critical hypervisor resource and should be treated very
carefully. IBM has stated this multiple times within Book III of the PowerPC
architecture.
The fault is on Sony's end. And the problem can be fixed in software. But
instead of fixing it, Sony wiped a whole community all of a sudden! And this
is something I can't tolerate.