Sync is an issue with any control system that has no concept of the actual state of things. Crestron and friends can get around this by issuing commands over RS-232 or Ethernet and getting confirmation, or with infrared and current-draw or voltage detection, or in some cases just asking a component what it's doing.
Without that sort of feedback mechanism, it's always going to be somewhat a crapshoot. Especially if you have more than one controller laying around (turn everything on with the Harmony but switch off the projector with its remote? Now it's confused.)
It can be improved kind-of-cheaply by using IR repeaters (Xantech and many others), to ensure that no matter which rational direction the remote is pointed all components will see every command.
Putting a power toggle on the first page of the Device menu in the Harmony helps, too: If power get de-synced, it's just (say) Device -> TV -> Power, and done. And if the inputs are wrong somewhere, pushing the activity button again will always reset it. (This keeps you out of the stupid help system, which might be useful for a houseguest but always pisses off anyone with a clue.)
Regarding slow response with the Harmony, there's a few adjustments for that. I've had the problem, did steps similar to that in the link, and it works fine. Maybe not to the level of detail I needed with Super Mario, but plenty good enough for adjusting the sort of settings you describe (I also dink with the menus more than might be sensible) or futzing with a DVR.
Your Marantz remote sounds like an interesting thing, but there's another issue with it (aside from the poor user-interface for controlling switchers and stuff): When you want the new and shiny pre-pro/receiver/whatever, or the old one gives up, the interface that people are used to is going to change. My wife hates that, as do most wives.:)
*shrug*
I'm not trying to persuade you one way or another, I'm just trying to solve the problem of not having enough useful inputs without turning the user interface into a pile of hateful remotes. I've got a decent selection of different gear, but only one remote that's not packed away and nobody has a problem making it work.
Re: HDMI switchers. I have no specific recommendation because I've so far managed to avoid them, although I myself will need one for the next console I get (I'm out of HDMI inputs). At the consumer level, they're all Chinese and they're all built around the same handful of different chips, so there's a strong probability that given a selection of a dozen random units at a dozen different price points, many of them are going to behave identically.
For myself, I'm going start with Monoprice (and pay attention to reviews with the usual grain of salt that reading user reviews requires), and go from there: Their products are inexpensive, and generally do work exactly as advertised. If nothing else, they've got a great reputation for accepting returns if the device doesn't work as expected.
If you want (or are able) to spend real money, one absolutely cannot go wrong with anything that Extron makes. But, $$$, and there isn't any particular magic to switching HDMI (unlike high-resolution component or VGA): It either works well and follows the specification, or it does not.
So fast forward some time and there is suddenly a HUGE drop in red light violations (and subsequent traffic fines). What was discovered was that traffic engineers, without telling the police, had extended the yellow light by an additional second to reduce the number of red light violations.
I parse that last bit as "to improve safety." And it sounds like it worked.
Forget revenue: It doesn't matter how many dollars change hands. It matters who profits the most relative to their effort, or what their return on investment is.
The Wii was sold at a profit, while (at least early on, perhaps still today) the PS3 and 360 were sold at a loss.
Sony and MSFT needed licensing revenue from game sales in order to make any profit, and the development costs were hideous.
Nintendo? Not so much. The Wii is just a souped-up Gamecube with a fancy controller (which is also sold at a profit). It was first to market, cheap to design, cheap to make, easy to sell, and people bought a shitload of them.
I'd guess you already know this (since your "pre/pro" nomenclature nails you down as at least somewhat of a gearhead), but in case you don't or anyone else: Don't use the original remotes for any complicated system unless you want your family to hate you.
There's a myriad of inexpensive options (my family gets by nicely with a cheap Harmony), and an array of more serious choices (Crestron, et al) that can make any system easy to use.
Even external switchers (consisting of anything, whether something specific from Monoprice or Extron, or a random old AV receiver or preamp with appropriate connections) are simple to operate with a semi-proper control system (including Harmony).
You just cable it up, program it, and you're off to the races. (Although I agree that HDMI is a blighted piece of shit.)
And: For gaming, if at all possible, try limit format conversions and extra help from your processor -- every step adds more latency.
Case in point: I had my Lexicon receiver doing scaling and conversion from component to HDMI for my Wii. I thought it was alright (I don't use the Wii much) until I fired up an emulator with Super Mario and found that it was rather unplayable.
First I turned off the scaler. This helped more than I expected, but it was still noticeably slow -- I was missing the audio cues at the beginning of level 1-1 (historically I can play the first bit of it blindfolded).
Then I ran a component cable from the receiver to the display. Things were instantly nailed-down, and the game worked as I remembered it.
Alas, to fire up the Wii now requires both the TV and receiver to switch inputs. No big deal with a Harmony remote, but a pain in the ass otherwise.
YMMV, but: The last thing I worry about when adding a new console or other toy to the system is input availability and complexity of operation. I program it up once, and it just works...
I really like the way Linux just works, and examines the hardware during boot. It eliminates the BS you have to go through when swapping a HDD from one computer to a different one!
That's not a Linux feature -- that's a distribution feature. The distinction seems small, but it is an important one.
And even amongst different distributions, support for some important things can be hairy.
(I once had a hell of a time finding a CD/DVD bootable distribution that would properly support a simple RAID 1 built with md on a bog-standard Intel chipset. And the only reason I needed that was because I needed an temporary environment that I could boot, mount the array, chroot over to the real system, and build a new kernel...specifically just to add drivers so that it could boot itself without help.
Yes, it was Gentoo. But it was also Linux. Hence why the distinction is important. And for the record, Damn Small Linux got the job done neatly, while the then-current incarnations of Knoppix were an improbable pain in the ass -- got figure.)
1. Jail's not always so bad. In my own experience, I had my own TV (with cable!) from 9AM to 11PM, a library (mostly full of donated romance novels, but still), my own shower with genuinely unlimited HOT water, 3 square meals every day that were usually pretty decent, and my own bloody-expensive-as-all-hell telephone.
Yes, it sucked. No, I don't want to go back. But it really wasn't so bad... My chief complaint was that the bed, bedding, and constant light were all very horrible, and the noise from inmates cleaning at night made it hard to sleep. I found it easier to sleep during the day (not that "day" meant much), although that didn't make suffering through the long noisy night any better.
One can get other food, candy, coffee, soda, puzzle books, writing materials and other stuff twice weekly. It's not free, but it's also not expensive. I opted for a carefully-budgeted arrangement of Starbursts, pickles, hot sauce, and saltines; YMMV.
(Hint for getting your own private suite, should you ever wind up in such a place: Be both clinically depressed and suicidal.)
This isn't Turkey: We treat our prisoners pretty well in the US.
2. My ISPs TOS doesn't say that. But even if it did: Seriously? You can't share the service? What about with others in the same house?
3. You're already on the Internet. Either ignore the problem and be at risk from all manner of crap (like almost everyone else), get over it (hard to do for a geek), fix it (which you should be doing anyway), and/or make a different SSID that just can't get from here to there (obvious).
I'm in the same boat, sorta: I have a Tomato-supported router and run a fancy-pants incarnation of it (thanks Shibby!), and want to be able to give away somewhat-limited network access to anyone within earshot.
I mean, seriously: Even though my VDSL pipe is "only" 12/1.5, I can donate 1/0.25 of that and never miss it a bit. It shouldn't be a problem: Shibby's firmware allows me to create a separate SSID with its own VLAN and its own rate limiting to/from the Internet. It can even be trivially configured so that the clients on this SSID can only talk to the Internet and not eachother.
Sold.
Trouble is that I'm addicted to QoS (to keep the gaming and the netflix and youtubes and the torrents and the browsing and the 800MB HTTP downloads all smoothly happening, all at once, within my own household network).
With Shibby's Tomato on my Asus RT-N16, I can can choose to rate-limit based on interface, or use QoS. I can't do both.
I was really excited when I got this router that I might be able to finally give away some meaningful net access to random folks, but it just doesn't work in a way that is feasible long-term.
It pleased me to be able to provide Internet access to the neighborhood after a big storm last summer that left us all dark for a week (I had a generator, a good UPS, and my DSL line never skipped a beat), but every now and then some freeloader or malware-infested twit would hog the connection for himself and latency would go through the roof.
I dealt with that for the week, because it just needed dealt with (I had an SSID of "Free WIFI for storm victims"), but after that I turned it off.
I -need- QoS. I -need- rate limiting. Both. Else, my Internet connection is only equally as useful to me as it is to them, which really isn't worth my money or time or effort or charity or anything else.
Sadly, it doesn't seem to exist.
(Oh, and yeah: DD-WRT is a fragmented and difficult-to-navigate mess of special builds and weirdness. I have it on one router because it was the only thing that would work on it other than factory, but I find it otherwise best to avoid it.)
To allow a program or device to make an outgoing NAT connection, i have to assume that it is not malicious. To allow programs and devices map incoming ports via upnp i have to assume that it is not malicious AND it is not buggy enough to allow gazillion script kiddies access to my network.
Your words, not mine.
The only sane approach (if there is a sane approach) is to mistrust every program, because a buggy program with network access is still buggy whether it can accept external connections or not: If uses data from other places, it is potentially exploitable.
The longer you avoid this concept, the longer that you'll willfully fail to have secure systems. Good luck!
What you are saying, is essentially - "I have my front door key under the mat - and the only three people who used this key are people who i would have let in anyway. And that key under the mat is just common sense as the crooks can come in by breaking the window and through the chimney or con the cleaning lady anyway."
No, that's not it at all.
Either you have good, secure stuff on your network, or you're a vulnerable target. End of story. Incoming connections don't matter any more than outgoing connections. (And if you think they do, you're lying to yourself. Go back to the first sentence in this paragraph and re-read it until you understand.)
I'm -pretty sure- I've applied every stage of every component upgrade in GT5. Really haven't noticed a problem. If you can tell me what it is exactly, I'd be happy to fire up the PS3 and test it -- I love filing angry bug reports.
(I didn't play GT3 or 4. Never had the hardware for them.)
It's how I fix the issue I have with 99% of all electronic equipment these days, as they seem to insist on being able to illuminate a room with their "LOOK AT ME!!!" lights.
The best feature of my NEC 2090UXi monitor (other than its beautiful IPS LCD panel) is that the power indicator can be adjusted from a glaring eye-burning blue to either amber or green, and then dimmed to such an extent that it ceases to be bothersome and becomes a useful status indicator. (These functions are part of its on-screen menus.)
The worst feature of the Asus monitor on my desk beside it is the strip of red vinyl electrical tape that covers the eye-burning blue LED. (I find that red tape lets enough blue light through to be useful, without blacking it out completely. Yellow, green, white, and blue vinyl tapes were less than satisfactory.)
The connection to UPNP is that these devices are needlessly exposing themselves to attack by automatically opening inbound ports through the router using UPNP.
And the root problem there is that the device itself is not secure, not that UPNP allowed the device to be attacked. That a device is going to be attacked should always be assumed as a given, whether or not it is exposed to the Internet as a whole.
If a device that is intended to operate on securely on a network, it had better actually do so securely. The devices in TFA don't. This is a device problem, not a network problem.
If I can't trust my DVR to be secure on the Internet, I sure as fuck can't trust it on a large LAN (or a small LAN with a Wifi connection).
An outbound port is also open to the entire world: Hence, how your clothes drier can send you an email to tell you that it is on fire (and get a buffer overflow from a compromised SMTP server in exchange, possibly with the help of a poisoned DNS server, MITM attack, etc).
*shrug*
If a device can't be trusted to behave itself on the Big, Bad Internet, it probably shouldn't be trusted in a common LAN environment either (what, with WEP being trivially broken and WPA attackable with surprisingly small effort).
Indeed, if people kept their networks tidy (even Windows does a good-enough job of this these days by itself, let alone the secure-by-default BSDs and their ilk), we wouldn't need to care much if one wayward appliance got hacked because even with local access from a compromised box the rest of the stuff on the network is still secure.
To allow a program or device to make an outgoing NAT connection, i have to assume that it is not malicious. To allow programs and devices map incoming ports via upnp i have to assume that it is not malicious AND it is not buggy enough to allow gazillion script kiddies access to my network.
You oversimplification is astounding. You act as if you've never heard of PDF, Java, Flash, browser-based, [...] exploits, when in fact there is a broad history of non-malicious programs with various bugs that can allow a gazillion script kiddies access to your network without ever opening a single incoming port.
It's obvious to anyone that the door is wide-open at the point of first infection. What's not so obvious is that the door was actually open to begin with by virtue of operating a firewall that allows outgoing connections by default. Your sense of security is false.
So thanks, but no thanks on the upnp front - i keep my open tcp ports to a minimum.
So do I. I just went and checked and the only ports I have open to the outside right now via UPNP are the exact same ports I'd have opened up anyway: Two for Subsonic and two for my BT client. Nothing else seems interested in having an open port.
UPNP lets me use DHCP (without manually-assigned, static addresses being doled out) and still have things like these work just fine.
I think the primary difference between your line of thinking and my own is that I accept and understand that computers on a network are subject to attack from many vectors involving badly-written or intentionally malicious software, whereas you seem to assume that blocking inbound connections is a meaningful preventative measure.
Step number one on any home routers I setup is to disable upnp because malicious software also likes to punch holes.
UPNP can trivially allow incoming ports on the firewall. And so what? You allow outbound connections, don't you?
There is very little difference between malicious programs being able to create its own outbound connections and being able to accept inbound connections: In either case, the malicious software is able to communicate and can accomplish whatever nefarious task its creators envision.
Why would I trust a program to create connections but not enough accept them?
In practice, I leave UPNP turned on. If I were paranoid enough to disable it, I'd also be sufficiently paranoid to never, ever execute any code that I'd not written or reviewed myself, with a firewall that denies everything by default in both directions...and I just don't have time for that.
UPNP makes things work better: From BT to software updates to gaming on a PS3, UPNP helps keep the clusterfuck of NAT from being absolutely horrible.
So the score, so far, for UPNP seems to be this:
Problems that UPNP solves for me: Several. Problems that UPNP creates for me: None.
Meanwhile, TFA is more about the fact that some hardware devices that may never see a software upgrade have one or more security holes which can be exploited over the network...which is interesting and all, but really has nothing to do with UPNP: If such devices were secure and trustworthy to begin with, there would never be a reason to firewall them at all, let along worry about UPNP.
Ah, but better is a matter of perspective. Try playing a game that combines keypresses with pointer movements on the E6420: You'll fail if it works the way you say it does.
And, yes, there are some highly generalized things that everybody should know. For example, fire makes heat, heat makes fire, speed kills, water cleanses, water drowns, righty tighty, lefty loosey, apples are apples, oranges are oranges, and software problems are different from hardware problems.
No, not everything knows this stuff. But everyone should.
It's not that I think I'm better than you, even though my UID is lower than yours. It's just that you really should know better than to conflate hardware and software issues.
Seriously. Comparing hardware based on software defaults is like proclaiming that computer A is better than computer B because you like the default desktop image on A better.
This is fixed on their E6420 series, when I type the trackpad is disabled for the duration of typing plus about half a second. It's just enough to where I haven't been forced to actually disable the trackpad in software on this one.
This has been a software-adjustable feature for eons: I remember tweaking just such an option in the late 90s on a Chicony-made P233 laptop running some non-NT incarnation of Windows.
Have you considered that maybe Nate Silver made his predictions and then God rearranged the Universe to make it so? Thus, Nate Silver spoiled the election (or is God).
Impossible. The only reason we had an election to begin with, or a Nate Silver to discuss the results before they happen, is because Morgan Freeman narrated it in advance.
(Oh. And for the uninitiated: Super 33+ is available everywhere, including Wal-Mart. And as far as I'm concerned, it's the only electrical tape that is worth buying, ever, even though its quite expensive compared to the other stuff on the shelf next to it. Even if I'm going through rolls and rolls of the stuff pulling wires, just to throw the tape away when I'm done, it's all I want to use. Accept no substitutes.)
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Sync is an issue with any control system that has no concept of the actual state of things. Crestron and friends can get around this by issuing commands over RS-232 or Ethernet and getting confirmation, or with infrared and current-draw or voltage detection, or in some cases just asking a component what it's doing.
Without that sort of feedback mechanism, it's always going to be somewhat a crapshoot. Especially if you have more than one controller laying around (turn everything on with the Harmony but switch off the projector with its remote? Now it's confused.)
It can be improved kind-of-cheaply by using IR repeaters (Xantech and many others), to ensure that no matter which rational direction the remote is pointed all components will see every command.
Putting a power toggle on the first page of the Device menu in the Harmony helps, too: If power get de-synced, it's just (say) Device -> TV -> Power, and done. And if the inputs are wrong somewhere, pushing the activity button again will always reset it. (This keeps you out of the stupid help system, which might be useful for a houseguest but always pisses off anyone with a clue.)
Regarding slow response with the Harmony, there's a few adjustments for that. I've had the problem, did steps similar to that in the link, and it works fine. Maybe not to the level of detail I needed with Super Mario, but plenty good enough for adjusting the sort of settings you describe (I also dink with the menus more than might be sensible) or futzing with a DVR.
Your Marantz remote sounds like an interesting thing, but there's another issue with it (aside from the poor user-interface for controlling switchers and stuff): When you want the new and shiny pre-pro/receiver/whatever, or the old one gives up, the interface that people are used to is going to change. My wife hates that, as do most wives. :)
*shrug*
I'm not trying to persuade you one way or another, I'm just trying to solve the problem of not having enough useful inputs without turning the user interface into a pile of hateful remotes. I've got a decent selection of different gear, but only one remote that's not packed away and nobody has a problem making it work.
Re: HDMI switchers. I have no specific recommendation because I've so far managed to avoid them, although I myself will need one for the next console I get (I'm out of HDMI inputs). At the consumer level, they're all Chinese and they're all built around the same handful of different chips, so there's a strong probability that given a selection of a dozen random units at a dozen different price points, many of them are going to behave identically.
For myself, I'm going start with Monoprice (and pay attention to reviews with the usual grain of salt that reading user reviews requires), and go from there: Their products are inexpensive, and generally do work exactly as advertised. If nothing else, they've got a great reputation for accepting returns if the device doesn't work as expected.
If you want (or are able) to spend real money, one absolutely cannot go wrong with anything that Extron makes. But, $$$, and there isn't any particular magic to switching HDMI (unlike high-resolution component or VGA): It either works well and follows the specification, or it does not.
I parse that last bit as "to improve safety." And it sounds like it worked.
Fuck implication. It was very clearly spelled out in plain English.
Forget revenue: It doesn't matter how many dollars change hands. It matters who profits the most relative to their effort, or what their return on investment is.
The Wii was sold at a profit, while (at least early on, perhaps still today) the PS3 and 360 were sold at a loss.
Sony and MSFT needed licensing revenue from game sales in order to make any profit, and the development costs were hideous.
Nintendo? Not so much. The Wii is just a souped-up Gamecube with a fancy controller (which is also sold at a profit). It was first to market, cheap to design, cheap to make, easy to sell, and people bought a shitload of them.
Re: Integration.
I'd guess you already know this (since your "pre/pro" nomenclature nails you down as at least somewhat of a gearhead), but in case you don't or anyone else: Don't use the original remotes for any complicated system unless you want your family to hate you.
There's a myriad of inexpensive options (my family gets by nicely with a cheap Harmony), and an array of more serious choices (Crestron, et al) that can make any system easy to use.
Even external switchers (consisting of anything, whether something specific from Monoprice or Extron, or a random old AV receiver or preamp with appropriate connections) are simple to operate with a semi-proper control system (including Harmony).
You just cable it up, program it, and you're off to the races. (Although I agree that HDMI is a blighted piece of shit.)
And: For gaming, if at all possible, try limit format conversions and extra help from your processor -- every step adds more latency.
Case in point: I had my Lexicon receiver doing scaling and conversion from component to HDMI for my Wii. I thought it was alright (I don't use the Wii much) until I fired up an emulator with Super Mario and found that it was rather unplayable.
First I turned off the scaler. This helped more than I expected, but it was still noticeably slow -- I was missing the audio cues at the beginning of level 1-1 (historically I can play the first bit of it blindfolded).
Then I ran a component cable from the receiver to the display. Things were instantly nailed-down, and the game worked as I remembered it.
Alas, to fire up the Wii now requires both the TV and receiver to switch inputs. No big deal with a Harmony remote, but a pain in the ass otherwise.
YMMV, but: The last thing I worry about when adding a new console or other toy to the system is input availability and complexity of operation. I program it up once, and it just works...
That's not a Linux feature -- that's a distribution feature. The distinction seems small, but it is an important one.
And even amongst different distributions, support for some important things can be hairy.
(I once had a hell of a time finding a CD/DVD bootable distribution that would properly support a simple RAID 1 built with md on a bog-standard Intel chipset. And the only reason I needed that was because I needed an temporary environment that I could boot, mount the array, chroot over to the real system, and build a new kernel...specifically just to add drivers so that it could boot itself without help.
Yes, it was Gentoo. But it was also Linux. Hence why the distinction is important. And for the record, Damn Small Linux got the job done neatly, while the then-current incarnations of Knoppix were an improbable pain in the ass -- got figure.)
All wives are programmers.
1. Jail's not always so bad. In my own experience, I had my own TV (with cable!) from 9AM to 11PM, a library (mostly full of donated romance novels, but still), my own shower with genuinely unlimited HOT water, 3 square meals every day that were usually pretty decent, and my own bloody-expensive-as-all-hell telephone.
Yes, it sucked. No, I don't want to go back. But it really wasn't so bad... My chief complaint was that the bed, bedding, and constant light were all very horrible, and the noise from inmates cleaning at night made it hard to sleep. I found it easier to sleep during the day (not that "day" meant much), although that didn't make suffering through the long noisy night any better.
One can get other food, candy, coffee, soda, puzzle books, writing materials and other stuff twice weekly. It's not free, but it's also not expensive. I opted for a carefully-budgeted arrangement of Starbursts, pickles, hot sauce, and saltines; YMMV.
(Hint for getting your own private suite, should you ever wind up in such a place: Be both clinically depressed and suicidal.)
This isn't Turkey: We treat our prisoners pretty well in the US.
2. My ISPs TOS doesn't say that. But even if it did: Seriously? You can't share the service? What about with others in the same house?
3. You're already on the Internet. Either ignore the problem and be at risk from all manner of crap (like almost everyone else), get over it (hard to do for a geek), fix it (which you should be doing anyway), and/or make a different SSID that just can't get from here to there (obvious).
Smart kids, dumb neighbor.
Perhaps should've ignored him and moved on.
I'm in the same boat, sorta: I have a Tomato-supported router and run a fancy-pants incarnation of it (thanks Shibby!), and want to be able to give away somewhat-limited network access to anyone within earshot.
I mean, seriously: Even though my VDSL pipe is "only" 12/1.5, I can donate 1/0.25 of that and never miss it a bit. It shouldn't be a problem: Shibby's firmware allows me to create a separate SSID with its own VLAN and its own rate limiting to/from the Internet. It can even be trivially configured so that the clients on this SSID can only talk to the Internet and not eachother.
Sold.
Trouble is that I'm addicted to QoS (to keep the gaming and the netflix and youtubes and the torrents and the browsing and the 800MB HTTP downloads all smoothly happening, all at once, within my own household network).
With Shibby's Tomato on my Asus RT-N16, I can can choose to rate-limit based on interface, or use QoS. I can't do both.
I was really excited when I got this router that I might be able to finally give away some meaningful net access to random folks, but it just doesn't work in a way that is feasible long-term.
It pleased me to be able to provide Internet access to the neighborhood after a big storm last summer that left us all dark for a week (I had a generator, a good UPS, and my DSL line never skipped a beat), but every now and then some freeloader or malware-infested twit would hog the connection for himself and latency would go through the roof.
I dealt with that for the week, because it just needed dealt with (I had an SSID of "Free WIFI for storm victims"), but after that I turned it off.
I -need- QoS. I -need- rate limiting. Both. Else, my Internet connection is only equally as useful to me as it is to them, which really isn't worth my money or time or effort or charity or anything else.
Sadly, it doesn't seem to exist.
(Oh, and yeah: DD-WRT is a fragmented and difficult-to-navigate mess of special builds and weirdness. I have it on one router because it was the only thing that would work on it other than factory, but I find it otherwise best to avoid it.)
Your words, not mine.
The only sane approach (if there is a sane approach) is to mistrust every program, because a buggy program with network access is still buggy whether it can accept external connections or not: If uses data from other places, it is potentially exploitable.
The longer you avoid this concept, the longer that you'll willfully fail to have secure systems. Good luck!
No, that's not it at all.
Either you have good, secure stuff on your network, or you're a vulnerable target. End of story. Incoming connections don't matter any more than outgoing connections. (And if you think they do, you're lying to yourself. Go back to the first sentence in this paragraph and re-read it until you understand.)
I'm -pretty sure- I've applied every stage of every component upgrade in GT5. Really haven't noticed a problem. If you can tell me what it is exactly, I'd be happy to fire up the PS3 and test it -- I love filing angry bug reports.
(I didn't play GT3 or 4. Never had the hardware for them.)
The best feature of my NEC 2090UXi monitor (other than its beautiful IPS LCD panel) is that the power indicator can be adjusted from a glaring eye-burning blue to either amber or green, and then dimmed to such an extent that it ceases to be bothersome and becomes a useful status indicator. (These functions are part of its on-screen menus.)
The worst feature of the Asus monitor on my desk beside it is the strip of red vinyl electrical tape that covers the eye-burning blue LED. (I find that red tape lets enough blue light through to be useful, without blacking it out completely. Yellow, green, white, and blue vinyl tapes were less than satisfactory.)
And the root problem there is that the device itself is not secure, not that UPNP allowed the device to be attacked. That a device is going to be attacked should always be assumed as a given, whether or not it is exposed to the Internet as a whole.
If a device that is intended to operate on securely on a network, it had better actually do so securely. The devices in TFA don't. This is a device problem, not a network problem.
If I can't trust my DVR to be secure on the Internet, I sure as fuck can't trust it on a large LAN (or a small LAN with a Wifi connection).
Blaming UPNP is a red herring.
An outbound port is also open to the entire world: Hence, how your clothes drier can send you an email to tell you that it is on fire (and get a buffer overflow from a compromised SMTP server in exchange, possibly with the help of a poisoned DNS server, MITM attack, etc).
*shrug*
If a device can't be trusted to behave itself on the Big, Bad Internet, it probably shouldn't be trusted in a common LAN environment either (what, with WEP being trivially broken and WPA attackable with surprisingly small effort).
Indeed, if people kept their networks tidy (even Windows does a good-enough job of this these days by itself, let alone the secure-by-default BSDs and their ilk), we wouldn't need to care much if one wayward appliance got hacked because even with local access from a compromised box the rest of the stuff on the network is still secure.
You oversimplification is astounding. You act as if you've never heard of PDF, Java, Flash, browser-based, [...] exploits, when in fact there is a broad history of non-malicious programs with various bugs that can allow a gazillion script kiddies access to your network without ever opening a single incoming port.
It's obvious to anyone that the door is wide-open at the point of first infection. What's not so obvious is that the door was actually open to begin with by virtue of operating a firewall that allows outgoing connections by default. Your sense of security is false.
So do I. I just went and checked and the only ports I have open to the outside right now via UPNP are the exact same ports I'd have opened up anyway: Two for Subsonic and two for my BT client. Nothing else seems interested in having an open port.
UPNP lets me use DHCP (without manually-assigned, static addresses being doled out) and still have things like these work just fine.
I think the primary difference between your line of thinking and my own is that I accept and understand that computers on a network are subject to attack from many vectors involving badly-written or intentionally malicious software, whereas you seem to assume that blocking inbound connections is a meaningful preventative measure.
UPNP can trivially allow incoming ports on the firewall. And so what? You allow outbound connections, don't you?
There is very little difference between malicious programs being able to create its own outbound connections and being able to accept inbound connections: In either case, the malicious software is able to communicate and can accomplish whatever nefarious task its creators envision.
Why would I trust a program to create connections but not enough accept them?
In practice, I leave UPNP turned on. If I were paranoid enough to disable it, I'd also be sufficiently paranoid to never, ever execute any code that I'd not written or reviewed myself, with a firewall that denies everything by default in both directions...and I just don't have time for that.
UPNP makes things work better: From BT to software updates to gaming on a PS3, UPNP helps keep the clusterfuck of NAT from being absolutely horrible.
So the score, so far, for UPNP seems to be this:
Problems that UPNP solves for me: Several.
Problems that UPNP creates for me: None.
Meanwhile, TFA is more about the fact that some hardware devices that may never see a software upgrade have one or more security holes which can be exploited over the network...which is interesting and all, but really has nothing to do with UPNP: If such devices were secure and trustworthy to begin with, there would never be a reason to firewall them at all, let along worry about UPNP.
Ah, but better is a matter of perspective. Try playing a game that combines keypresses with pointer movements on the E6420: You'll fail if it works the way you say it does.
And, yes, there are some highly generalized things that everybody should know. For example, fire makes heat, heat makes fire, speed kills, water cleanses, water drowns, righty tighty, lefty loosey, apples are apples, oranges are oranges, and software problems are different from hardware problems.
No, not everything knows this stuff. But everyone should.
It's not that I think I'm better than you, even though my UID is lower than yours. It's just that you really should know better than to conflate hardware and software issues.
Everyone should.
Perhaps you didn't look.
Seriously. Comparing hardware based on software defaults is like proclaiming that computer A is better than computer B because you like the default desktop image on A better.
Everyone should know better. Including you.
Ebay.
When you say "literally impossible," I take that, well, literally.
Is there a specific UI element in GT5 that that nobody has ever used because it is literally impossible to select? If so, which one?
Or did you mean, instead, to say something like "extraordinarily difficult"?
I haven't found any functions of GT5 to be "literally impossible" to select, but if there is one, I'm all ears.
This has been a software-adjustable feature for eons: I remember tweaking just such an option in the late 90s on a Chicony-made P233 laptop running some non-NT incarnation of Windows.
Where have you been?
Impossible. The only reason we had an election to begin with, or a Nate Silver to discuss the results before they happen, is because Morgan Freeman narrated it in advance.
(Oh. And for the uninitiated: Super 33+ is available everywhere, including Wal-Mart. And as far as I'm concerned, it's the only electrical tape that is worth buying, ever, even though its quite expensive compared to the other stuff on the shelf next to it. Even if I'm going through rolls and rolls of the stuff pulling wires, just to throw the tape away when I'm done, it's all I want to use. Accept no substitutes.)