Passage of Time Solves PS3 Glitch 147
An anonymous reader writes "A quick update on the widespread PlayStation 3 glitch we discussed recently: as of last night (Monday, March 1st) the problem has resolved itself. I powered up my PS3 to find the clock was set to April 29th, 2020, but once I went into the system menu and set the date and time via the internet I got an accurate date. That seems to be the test of whether your PS3 is 'fixed' or not; Sony says you should be all set."
Re:Slashdot has programmers (Score:1, Insightful)
Ok, there are logic bugs, then there are extremely stupid bugs. 2010 is 2 years away from a leap year. That's ridiculous.
Re:BUG! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I can't wait for April Fool's Day... (Score:3, Insightful)
I like that as much as Verizon and Brighthouse/Roadrunner's voice attendants. "Thank you for holding. You can also get help on the web by visiting our site com"
Every time I've been stuck on hold hearing that, it's been because the Internet connection was down. After hearing it every 30 seconds, for 45 minutes, I've been as polite as possible to the person who answers the phone and then asks
"Is your computer turned on?" ... where are you at? .. Yes, right there. It should be fixed soon. Give us a call back in a few hours if you're still having problems."
"Are there any lights on the front of the modem?"
"Are you sure?"
"Reboot your computer, and call back in 15 minutes if there are more problems."
"Well, reboot the modem and call back in 15 minutes if there are more problems."
"Well, it seems we're having an outage in
I'm pretty sure that's their full script, except for "Sir, please don't curse at us, we're doing our best." :)
Pot, meet kettle (Score:1, Insightful)
...That's pretty much what ALL of you so-called Slashdotters do. Belittle anyone who doesn't agree with you ("you, sir, are an idiot, anybody who does X is an idiot", etc). I also see that so-called Slashdotters have a tendency to assume that anybody who doesn't have in-depth knowledge about the topics discussed is also an idot.
A bunch of armchair experts, who supposedly know everything from world politics to enterprise-level corporate management, but still SOMEHOW find the time through all of their corporate, financial and world-wide political success to post asinine comments on /.
Hence, the topic of my post.
And, who gives a fuck that I'm anon; stop waving your pseudonyms around, or leaving some silly signature as if your real name has any bearing on the validity of your posts.
Re:BUG! (Score:3, Insightful)
how did we let Warcraft users slowly replace the word "bug" with "glitch" ?! It's a bug!
A bug is a logic problem in the code; a glitch is misbehavior by the program. Glitches are normally associated with bugs, but faulty hardware or cosmic rays can also cause glitches. On the other hand, it is quite possible for a bug to exist without ever triggering a glitch, if the conditions that would trigger the bug are sufficiently remote, or if other code in the system corrects for the behavior of the bug (the latter is actually quite common).
In this case, I don't believe they've fixed the bug, but the glitch that is the manifestation of the bug is solved for now. If my understanding of what happened is correct, they should have nearly four years to ship a fix to the bug before the glitch reappears, so the fix will probably be bundled with the next system update.
If the headline had read "passage of time fixes bug", as you suggest, I would have had to call it an outright lie. As it is, however, I think the headline is exactly correct.
Re:Here's a patch (Score:1, Insightful)
Protip, PS3s firmware doesn't work like that.
They MADE the "isLeapYear" functionality, and obviously screwed it up somehow.
They won't just pile on a bunch of mostly useless libraries that they won't need just "because", they have limited space on the internal memory remember.
Since it won't happen again for a while, it will probably be fixed in the next update.
Re:FUCK YOU, Singularity42 (Score:3, Insightful)
This is /. Proper coding is a moral issue. By definition.
You can dump your geek card in the recycler at the exit. Thank you.
Re:Here's a patch (Score:3, Insightful)
unless you are considering limited processing power and you want to avoid extra checks. And I don't think this is the case here.
Re:So what were they supposed to do? (Score:4, Insightful)
A major bug knocks out significant functionality in a console with an installed base in the tens of millions. Remember, you're the CEO of Sony, and you have to protect the value of your company. It would be criminally irresponsible if you were to rush out an untested fix. If that broke anything you'd be subject to lawsuits. Firmware updates are risky at the best of times.
Meanwhile, your engineers are telling you, "We've got a problem with the date that's screwing up DRM. On our special development consoles, it looks like once the date rolls over in less than 24 hours, the problem will go away. We've tested it on a handful of our customer-style consoles, and from what we can see it appears to be the case there, too. But there are seven 'Fat' models [wikipedia.org] out there and in these few hours we can't test 'em all. Even once that's fixed, we can't absolutely guarantee all will be working after that."
So, you're careful about what you say, and you proceed with deliberate speed. The problem hasn't even been resolved for 24 hours yet! I strongly suspect that they are working on adding a fix to the next firmware upgrade - but that means they'll need to delay the next upgrade, add new tests to the regression tests and QA process, evaluate the fix on all nine models of PS3 (plus the two new slim models in the pipe [n4g.com]), and then finally roll it out.
Every company with a substantial codebase and millions of customers is this slow, by necessity. It took Microsoft a week to get the Live network stable after the flood of new users back in December, 2008 [gamestooge.com]. A week later (i.e. seven times 24 hours), they gave away a free downloadable game as a further apology [gamestooge.com]. And they still got sued over it [mtv.com].
I strongly suspect that Sony will release more information soon, and may offer a downloadable trinket as a further apology, too. But expecting a giant company to share technical information (that might be used in a lawsuit) in real-time is a bit much.
Re:Sony's Official Announcement (Score:4, Insightful)
So instead, you are suggesting that they think 0x10 is the same as 10?
No, I am suggesting that person or group A developed a hardware clock that stores a set of values as binary-coded decimals, and person or group B, probably at an entirely different company, wrote firmware to read those values as binary numbers without verifying whether that was the correct format. Either someone didn't document it, or someone else didn't read the documentation.
I don't think that is much credit.
Hence my emphasis of the word little. It is certainly a more understandable path to failure than "Durrrr, leep yeers every 2 years i am a pogrammer, Yay!"