I agree here, and also i might add the fact, that many people are capable of switching their graphics cards. There is a shitload of PCs out there which just need a decent graphics card to become a viable gaming rig, if you are on that road, a console is the absolute looser. Thank intel for pushing mediocre graphics cards onto a lot of laptops and desktops so that they push the stupid customers to buy the next processor upgrade! The funny thing is if you are on the graphics hardware only upgrade route, any mid range ati and nvidia card will do the job. You end up with 150 dollars spent and games on the average 20 dollars cheaper than their console counterparts!
The problem is you went the wrong route. Crysis is absolutely the only game which pushes the pc currently to its limit. In my experience you do fine with a rather old board and add a decent pc graphicshardware! So yes building a pc might be expensive, but you should reevaluate your priorities, in most cases it is mostly adding just the next generation of graphics card. To my experience a good radeon 4850 runs the games better than any xbox or ps3 out there given you have a decent amount of ram and not the latest processor (anything released the last three years does it processorwise) So you simply went the wrong route, you probably could have gotten away with 200 dollars just by upping your old pc. Would it run Crysis better, probably not, would it run Crysis worse. No. Would it run any other game decently as the consoles out there, definitely yes! I recently exactly did it, and I am rather happy with the choice I made. The games run better than on the consoles, and are way cheaper, and the upgrade was a measly 150 bucks!
ah btw. I almost forgot, modern pc graphics hardware currently is for pure general purpose computing around 1-1.6 tflop for single precision, with the mid range being around 1 tflop! Double precision probably around 500-1000 (I have yet to dig up the numbers) But the problem is that the number of domains where you can apply that stuff to its full extent is limited! Classical 2d processing, some parts of 3d, and everything you can work on data streams and have to perform operations onto it is.
Well there is a huge problem with this kind of design besides that you reach a high number of cores (btw. sun is still king here, if you count out modern graphics hardware which has around 400-600 cores which do very simple simd tasks!)
Sony probably wants to push so many cores in the long run to make the graphics processors obsolete, but I rather doubt that will work out. AMD and NVidia already are at the design level sony wants to achieve with the cell, in one single processor. The latest ATI graphic cards have around 600 dedicated simd units doing rather simple processing, but good enough to push a load of 3d and maybe also some physics parallel on the same card. NVidia currently is at around 200 cores! Ok this is a very special design leaving the general purpose computing to a multicore system where the card is attached but after all this is exactly the design where sony wants to head to.
Also do not count out intel, there were inofficial statements that they also work on highly parallel core systems based on a pentium design, which they have in house prototypes up and running!
So it will end up who is faster there, the PC basically is already there with its graphics hardware.
Also there is another issue, you cannot speed up things linearily in general purpose computing simply by adding cores, that only works halfway in typical simd operations where you have to divide the operations and push them onto as much data as possible! In general purpose computing you have to face a lot of linar problems and only can divide those into parallel processing to a certain extent. Things which are done mostly in server programming nowadays with about 5 threads in the logic being around the maximum, games have about 3 threads parallel in the logic maximum even less in most cases. Where a load of general purpose cores however really can shine, given the proper bus speed and that the hardware can deal with the inherent locking of ram (which means also a shitload of ram) is the typical multiuser situation, where myriads of users hammer the maching, in this case you should have a high number of cores or processors, loads of ram, harddisks as fast as possible, and languages and operating systems which efficiently can distribute the load.
Not quite the domain of a console. So packing 60 cores into the next console might be a nice marketing stunt, which the games probably not even remotely can utilize instead everything again will be pushed then onto the current generation of graphics hardware which by then probably will be way more sophisticated with the same design principles sony tries to target, just in the limited area of simd operations which are mapped into the 3d domain!
Now that sony has to reduce the price significantly on the next console to even compete, and they also have to have backwards compatibility at least to the PS3 to not entirely kill the playstation line i rather doubt we will see anything significant in the PS4 which will put it lightyears ahead of any other design! The PS3 wasnÂt and sony already killed off its cash cown by adding too many weird design aspects which drove the costs up so I think the PS4 will be nothing more than a PS3+ !
You cannot cut it down to one point. I personally think that there are three factors.
Lack of PS2 compatibility which made a load of PS2 owners not upgrading. (Basically nobody wants two consoles in front of the TV and nobody wants to push the games which partially are still played pushed into the next gamestop!)
The other one is that you basically can enjoy the PS3 really only with a modern TV, while the number of HDTVs sold worldwide is picking up significantly, do not underestimate the number of people who still use tubes!
Third it is still the price and face it when a wii goes for 250 and an xbox around 200-250 who really buys a ps3? Especially since the games tend to be more expensive than on the PC WII or XBOX!
I personally think that Sony might see a huge load of new sales if the readd full PS2 compatibility again at the current price. I think a huge load of PS2 owners would reconsider buying a PS3. But that would mean to add the custom PS2 processors again to the console and that would drive the costs up. The reason why Sony dropped it in the first place!
Actually despite the entire DRM issues, I personally found that the quality of the PC games has increased tremendously lately, gone are mostly the days of unplayable PC releases. I personally see it as a plus that the games are nowadays mostly developed for the xbox, the testing is definitely more heavy on them, and in some cases the xbox owners have to iron the bugs out until the cheaper pc version comes out! The entire drm, depends on the heavyness for me, I can live with drm which does not rely on online registration, or which is non intrusive as steam, which fortunatly most pc games still are. If a game requires online activation then I either wait for the nocd "patch" or I simply dont buy it at all. I dont "buy" the games from bittorrent!
After being hammered into the console craze the last two years (I myself own a wii, a nintend DS, and a PSP) I reevaluated my gaming options for the high end and reverted back to the PC, it simply was the cheapest for me to shell out 150 euros for a decent graphics card which surpasses the power of the current console generation.
And so I did a few months ago! Given my current gaming buying habits, I probably already have saved several hundred dollars by now!
Since I am neither into shooters nor racing games the options on the consoles are more limited to me than on the PC!
Actually I have bought a radeon 4850 a while ago, and while this is not the top notch graphics card anymore I have yet to find a game which does not run in more than 60 fps with all the settings on at high.
The DRM is an issue which can be bypassed. I have bought so many games recently for the PC it is insane and mostly the graphics nowadays are better than on the console ports while having equal or better framerates.
The issue is we have now three years into the pipeline and as usual the mid range pc class now surpasses the latest console generation, as it always did since the ps1 came out!
The funny thing is, if you have a pc, spending 150 dollars for a nowadays mid range card probably is the cheapest option, if you count in that the games on the average are about 20 dollars cheaper it definitely is! If you dont have a pc or notebook computer only then probably going the console route is the way to go!
Btw. as for poor framerates, and poor ports, the PS3 probably currently is the winner there. Most games are up to par being developed for the 360 and then ported to the PC, and the ps3 is merely an afterthought and that shows. The most recent example being Fallout 3 with the PS3 version being the worst of the bunch! But also the most expensive (thank Sony for that!)
hint to sony, bring out another ps3 with backward compatibility and sales might jump up again. There is a shitload of ps2 owners who simply did not upgrade because there was no upgrade option!
Altivec was not used by apple that extensively because they already were planning to jump ship onto intel. The parallel intel port of osx always had to compile and run besides the powerpc port even at the time Apple bought NeXT!
Well for decent graphics you do not need the cpu that much you can offload things onto the gpu which is more or less an nvidia g70 fast enough to pull of decent graphics. Things become nasty once you get into the area of having to control multiple things parallely and when things become multithreaded! The SPEs are a neat addition if you need physics and particle effects and maybe realtime decompression of textures to bypass the memory limits, but thats it. The SPE units have their place but more in other machines than the PS3!
The problem with this assumption simply is that 8-16 cell processors by the time this is viable will be easier to handle and cheaper than a 16 core prozessor, I rather doubt it.
Not really solved, but they managed to pull things off despite the broken architecture (well a market of potentially 100 mio machines does a lot...) But the PS2 in the end was the weakest of its generation...
Consumerwise they did right by including DVD and they could ride on the PS1, it gave the machine enough momentum to program for (after all the developers are the last ones to be asked whether it was worthwhile to develop for a platform) that does not change the fact that developers still hate the platform, and they similarily hate the PS3 for exactly the same reason! You can see that at the quality, outside of sonys own development all stuff done for the ps3 is a rather unoptimized quick port, often the PS3 version is the worst one, due to the lack of horsepower on the PS3 side!
The question is more alike, does anyone outside of sony wants to use the extram stuff given, the other problem is, what are the benefits, can you achieve even some? The problem the PS3 currently simply has, it lacks cores, it lacks general purpose computing power. You cannot vectorize everything. All it does well is feed data and process matrices, but that is not everything, you might get decent particle effects you might get impressive physics, but even on the graphics side a 3 year old nvidia graphics processor is way faster than what sonys internal cell delivers. Now skip ahead 3 years and you have processing power on a single mid range pc card, which excels the entire ps3 both in speed and memory, add to that a decent general purpose cpu and you can see that the PS3 did not even survive 2 years compared to the PC. So now we have the xbox with around the same processing power a pc had 2 years ago (well the cpu sucks but at least it still has multiple cores to handle parallel tasks well) and a similar programming model, and you have the PS3 with an archtecture rather similar to program directly into a graphics card with an addon processor attached and you can see which platform to optimize for. It is not the PS3....!
Problem with this assumption simply is that the processor itself is fast, which the cell obviously just is in data processing, the core of the cell sucks due to being a powerpc stripped from anything which even remotely would give it speed. You basically can see that at the PS3, the 2d processing of the PS3 is awesome I have yet to see a better MPEG2 scaling, but problems start wherever more is needed than data shoveling, then suddenly games start to become slower than their xbox counterparts etc... I personally am not sure if the cell really is such a good idea, modern graphics processors have way better vector units than the cell ever is and the parallelization on the processor level is driven forward on other architectures more impressively. All it needs to combine both is a faster bus than PCIX is to gain the needed results!
The cell however in the long run might end up as a cheap processing solution for consumer electronics and that is exactly what it was designed for! (So to say a sony cpu which can be used for most of their consumer devices which mainly need a sound and image processor!)
Well the problem with the simd approach simply is, is it worth it. You wont gain that much, you can use simd in classical mathematical operations which needs matrices, that reduces them to sound, 2d/3d processing, and to some physics depending on the power. For graphics dedicated hardware is more expensive but better. This works out for some games, but makes the engine programming 10 times harder than it needs to be. Microsoft went the PC route successfully! The problem with the simd approach simply is, the processors suck at everything else then pure number crunching big time. So you end up with an architecturen which is not fast enough as a dedicated graphics processor in the simd area (due to costs mostly) and sucks a lot as general graphics processing unit. To get it up to speed you have to get down to the iron and spend 10 times the effort to achieve some results.
Again is it worth it? In case of the PS2 the huge install base justified to support the architecture. In case of the PS3 only Sony itself goes the extra mile!
Depends on the java, most java viruses i have seen have targetted the microsoft platform. I have yet to see a direct Sun VM exploit. It is not that easy to sneak a program in, all java applets are sandboxed and need additional user permission to access limited system resources (like being able to store files) also there is no direct way to achieve buffer overflows, since you cannot do them on language level due to bounds checking! All you can do is to trigger one on C level which is hard to reach since 99% of the VM is written in java itself. But that does not say it is fully secure, there are security flaws fixed from time to time, but it is definitely not as insecure as you mention it. On the other hand if you meant javascript instead or the Microsoft VM then this is a different ballpark!
Actually I had to remove this crapware at a friends pc a while ago, it was nasty, booting into safe mode deleting several files deleting half a dozen registry entries scattered throughout the registry. btw. speaking of this machine I stumbled upon another interesting piece of spyware, a meta spyware, the spyware scanner which i used (and did not want to pay for hence the manual removal) reported me a meta spyware program, a program which adds periodically other spyware onto the machine. Needless to say i had to remove about 10 trojans and this meta trojan before the machine was clean again!
The difference is to install crap you need to chmod u+x the crap and then if you do not run as admin only your local account is affected. Since Linux has no file locking backup and shadowing of accounts is rather easy... There is no double click and then hit the ok box crapware install on linux and that is exactly what makes it more idiot proof.
There was a huge article on the net about the red ring of death. There were two things which were stated. Microsoft had a very short timeframe. To be there before Sony. To the worse halfway into development they reduced the design team seriously to move them towards Zune. To the worse late in the stage serious production problems occurred which then were not fixed by a time delay but by risk management. So Microsoft deliberately knew that the console was flawed, but they did not know that from the first patches a huge amount of them were flawed, they were struck by numbers which were around 90% or so!
I dont have the source for the article anymore but you can google a lot of articles regarding it, just google for red ring of death! It was wise for microsoft to do the repair recall otherwise they now would sit knee deep in class action lawsuits. I guess they have learned their lesson. It always takes Microsoft three attempts to do it right! Always!
Problem is that the PS3 still is one of the best blue ray players out there, there simply is not even one cheap blue ray player so far which can match it qualitywise remotely!
I agree here as well, there is nothing from the Cell design which went into the Microsoft PowerPC core. IBMs processor business nowadays is mostly to customize power pc processors for various customers. The design which went in from Microsoft is basically just a trimmed down G5 core with three cores, while the Cells, is a trimmed down G5 core with a load of SIMD units!
Well the idea of sony was to advance the PS2 design further, in my opinion a broken design having two SIMD Vector processors doing everything. They probably wanted to reduce the design down to one SIMD processor doing everything. The design of Sony seems to be vector processing is everything you dont need multithreading anyway. The problem with this approach is that even for modern games you need a good mix of everything, good vector processing for graphical stuff and physics, good general purpose processing and multiple cores for the application logic. I personally think Microsofts approach despite the obvious quality problems of the console (which stems mostly from Microsoft internal management decisions, you can read that up) is dead on, while Sonys approach is totally broken even on the PS2, you can remember the complaints of the developers how hard it was to handle the PS2, if it wasnÂt for the success of the hardware among the customers developers probably would have neglegted it due to the fact that pushing an application logic into dual vector processors is a rather hard task. But tools covered that over time!
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I agree here, and also i might add the fact, that many people are capable of switching their graphics cards. There is a shitload of PCs out there which just need a decent graphics card to become a viable gaming rig, if you are on that road, a console is the absolute looser. Thank intel for pushing mediocre graphics cards onto a lot of laptops and desktops so that they push the stupid customers to buy the next processor upgrade!
The funny thing is if you are on the graphics hardware only upgrade route, any mid range ati and nvidia card will do the job. You end up with 150 dollars spent and games on the average 20 dollars cheaper than their console counterparts!
The problem is you went the wrong route. Crysis is absolutely the only game which pushes the pc currently to its limit. In my experience you do fine with a rather old board and add a decent pc graphicshardware!
So yes building a pc might be expensive, but you should reevaluate your priorities, in most cases it is mostly adding just the next generation of graphics card. To my experience a good radeon 4850 runs the games better than any xbox or ps3 out there given you have a decent amount of ram and not the latest processor (anything released the last three years does it processorwise)
So you simply went the wrong route, you probably could have gotten away with 200 dollars just by upping your old pc. Would it run Crysis better, probably not, would it run Crysis worse. No. Would it run any other game decently as the consoles out there, definitely yes!
I recently exactly did it, and I am rather happy with the choice I made. The games run better than on the consoles, and are way cheaper, and the upgrade was a measly 150 bucks!
ah btw. I almost forgot, modern pc graphics hardware currently is for pure general purpose computing around 1-1.6 tflop for single precision, with the mid range being around 1 tflop!
Double precision probably around 500-1000 (I have yet to dig up the numbers)
But the problem is that the number of domains where you can apply that stuff to its full extent is limited! Classical 2d processing, some parts of 3d, and everything you can work on data streams and have to perform operations onto it is.
Well there is a huge problem with this kind of design besides that you reach a high number of cores (btw. sun is still king here, if you count out modern graphics hardware which has around 400-600 cores which do very simple simd tasks!)
Sony probably wants to push so many cores in the long run to make the graphics processors obsolete, but I rather doubt that will work out. AMD and NVidia already are at the design level sony wants to achieve with the cell, in one single processor. The latest ATI graphic cards have around 600 dedicated simd units doing rather simple processing, but good enough to push a load of 3d and maybe also some physics parallel on the same card. NVidia currently is at around 200 cores!
Ok this is a very special design leaving the general purpose computing to a multicore system where the card is attached but after all this is exactly the design where sony wants to head to.
Also do not count out intel, there were inofficial statements that they also work on highly parallel core systems based on a pentium design, which they have in house prototypes up and running!
So it will end up who is faster there, the PC basically is already there with its graphics hardware.
Also there is another issue, you cannot speed up things linearily in general purpose computing simply by adding cores, that only works halfway in typical simd operations where you have to divide the operations and push them onto as much data as possible!
In general purpose computing you have to face a lot of linar problems and only can divide those into parallel processing to a certain extent. Things which are done mostly in server programming nowadays with about 5 threads in the logic being around the maximum, games have about 3 threads parallel in the logic maximum even less in most cases.
Where a load of general purpose cores however really can shine, given the proper bus speed and that the hardware can deal with the inherent locking of ram (which means also a shitload of ram) is the typical multiuser situation, where myriads of users hammer the maching, in this case you should have a high number of cores or processors, loads of ram, harddisks as fast as possible, and languages and operating systems which efficiently can distribute the load.
Not quite the domain of a console. So packing 60 cores into the next console might be a nice marketing stunt, which the games probably not even remotely can utilize instead everything again will be pushed then onto the current generation of graphics hardware which by then probably will be way more sophisticated with the same design principles sony tries to target, just in the limited area of simd operations which are mapped into the 3d domain!
Now that sony has to reduce the price significantly on the next console to even compete, and they also have to have backwards compatibility at least to the PS3 to not entirely kill the playstation line i rather doubt we will see anything significant in the PS4 which will put it lightyears ahead of any other design!
The PS3 wasnÂt and sony already killed off its cash cown by adding too many weird design aspects which drove the costs up so I think the PS4 will be nothing more than a PS3+ !
You cannot cut it down to one point. I personally think that there are three factors.
Lack of PS2 compatibility which made a load of PS2 owners not upgrading. (Basically nobody wants two consoles in front of the TV and nobody wants to push the games which partially are still played pushed into the next gamestop!)
The other one is that you basically can enjoy the PS3 really only with a modern TV, while the number of HDTVs sold worldwide is picking up significantly, do not underestimate the number of people who still use tubes!
Third it is still the price and face it when a wii goes for 250 and an xbox around 200-250 who really buys a ps3? Especially since the games tend to be more expensive than on the PC WII or XBOX!
I personally think that Sony might see a huge load of new sales if the readd full PS2 compatibility again at the current price. I think a huge load of PS2 owners would reconsider buying a PS3. But that would mean to add the custom PS2 processors again to the console and that would drive the costs up. The reason why Sony dropped it in the first place!
Actually despite the entire DRM issues, I personally found that the quality of the PC games has increased tremendously lately, gone are mostly the days of unplayable PC releases. I personally see it as a plus that the games are nowadays mostly developed for the xbox, the testing is definitely more heavy on them, and in some cases the xbox owners have to iron the bugs out until the cheaper pc version comes out!
The entire drm, depends on the heavyness for me, I can live with drm which does not rely on online registration, or which is non intrusive as steam, which fortunatly most pc games still are. If a game requires online activation then I either wait for the nocd "patch" or I simply dont buy it at all. I dont "buy" the games from bittorrent!
After being hammered into the console craze the last two years (I myself own a wii, a nintend DS, and a PSP) I reevaluated my gaming options for the high end and reverted back to the PC, it simply was the cheapest for me to shell out 150 euros for a decent graphics card which surpasses the power of the current console generation.
And so I did a few months ago! Given my current gaming buying habits, I probably already have saved several hundred dollars by now!
Since I am neither into shooters nor racing games the options on the consoles are more limited to me than on the PC!
Actually I have bought a radeon 4850 a while ago, and while this is not the top notch graphics card anymore I have yet to find a game which does not run in more than 60 fps with all the settings on at high.
The DRM is an issue which can be bypassed. I have bought so many games recently for the PC it is insane and mostly the graphics nowadays are better than on the console ports while having equal or better framerates.
The issue is we have now three years into the pipeline and as usual the mid range pc class now surpasses the latest console generation, as it always did since the ps1 came out!
The funny thing is, if you have a pc, spending 150 dollars for a nowadays mid range card probably is the cheapest option, if you count in that the games on the average are about 20 dollars cheaper it definitely is!
If you dont have a pc or notebook computer only then probably going the console route is the way to go!
Btw. as for poor framerates, and poor ports, the PS3 probably currently is the winner there. Most games are up to par being developed for the 360 and then ported to the PC, and the ps3 is merely an afterthought and that shows. The most recent example being Fallout 3 with the PS3 version being the worst of the bunch! But also the most expensive (thank Sony for that!)
hint to sony, bring out another ps3 with backward compatibility and sales might jump up again.
There is a shitload of ps2 owners who simply did not upgrade because there was no upgrade option!
20 dollars more per game than the better running pc version of the same game?
Is that what i am missing?
Altivec was not used by apple that extensively because they already were planning to jump ship onto intel. The parallel intel port of osx always had to compile and run besides the powerpc port even at the time Apple bought NeXT!
Well for decent graphics you do not need the cpu that much you can offload things onto the gpu which is more or less an nvidia g70 fast enough to pull of decent graphics. Things become nasty once you get into the area of having to control multiple things parallely and when things become multithreaded!
The SPEs are a neat addition if you need physics and particle effects and maybe realtime decompression of textures to bypass the memory limits, but thats it. The SPE units have their place but more in other machines than the PS3!
The problem with this assumption simply is that 8-16 cell processors by the time this is viable will be easier to handle and cheaper than a 16 core prozessor, I rather doubt it.
Not really solved, but they managed to pull things off despite the broken architecture (well a market of potentially 100 mio machines does a lot...)
But the PS2 in the end was the weakest of its generation...
Well the Ps3 has some decent games, but you can count them on one hand if you despise shooters!
Consumerwise they did right by including DVD and they could ride on the PS1, it gave the machine enough momentum to program for (after all the developers are the last ones to be asked whether it was worthwhile to develop for a platform) that does not change the fact that developers still hate the platform, and they similarily hate the PS3 for exactly the same reason!
You can see that at the quality, outside of sonys own development all stuff done for the ps3 is a rather unoptimized quick port, often the PS3 version is the worst one, due to the lack of horsepower on the PS3 side!
The question is more alike, does anyone outside of sony wants to use the extram stuff given, the other problem is, what are the benefits, can you achieve even some?
The problem the PS3 currently simply has, it lacks cores, it lacks general purpose computing power. You cannot vectorize everything. All it does well is feed data and process matrices, but that is not everything, you might get decent particle effects you might get impressive physics, but even on the graphics side a 3 year old nvidia graphics processor is way faster than what sonys internal cell delivers. Now skip ahead 3 years and you have processing power on a single mid range pc card, which excels the entire ps3 both in speed and memory, add to that a decent general purpose cpu and you can see that the PS3 did not even survive 2 years compared to the PC.
So now we have the xbox with around the same processing power a pc had 2 years ago (well the cpu sucks but at least it still has multiple cores to handle parallel tasks well) and a similar programming model, and you have the PS3 with an archtecture rather similar to program directly into a graphics card with an addon processor attached and you can see which platform to optimize for.
It is not the PS3....!
Problem with this assumption simply is that the processor itself is fast, which the cell obviously just is in data processing, the core of the cell sucks due to being a powerpc stripped from anything which even remotely would give it speed. You basically can see that at the PS3, the 2d processing of the PS3 is awesome I have yet to see a better MPEG2 scaling, but problems start wherever more is needed than data shoveling, then suddenly games start to become slower than their xbox counterparts etc...
I personally am not sure if the cell really is such a good idea, modern graphics processors have way better vector units than the cell ever is and the parallelization on the processor level is driven forward on other architectures more impressively. All it needs to combine both is a faster bus than PCIX is to gain the needed results!
The cell however in the long run might end up as a cheap processing solution for consumer electronics and that is exactly what it was designed for!
(So to say a sony cpu which can be used for most of their consumer devices which mainly need a sound and image processor!)
Well the problem with the simd approach simply is, is it worth it. You wont gain that much, you can use simd in classical mathematical operations which needs matrices, that reduces them to sound, 2d/3d processing, and to some physics depending on the power. For graphics dedicated hardware is more expensive but better. This works out for some games, but makes the engine programming 10 times harder than it needs to be. Microsoft went the PC route successfully! The problem with the simd approach simply is, the processors suck at everything else then pure number crunching big time. So you end up with an architecturen which is not fast enough as a dedicated graphics processor in the simd area (due to costs mostly) and sucks a lot as general graphics processing unit. To get it up to speed you have to get down to the iron and spend 10 times the effort to achieve some results.
Again is it worth it? In case of the PS2 the huge install base justified to support the architecture. In case of the PS3 only Sony itself goes the extra mile!
Depends on the java, most java viruses i have seen have targetted the microsoft platform. I have yet to see a direct Sun VM exploit. It is not that easy to sneak a program in, all java applets are sandboxed and need additional user permission to access limited system resources (like being able to store files)
also there is no direct way to achieve buffer overflows, since you cannot do them on language level due to bounds checking!
All you can do is to trigger one on C level which is hard to reach since 99% of the VM is written in java itself.
But that does not say it is fully secure, there are security flaws fixed from time to time, but it is definitely not as insecure as you mention it. On the other hand if you meant javascript instead or the Microsoft VM then this is a different ballpark!
Actually I had to remove this crapware at a friends pc a while ago, it was nasty, booting into safe mode deleting several files deleting half a dozen registry entries scattered throughout the registry.
btw. speaking of this machine I stumbled upon another interesting piece of spyware, a meta spyware, the spyware scanner which i used (and did not want to pay for hence the manual removal) reported me a meta spyware program, a program which adds periodically other spyware onto the machine. Needless to say i had to remove about 10 trojans and this meta trojan before the machine was clean again!
The difference is to install crap you need to chmod u+x the crap and then if you do not run as admin only your local account is affected. Since Linux has no file locking backup and shadowing of accounts is rather easy...
There is no double click and then hit the ok box crapware install on linux and that is exactly what makes it more idiot proof.
There was a huge article on the net about the red ring of death. There were two things which were stated. Microsoft had a very short timeframe. To be there before Sony. To the worse halfway into development they reduced the design team seriously to move them towards Zune. To the worse late in the stage serious production problems occurred which then were not fixed by a time delay but by risk management. So Microsoft deliberately knew that the console was flawed, but they did not know that from the first patches a huge amount of them were flawed, they were struck by numbers which were around 90% or so!
I dont have the source for the article anymore but you can google a lot of articles regarding it, just google for red ring of death!
It was wise for microsoft to do the repair recall otherwise they now would sit knee deep in class action lawsuits.
I guess they have learned their lesson. It always takes Microsoft three attempts to do it right! Always!
Problem is that the PS3 still is one of the best blue ray players out there, there simply is not even one cheap blue ray player so far which can match it qualitywise remotely!
I agree here as well, there is nothing from the Cell design which went into the Microsoft PowerPC core. IBMs processor business nowadays is mostly to customize power pc processors for various customers. The design which went in from Microsoft is basically just a trimmed down G5 core with three cores, while the Cells, is a trimmed down G5 core with a load of SIMD units!
Well the idea of sony was to advance the PS2 design further, in my opinion a broken design having two SIMD Vector processors doing everything.
They probably wanted to reduce the design down to one SIMD processor doing everything.
The design of Sony seems to be vector processing is everything you dont need multithreading anyway. The problem with this approach is that even for modern games you need a good mix of everything, good vector processing for graphical stuff and physics, good general purpose processing and multiple cores for the application logic. I personally think Microsofts approach despite the obvious quality problems of the console (which stems mostly from Microsoft internal management decisions, you can read that up) is dead on, while Sonys approach is totally broken even on the PS2, you can remember the complaints of the developers how hard it was to handle the PS2, if it wasnÂt for the success of the hardware among the customers developers probably would have neglegted it due to the fact that pushing an application logic into dual vector processors is a rather hard task. But tools covered that over time!