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."
Sony's Official Announcement (Score:5, Funny)
First Quadrennial Childhood Obesity Awareness Day Goes Off Without a Hitch!
We'd like to thank all our gamers for observing our compulsory First Quadrennial Childhood Obesity Awareness Day that we had planned many years in advance back when we made our first consoles. We hope all the children took the time to get outside and exercise. As always, Sony endorses moderation in game play and we feel that this surprise holiday away from the Playstation Network will help today's youth become more healthy and social.
Should we decide to surprise you with a second Quadrennial Childhood Obesity Awareness Day, it could happen March 1st of 2012. See you in 2012 (maybe)! Until then, remember to get plenty of fresh air and exercise!
Totally in control of the situation,
Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Chief Sony Public Think of the Children Relations Officer
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The problem yesterday was that the servers thought it was the 29th, but the consoles refused to accept such nonsense. In 2012 it really is a leap year. I guess the reverse could happen, but then you'd just change the date to something else and you'd be alright.
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The problem yesterday was that the servers thought it was the 29th, but the consoles refused to accept such nonsense. In 2012 it really is a leap year. I guess the reverse could happen, but then you'd just change the date to something else and you'd be alright.
Actually it was the exact opposite. The servers thought it was March 1st. Some older consoles (with a bug in their hardware clock chips that have a leap-year programmed every 2 years instead of every 4 years) thought it was Feb 29. Newer PS3 Slim consoles were not affected. Not all "fat" PS3's were affected either as they did not all contain the faulty chips.
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Some older consoles (with a bug in their hardware clock chips that have a leap-year programmed every 2 years instead of every 4 years)
That is not the nature of the bug. (If so this would have happened on March 1, 2006 as well). The older consoles thought it was a leap year because they interpreted the date as a binary number instead of a binary coded decimal number. Essentially, they know which years are leap years, but they thought this was 2016.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem#Year_2010_p [wikipedia.org]
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Since the PS3 was released 11 November, 2006, how do we know this bug did not happen 01 Mar, 2006?
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Touche'.
Regardless, the bug is not as trivial as someone getting the basic rules for when a leap year occurs wrong, but a result of the date being stored in one format by one module, and interpreted as a different format by another module, where the formats happen to be identical for values less than 10.
In the end, a bug is a bug, and the result is the same, but everyone seems to be assuming that Sony's programmers just don't know when leap years occur, and I think they deserve a *little* more credit than t
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!"
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Most likely cause. I've dealt with many RTC chips, and the ones that have standard second/minute/hour/day/month/year type registers
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They are, in BCD.
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So instead, you are suggesting that they think 0x10 is the same as 10?
If it's stored in packed decimal format, it can be.
Regardless, Sony is probably safe until at least 2014, when the next even, non-leap year occurs. We've seen that leap years work (2008)
We've seen one leap year work. We've seen two non-leap years work (2007, 2009) out of three.
If it's doing mod math on packed decimal format data without converting first, it could get even years wrong 100% of the time every other ten year cycle of this century.
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So my PS3 will stop working again on March 1, 2014? Nice.
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Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Chief Sony Public Think of the Children Relations Officer
And I was wondering just yesterday where he ended up... Well, I guess in times like these, with economic problems, even honest people have to bend over and take any job they can get.
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if it's quadrennial
Good observation. That's (part of) the joke.
I can't wait for April Fool's Day... (Score:2)
Is SONY going to make my PS3 explode?
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Yes. And then April 2nd they'll provide instructions for reassembly via their PS3 online network.
No problem, right?
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This post reminds me of those finallyfast.com commercials. "Is your computer fucked? Just go to finallyfast.com to fix these problems and more!"
yeah...because if your computer is fucked, you can really get to their site. ::coulda had a V8::
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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?"
"Are there any lights on the front of the modem?"
"Are yo
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Hmm. Yeah, it's about like that with AT&T, too.
Or at least it was. Nowadays, my account is flagged, and my calls go straight through to level 3 support.
A conversation now goes something more like this:
First, an American answers the phone.
"This is Mike. What can I do for you?"
"Hi, Mike. My DSL is hosed. Again. I think your RADIUS server is down."
"Let me check on that. [clickity-click] You're right. We'll get right on that. Do you want me to call you back when it's fixed?"
"Sure."
Or, if it's a li
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Don't tell me your ISP never told you that you could simply download the drivers for your NIC/modem...
Re:I can't wait for April Fool's Day... (Score:5, Funny)
Is SONY going to make my PS3 explode?
No, but every twenty minutes a kitten will come out. [penny-arcade.com]
That'll be fixed in the next update [penny-arcade.com] though.
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Is SONY going to make my PS3 explode?
No, that's July 4th not April Fools Day.
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Just Sony's famous times kill switch, that's all.
I never realized (Score:1)
that the PS3 was powered by the Zune...
Here's a patch (Score:1)
bool isLeapYear = (((year % 4 == 0) && (year % 100 != 0)) || (year % 400 == 0));
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Your using an extra 'mod', 'compare' and 'or' to avoid a branch, yet those 'compare's are probably going to be compiled into branches anyway, thus defeating the point.
Really, you should either break down and write it as a simple branch, or write branch free assembly for each target platform. I would suggest the former. Simplicity and readability are much more important in this day and age than a few clock cycles.
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(year % 4) is enough. Next leap year exception is 2100, I will no longer be in office by then.
Before someone complains and compares it to Y2K: We're talking about a game console here with an expected lifetime of less than a decade. Not a supercomputer whose programs might outlive its makers.
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unless you are considering limited processing power and you want to avoid extra checks. And I don't think this is the case here.
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Great. Except that the bug is probably in a hardware RTC circuit. Please try again in Verilog or VHDL and include the process by which the silicon can be updated to use your glorious patch.
It is very likely that the clock chip used BCD for the date and time, and used "bcd_year % 4" to determine a leap year. 10 is not divisible by 4, but 0x10 is.
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bool isLeapYear = (((year % 4 == 0) && (year % 100 != 0)) || (year % 400 == 0));
What type is "year"?
Human representations of time should be restricted to display purposes only. A computer shouldn't care whether a particular span of 86400 seconds is in February or March.
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Did you write the firmware or something?
*Any* programmer should feel superior because this is an extremely trivial bug that should've never been allowed to see the light of day. This only serves to highlight what must've been a breakneck release schedule as Sony was bringing the original PS3 to market (the newer slim PS3s were unaffected).
I'd bet money that Sony caught this firmware bug too late in their production cycle to fix it (i.e. the firmware chips were already burned). An issue that might come up ev
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An issue that might come up every two years? That would hardly warrant a "stop the presses" to Sony.
Actually, the bug would only manifest itself every 4 years. 2012 is a leap year and Feb 29 does exist, so the bug *shouldn't* occur. In 2014, though, we'll see.
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Stop attempting to belittle your fellow slashdotters to signal your "moral superiority".
I had not realized that properly coding leap year algorithms was a moral issue. On slashdot is everything a moral issue? I must be new here.
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This is /. Proper coding is a moral issue. By definition.
You can dump your geek card in the recycler at the exit. Thank you.
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 corpora
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and yes there are people who are experts in their fields, and remember there are more than 1 million users here. So there will be most likely at least a bunch of experts for each topic. Although the armchair experts are not missing, but you have to learn how to filter those out (for one check their comment history?).
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
...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.
Whatever, faggot.
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anybody who doesn't have in-depth knowledge about the topics discussed is also an idot.
You sir, are an idot of the highest order.
Parable (Score:2)
BUG! (Score:2)
I know I have pretty much become an old man at this point in my life, but how did we let Warcraft users slowly replace the word "bug" with "glitch" ?! It's a bug!
However, I have to feely admit one point: replacing the word with 'glitch' makes it easier to use as a verb, as in "that instance is glitched" vs "that instance is bugged" - in the sense that the latter use could mean "we put that bug in the bug DB already." Ah well, back to feeding ferrite core beads to pigeons...
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More generally, I guess the new term arose from having a huge mass of people suddenly wodged together - many of whom were/are not terribly computer-ey - creating terms themselves to describe what they experience (ie, sixty zillion Warcraft users interacting daily). A king of eternal September in a way.
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Says the guy with the high UID.
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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 th
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Because you are using the wrong form of bug.
the correct use is....
"That instance is completely buggered!" and yes the UK use of buggered is 100% correct in any sense of the term bug.
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Bug bug bug BUG "bug" "BUG"!
Why, for god sakes, are the last two "bugs" in quotes? Are they some sort of ironic bugs? Is the wink implied?
(yes, this is a ripped off joke [wikiquote.org])
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Don't blame WoW players for this. The use of "glitch" instead of bug is, and has been, extremely prevalent in console communities since the N64 days.
There is some usefulness to the term "glitch" in the context it's often used for in console games, though. There are a lot of things that players can do to break the game in certain ways that don't necessarily fall into the realm of something that should or even can be fixed by a developer. Things that are the equivalent of shifting your NES cartridge left and
Sony Timer (Score:2)
I have a theory there's an unseen clock running inside the PS3. Since the passage of time solved the problem, shouldn't too have setting the system time forward a day? I tried that, yet the system was still bugged. It would make sense if there was a hidden clock not able to be directly set by the end user for things like DRM. Since Sony has downloadable movie rentals, which can only be viewed for 48 hours after payment. It would follow that there's an extra timer which one can't over-ride to get more t
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I tried that, yet the system was still bugged. It would make sense if there was a hidden clock not able to be directly set by the end user for things like DRM. Since Sony has downloadable movie rentals, which can only be viewed for 48 hours after payment. It would follow that there's an extra timer which one can't over-ride to get more time with the rental.
Yeah, but even so, it shouldn't care about leap years. In fact, it shouldn't care about human time at all. All such a clock really needs to do is continually increment some value every unit of time. Then, it just needs three pieces of information to determine if it's in the rental period:
1. The time the rental period start, in "clock units."
2. How long the rental period lasts, in "clock units."
3. The current clock time.
Is "start time" + "rental period" less than "current time?" Then it's still in the rent
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The RTC is not a theory or a myth! The RTC exists. Take the battery out of your PS3 for ten minutes if you want to reset the RTC.
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The problems seemed to specifically affect the PSN system along with the older PS3s (I don't have one so I haven't followed the issue that much). I'm going to guess that the date and time is sent from PSN as a single integer in seconds from an epoch time, likely Unix/POSIX time counting from Jan 1, 1970, which is then used by the hardware to figure out the actual date/time for talking to the network, and not your system entered "local" time.
The system must have been translating the epoch tim
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It wasn't a PSN problem, I know someone with a PS3 which has never been online, yet she couldn't play a trophy-enabled disc game on Sunday.
The affected systems now think it is January 2, 2000--unless the user has corrected the time. When the bug hit they all reset to December 31, 1999 (which is a year one can't manually enter).
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So it sounds like they're running on epoch time where Jan 1, 2000 = 1, and the bug forced the time/date value to 0 or null. Ultimately it still sounds like that version of the hardware is trying to treat all even years as leap years and the bug handling code is not very graceful about it.
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I just realized that the zero date may have been the result of: 1) clock chip returns February 29 2010 as discrete Y/M/D components, 2) date is passed to conversion routine that returns seconds-from-epoch of the date at 00:00, 3) conversion routine says WTF U DOIN? and returns zero as an error value, 4) hours and minutes and time zone offset are added to the zero.
So it didn't so much divide by zero as add to zero.
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What I don't understand is my system played fine Sun night and Monday night. At least, it synced trophies and Bioshock played. I have one of the newer fat models though, maybe that's the difference.
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Some trophy enabled games failed to init properly (Heavy Rain is one such game) and would quit. While others would load and play fine. I played Fallout 3 sunday evening but the catch was it zero'd out my local trophy data, as if I had never played the game. Not sure what would have happened if I earned one during my playtime that night. If anyone is curious now that everything working again I restored my trophies by launching the game (init to 0%) then quit and re-synced my trophy data with the PSN servers.
I'm still pissed, though (Score:2)
As one of the owners of a console that got bit by this bug (and the last revision to support PS2 backwards-compatibility), I'm still rather pissed off by this bug.
First off, it's ridiculously stupid. I'd love to hear an explanation from Sony about how, exactly, they managed to have this bug exist in the first place. First off, I'd love to know why the internal clock considers 2010 a leap year [playstation.com] but what I'd also like to know is 1) why this "internal clock" is different from the PS3 clock, which knows 2010 isn
So what were they supposed to do? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, apparently, it wasn't a Sony bug per se, it was a bug in one of the support chips [wikipedia.org].
Sony decided to be paranoid about time because of pirates. If you can hack the PS3 and change the date, then you can avoid expiration times and so forth. So if the hardware clock and software clock get out of sync, their DRM and such stops working. Considering the PS3 is the only major console that has not been hacked to the point of widespread piracy, keeping to this level of paranoia seems to have paid off for Sony's purposes.
As to Sony's "piss-poor handling of the entire incident", I'd like to know what, exactly, you think they should have done about it?
Seriously, I've just appointed you, _xeno_, to be CEO of Sony, and you just got a phone call. "Oh, crap, it's midnight GMT on March 1st, 2010, and all the older PS3 consoles can't play downloaded content or games with trophies or sign into the PSN!". What are you going to do? What orders do you give?
Re:So what were they supposed to do? (Score:4, Informative)
You may not be aware of this, but they have a Twitter account devoted to the PlayStation [twitter.com] and a blog [playstation.com]. Sadly, the blog doesn't record the time when the entries were posted, but you may notice the 13-hour stretch between "slim consoles still work" and - well, actually, if you follow the link, it basically reiterates that slim consoles are working.
Then complete silence until the 24-hour period ended, followed by a brief announcement that "hey, it works again!" and then completely ignoring that it ever happened. Instead they've posted several blog entries that conveniently knock the PSN outage way down the page.
Do they intend to fix this issue with a patch? Can they? Does it even matter? Who knows, they certainly aren't saying. All they've said is "oops, sorry" and, well, that's it. Not even a "we're still looking into this matter."
Of course, based on the vague "if we get new information we'll keep you posted," I get the impression that this isn't the fault of the people running the blog, it's that the PlayStation group themselves are simply not bothering to communicate. Maybe they're still looking into it, maybe they aren't, but the community managers apparently have no idea based on the weasel-wording on the blog. And that would be a problem that Sony should address.
But in any case, I still have to wonder: why in the hell does a reduced instruction set computer have a buggy leap-year function? Why the hell does it care what the human-readable date is? All it needs to do is keep track of "units of time since a known start point." Let the OS worry about what the human time is.
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.
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>>As to Sony's "piss-poor handling of the entire incident", I'd like to know what, exactly, you think they should have done about it?
Well, they said they'd have a fix within 24 hours, and here we are!
I actually laughed when I read that yesterday, since I knew exactly what their fix would be: doing nothing.
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Issue apology for the bug. Give free premium theme of choice to all affected PS3 users. Then get me a limo and six hot hookers.
This CEO shit rocks!
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Anybody got a link to the errata from ARM? Can't find it on their site.
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Easy, post an explanation to the official playstation twitter account and playstation blog. Be open about the problem, admit it's a mistake, admit we aren't going to fix it, explain that it's one day. Call March 1st "Playstation Nap Day"
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I mean, it's apparently an internal hardware clock, right? It's not user visible. So why, exactly, is it storing dates and not just being a clock?
Many off the shelf hardware RTCs do use human style date and time, I guess because they expect people to use them in systems where that is the most convenient format. PCs also traditionally use a human style format for thier RTC so if that part of their system is a derivative of a PC design that could also explain it.
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They also tend to be in BCD.
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Shut up, if you anger them they will start putting root-kits on CD's and DVD's again!
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The wiki entry mentioned in another reply was deleted becase it was not relevant to "ARM Architecture". (And it had horrible grammar too.) I dug it out of the article history:
PS3 Date Controversy It has been suggest that older verions of the ARM SYSCON cpus had errata such that the CPUs believed incorrectly that 2010 was a leap year and may be partially responsible for non slim versions of the Playstation 3 not being able to function properly on 3/1/2010 (issue resolved itself on most PS3s at midnight GMT on 3/2/2010). "The ARM SYSCON CPU that is used to power up the front panel of the ps3, that is responsible for doing things like sleep mode, eject, RTC etc. Is an old batch that sony picked up from the shelf like other manufacturers that has that calendar year bug regarding feburary 29th on certain periods. Causing the ps3 system clock and the real time clock to desync, messing up security measures like Digital Rights management software and sometimes games that relies on clocks for whatever reason. As well as signing up to the playstation network This CPU is always on even when your PS3 isn’t plugged
This is the one of the same type of CPUs that is powering up mobile devices like zune and blackberries, they have been affected with this bug, so they done some software patches. A syscon update can also fix this problem
The Slims ps3s aren’t affected because they use a newer up to date revision on the syscon cpu that fixes this bug.
[WARNING: will void your warranty, may be best to wait for official solution from Sony] - A quick way to fix this is to remove the RTC battery for at least 5-10 min and plug it back in, you will see the date and time reset, and voila "
I would add the following:
1) PS3 asks for date from chip (note: chip time does not include local time zone, and is probably in UTC)
2) Chip returns 10-02-29 with correct hh:mm:ss. Like many clock chips, these are returned as discrete components, probably in BCD.
3) PS3 adds 2000 to the year and passes 2010-02-29 to conversion routine
Sony is very lucky... (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the documentation [kernel.org] provided for PS3 linux, the clock that is embedded in the PS3 cannot actually be manipulated from under the hypervisor:
"Similar to a PC, a built-in real time clock (RTC) keeps the wall clock time for the PS3. The RTC is backed up by a battery and so ticks even if external power is removed. The RTC value can be read by a hypervisor call, but it can not be written. The RTC value monotonically increases and never rolls back. The PS3 Linux platform support uses the standard RTC userland interface
I'm assuming that this read-only clock "feature" is in some way related to DRM, to keep people from playing tricks with expiration dates. Worst case scenario, it is impossible to modify the RTC without hardware tinkering. Had this not been a transient bug, that would have meant massive physical recalls. More likely, it is possible for sony-blessed firmware updates to modify the clock. However, Sony can only push those either through the internet, or on physical disks. Since the bug was preventing PSN logins, the internet option wouldn't have been automatically available(though, since the issue is transient, it now is again). They would either have to mail out upgrade disks to affected users, bundle the upgrade with future game releases, or make their customers go to some support site and burn their own upgrade disks. Gigantic pain in the ass.
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I'm not sure, but i think that Linux stores an offset from the Hardware clock to its internal software clock. You could set the hardware clock to 1/1/1970 and it wouldn't matter as long as the the kernel knows how much of an offset is needed to set the software clock correctly. I think it also records if and how much the hardware clock runs fast/slow so that it can adjust the offset for inaccuracy as time goes past. Then if you have NTP set up it just recalibrates the software clock over the net while it's
Expect a repeat performance in 2014 (Score:2)
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wow, whoever thought Year % 10 and Year were congruent mod 4 needs to go back to undergrad.
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Clock begins again (Score:1)
Sony has a little less than 4 years to figure out how to solve this. I pray they can do it in time. Meanwhile, my PS2 worked just fine.
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They may have only two years to fix it. If it's a bug that causes the BCD year mod 4 to be used to determine leap years, then it will be a problem every other year in this decade. Then another ten years later it would be a problem again.
The next time it happens, the clock will lose a day, instead of gaining a broken day. Among other things, imagine what happens when you play a downloaded "rental" video with a 24 hour clock from when you first start playing it... and you start playing just before it turns F
Bravo Dev Team! (Score:3, Funny)
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...One might even say they moved the earth for it.
Sony caused the Chilean earthquake?
All the people complaining about DRM... (Score:2)
I realize cheating is still possible, but I applaud having a system which is difficult to hack, even if it means things like this can happen. Do they get to us
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Ok, there are logic bugs, then there are extremely stupid bugs. 2010 is 2 years away from a leap year. That's ridiculous.
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Unless it was a decimalhex bug... 10 hex = 16 dec , 2016 IS a leap year.
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This is also the first even-numbered year since the PS3 release that is not a leap year. It's possible their leap-year code is completely broken...
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duh, 2006 wasn't a leap year either
True, but the PS3 wasn't released until well after February of that year (November).
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As well, it seems the trophy update had something to do with the issue, not something that would have been seen in 2006.
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Yeah, but March 1, 2006 was a Wednesday. Who files bug reports on Wednesdays?
Seriously though, the bug may not have been tripped for 2006: 0x2006 BCD treated as an int (8198) is not evenly divisible by 4, but 0x2010 BCD as an int is 8208 which is evenly divisible by 4.
Curiously, 0x2008 BCD is int 8200 which is divisible by 4, but it is also divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400. Since it worked in 2008, if it is a error failing to convert BCD to decimal, then they're just using every 4 years and not pay
Re: (Score:2)
Amateurs, the lot of you.
I once created a bug where the fix involved -- and I am serious here -- shooting a tiger.
Re: (Score:2)
Thats nothing, due to budget constraints a quick workaround to our watchdog has never been properly redone, so we are stuck with sacrificing a goat every month or the watchdog kills the databases.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I was being literal.
I used to work for a GPS tracking company, and the | was in packing the GPS stream into a byte for VHF transmission. It turned out that the tenths digit of longitude was always 0. It was part of an update to reduce the footprint. (This reduced the footprint from 98% to 92%, IIRC, which was a pretty big deal.)
It made it out through my tests, production's tests, and the test customer happened to be in a spot where the tenths digit was supposed to be zero. The reason was a formatting bug in
Re: (Score:1, Interesting)
Not according to their planned 10-year lifespan.
PS2s are still in wide use almost 10 years later.
Re: (Score:2)
PS2s are still in wide use almost 10 years later.
Yes, and I'm sure Sony (and game makers for their consoles) ain't happy about that. After all, they could sell all those PS2 titles again for the PS3.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Because they have to offset their losses on the PS3 somehow, and removing its ability to play PS2 games to make you have to buy a new PS2 when your old one breaks is one of those ways.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If that were really the case why didn't it effect the PS3 Slim? Also why didn't this manifest itself for people playing games without trophies? Oh yeah, because you're spewing bullshit.
Re: (Score:2)
But then that doesn't explain how the non-slim models in which you played games without trophies didn't have the issue either.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
While I agree they should fix the problem I don't think there is any point in pushing an emergency fix at this point. The correct thing to do (assuming this is a periodic problem) is to release a properly QA'd fix as part of a normal firmware update cycle.
Re: (Score:2)
IF that is possible.
I somehow doubt it. IIRC, and please someone correct me if they know more about the inner workings of the PS3 than I do, you have two "clocks" inside the PS3. One that resides uncerneath all the hypervisor and other DRM protection, shielded by it against tampering, which is used most likely for rentals and the like when Sony wants to make dead sure they know just how much time has passed and you have no chance to tamper with it. How this clock is initialized is still a mystery to me, but
Re: (Score:2)
which probably prompted the internal one to assume tampering and thus it simply sent the general shutdown command
except the system WAS NOT completely disabled. Afaict downloadable content failed (presumablly due to it's drm dates being out of range) and the trophy system crashed but afaict games without trophy support continued to run fine as did the web browser and the backwards compatibility. Further things recovered by themselves when the internal clock rolled back to a sane date.
This suggests to me that