Yeah, a lot of music studios fell for the "ST comes with MIDI, amiga doesn't" hype, but a tricked-out Amiga beat any Atari except maybe the very rare and late in the game "Falcons".
Saw a post from a ST and Amiga user on the subject. He liked the Amiga but would never take it on stage as it was not reliable. The single tasking nature of the ST was a sort of advantage in that way.
From http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html
For the pilot, the effects were rendered on a network of Amiga computers; later, Foundation used 12 Pentium PCs and 5 DEC Alpha workstations for 3D rendering and design, and 3 Macintoshes for piecing together on-set computer displays. The NDI team uses a similar array of equipment; see George Johnsen's comments below.
So the only Pilot was rendered with Amiga. I know the pilot had its CGI upgraded later, so if you want to see the original Amiga rendering you'll probably have to torrent it.
Basically, started the whole process of CGI.
CGI existed as far back as the early eighties and you can see it in movies like Tron. That's before the Amiga's time.
And Ultima did have first-person combat, including ranged weapons, spells, and melee. Again, better than Wolf3D. Overall it is a MUCH better game that shipped first with a larger set of game features, but everyone said Wolf3D was the big innovator.
I see it needs a 386 with 2 megabytes RAM. Wolf 3D makes do with 286 and 512KB RAM. That can have made the difference.
What really gets me is how Ultima Underworld never gets the credit it deserves.
Because it isn't a first person shooter. Or was it? I never played it, didn't care for Wolf3D back then either. Doom was the first good one. The Super Mario Bross of FPSes, sure there's Pitfall, Smurfs, Faceball 2000, etc, out before but Doom/SMB was the first to 'get it right'.
I got a 5 year old wireless router that has been trouble free. It's not as fast as your N router but for surfing the internet does that make a difference? IPv6 alone is not a big enough draw for me to replace my router.
That's the problem. People like me, happy with what I got, are going to be a big barrier for wide scale IPv6 adoption. It's no longer just enough that Windows and ISPs support IPv6, we users have to replace perfectly working gear for seemingly no benefit too.
Mind you, that Apple router got more than just IPv6 and speed. It also got a USB printer port. That is a feature I might buy a new router for.
And I strongly suspect that apples system is just as modular if not more so than modern PC bioses and therefore just as vulnerable to malicious addition of a module.
EFI is a bit like Java, which means that modules don't consist of native code. As long as EFI itself isn't modified it can prevent modules from doing nasty stuff, or perhaps simply refuse to load unsigned modules.
SMRAM sits in "normal" RAM, it's not its own chip like CMOS. A cold reboot will clear it; a warm reboot will/should overwrite it.
CMOS is too slow to keep interrupt vectors in. CMOS sits on an 8MHz buss while SMM interrupts can trigger thousands of time each second, so it needs to be closer to the CPU. Basically the BIOS programs the CPU to ignore a small area of memory and fills it with SMM interrupt vectors.
Wrong. Even without this exploit a BIOS virus can make use of VT-x (or borrow code from Virtualbox for CPUs without VT-x). SMM may be harder to detect though.
Several EE students found a similar exploit for the Motorola 68010, way back when (early 80s). Bumped the user into supervisor mode with a little register manipulation. At least Motorola sent us updated models after they fixed their undocumented stack issue.
Going from usermode to supervisor mode is a far more serious exploit than going from supervisor to "hypervisor" mode.
The exploit allows access from Ring to SMM? Summary is confusing but I think we're talking about an exploit that can write to bios even with flashing disabled at the bios level.
Not really. SMM is a mode that's normally the BIOS's playground. There may be SMM code that prevents BIOS flashing which this exploit could be used to circumvent, but this exploit does not flash the BIOS.
It's much worse, when combined with a firmware re-write, it will survive a complete re-install and cannot be detected by a security scan booted from CDROM.
If they can do that, your box is rooted already. The only difference seems to be that in this way it can hide in a place where the OS can't get at it. But IMO, if you're compromised you can't count on the compromised OS being able to remove everything malicious anyway.
IOW it's like the Blue Pill rootkit except possibly harder to get rid off/detect if you get infected and no need for AMD-V/VT-x support in the CPU.
From Wikipedia:
Joanna Rutkowska claims that, since any detection program could be fooled by the hypervisor, such a system would be "100% undetectable".
Articles about this exploit are referring to this "Blue Pill" ordeal (a Matrix reference I'm guessing) which was a rootkit using AMD-V/VT-x. Hypervisors, as they're currently exists, are not 100% undetectable and that rootkits could use AMD-V was not unexpected.
This new SMM exploit could is just an upgrade to that Blue Pill thing. Unless they manage to get into SMM from usermode I'm leaning towards "sensationalism".
I'd like to see a chip that can run in a x86 'translated' mode and a 'native' RISC mode, much like was done with 32bit/64 bit.
The inner core of modern x86 CPUs are actually more like VLIW CPUs and is also quite CISCY at times (doing stuff like add and store in a single instruction). If you could code in microcode you'd quickly discover that it lacks the sanity checks of the outer instruction set and some other "features" like a supervisor mode.
Oh well, I guess I'll go back to the idea lab and keep on dreaming.
Almost every developer that is charged with JBIG2 implementation is going to use the reference implementation.
Sumatra use jbig2dec. Don't know if that's vulnerable or not.
I assume that your "alternative" also links into the shell constructs of Windows, exposing a similar attack surface.
No. Abode software dig much deeper into the shell. Sumatra only has an icon for pdf files and opens when they're clicked (no filters, browser plugins, etc).
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Yeah, a lot of music studios fell for the "ST comes with MIDI, amiga doesn't" hype, but a tricked-out Amiga beat any Atari except maybe the very rare and late in the game "Falcons".
Saw a post from a ST and Amiga user on the subject. He liked the Amiga but would never take it on stage as it was not reliable. The single tasking nature of the ST was a sort of advantage in that way.
IIRC, they did the CGI to Babylon 5 on Amigas.
From http://www.midwinter.com/lurk/making/effects.html
For the pilot, the effects were rendered on a network of Amiga computers; later, Foundation used 12 Pentium PCs and 5 DEC Alpha workstations for 3D rendering and design, and 3 Macintoshes for piecing together on-set computer displays. The NDI team uses a similar array of equipment; see George Johnsen's comments below.
So the only Pilot was rendered with Amiga. I know the pilot had its CGI upgraded later, so if you want to see the original Amiga rendering you'll probably have to torrent it.
Basically, started the whole process of CGI.
CGI existed as far back as the early eighties and you can see it in movies like Tron. That's before the Amiga's time.
Hmm, the PC version had FM music based on old German classical scores (I think). Liked it better than Quake's music anyway.
And Ultima did have first-person combat, including ranged weapons, spells, and melee. Again, better than Wolf3D. Overall it is a MUCH better game that shipped first with a larger set of game features, but everyone said Wolf3D was the big innovator.
I see it needs a 386 with 2 megabytes RAM. Wolf 3D makes do with 286 and 512KB RAM. That can have made the difference.
What really gets me is how Ultima Underworld never gets the credit it deserves.
Because it isn't a first person shooter. Or was it? I never played it, didn't care for Wolf3D back then either. Doom was the first good one. The Super Mario Bross of FPSes, sure there's Pitfall, Smurfs, Faceball 2000, etc, out before but Doom/SMB was the first to 'get it right'.
As an Apple Fanboy/Apologist/Groupie, I still LOL'ed.
Wasn't the old mac port the best one? Better textures, flamethrower and stuff. Odd that ID didn't port that.
Neat.
I got a 5 year old wireless router that has been trouble free. It's not as fast as your N router but for surfing the internet does that make a difference? IPv6 alone is not a big enough draw for me to replace my router.
That's the problem. People like me, happy with what I got, are going to be a big barrier for wide scale IPv6 adoption. It's no longer just enough that Windows and ISPs support IPv6, we users have to replace perfectly working gear for seemingly no benefit too.
Mind you, that Apple router got more than just IPv6 and speed. It also got a USB printer port. That is a feature I might buy a new router for.
Speaking of NAT, how many wireless routers out there support ipv6? That might be the biggest hurdle.
why can't these scientists just devote their work to curing the common cold or the flu?
How will our immune system end up looking without a frequent visitor to give it a work out?
And I strongly suspect that apples system is just as modular if not more so than modern PC bioses and therefore just as vulnerable to malicious addition of a module.
EFI is a bit like Java, which means that modules don't consist of native code. As long as EFI itself isn't modified it can prevent modules from doing nasty stuff, or perhaps simply refuse to load unsigned modules.
SMRAM does get cleared on a reboot, yes?
SMRAM sits in "normal" RAM, it's not its own chip like CMOS. A cold reboot will clear it; a warm reboot will/should overwrite it.
CMOS is too slow to keep interrupt vectors in. CMOS sits on an 8MHz buss while SMM interrupts can trigger thousands of time each second, so it needs to be closer to the CPU. Basically the BIOS programs the CPU to ignore a small area of memory and fills it with SMM interrupt vectors.
Hard real time is a world in which stuff is expected to actually work every time.
So instead of "real time kernel" it should be called "every time kernel" :-)
The first part is, but not the second.
Wrong. Even without this exploit a BIOS virus can make use of VT-x (or borrow code from Virtualbox for CPUs without VT-x). SMM may be harder to detect though.
SMRAM is not CMOS. Reflashing a borked BIOS can be troublesome, but you can clear CMOS.
It's not worse than drivers that polls interrupts and spinlocks. Don't like it, don't buy it.
Several EE students found a similar exploit for the Motorola 68010, way back when (early 80s). Bumped the user into supervisor mode with a little register manipulation. At least Motorola sent us updated models after they fixed their undocumented stack issue.
Going from usermode to supervisor mode is a far more serious exploit than going from supervisor to "hypervisor" mode.
The exploit allows access from Ring to SMM? Summary is confusing but I think we're talking about an exploit that can write to bios even with flashing disabled at the bios level.
Not really. SMM is a mode that's normally the BIOS's playground. There may be SMM code that prevents BIOS flashing which this exploit could be used to circumvent, but this exploit does not flash the BIOS.
It's much worse, when combined with a firmware re-write, it will survive a complete re-install and cannot be detected by a security scan booted from CDROM.
This is true even without the SMM exploit.
If they can do that, your box is rooted already. The only difference seems to be that in this way it can hide in a place where the OS can't get at it. But IMO, if you're compromised you can't count on the compromised OS being able to remove everything malicious anyway.
IOW it's like the Blue Pill rootkit except possibly harder to get rid off/detect if you get infected and no need for AMD-V/VT-x support in the CPU.
I'm an idiot. That was supposed to be a reply....
From Wikipedia:
Joanna Rutkowska claims that, since any detection program could be fooled by the hypervisor, such a system would be "100% undetectable".
Articles about this exploit are referring to this "Blue Pill" ordeal (a Matrix reference I'm guessing) which was a rootkit using AMD-V/VT-x. Hypervisors, as they're currently exists, are not 100% undetectable and that rootkits could use AMD-V was not unexpected.
This new SMM exploit could is just an upgrade to that Blue Pill thing. Unless they manage to get into SMM from usermode I'm leaning towards "sensationalism".
Now even Microsoft enters this sad, pathetic game.
Microsoft isn't suing Nintendo. They're being sued by Fenner Investments
I'd like to see a chip that can run in a x86 'translated' mode and a 'native' RISC mode, much like was done with 32bit/64 bit.
The inner core of modern x86 CPUs are actually more like VLIW CPUs and is also quite CISCY at times (doing stuff like add and store in a single instruction). If you could code in microcode you'd quickly discover that it lacks the sanity checks of the outer instruction set and some other "features" like a supervisor mode.
Oh well, I guess I'll go back to the idea lab and keep on dreaming.
Do that :-)
Fail!
Almost every developer that is charged with JBIG2 implementation is going to use the reference implementation.
Sumatra use jbig2dec. Don't know if that's vulnerable or not.
I assume that your "alternative" also links into the shell constructs of Windows, exposing a similar attack surface.
No. Abode software dig much deeper into the shell. Sumatra only has an icon for pdf files and opens when they're clicked (no filters, browser plugins, etc).