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User: AaronW

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  1. Re:How does it do in the winter? on Elon Musk Announces $35,000 Tesla Model 3 Electric Car · · Score: 1

    I'm sure it will have defrosting wires. The cars shown are prototypes. They sell a lot of cars in Norway and have special winter packages available. The traction control is far smoother than an ICE vehicle so it handles very well, especially with AWD.

  2. Re:"mass market affordable car" on Elon Musk Announces $35,000 Tesla Model 3 Electric Car · · Score: 1

    You are clearly clueless. The Ford Explorer is not in the same league as the Model X. Safety? The Model X will eat the Explorer's lunch. With the CG so low it's damned near impossible to flip. There's no huge engine in front, so there's a much bigger crumple zone, add to that the automatic braking and autopilot features. Acceleration? Model X beats the crap out of the Explorer. For its size it's impossible to beat the storage capacity since there's no huge engine up front. It will also handle a lot better than an Explorer. Granted, it's not as big a vehicle as an explorer, but it certainly will comfortably seat 7 adults.

  3. Re:How is this not win/win on 33,000 Sign Online Petition Promoting Guns At Republican Convention (cnet.com) · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to Politifact, Hillary lies about 28% of the time (counting Mostly False,False and Pants on Fire) and tells the truth 52% of the time (True and Mostly True)
    http://www.politifact.com/pers...

    By comparison, Bernie Sanders lies about 29% of the time and tells the truth 51% of the time
    http://www.politifact.com/pers...

    Ted Cruz lies 60% of the time and tells the truth 22% of the time
    http://www.politifact.com/pers...

    And Donald Trump lies 77% of the time and tells the truth 10% of the time
    http://www.politifact.com/pers...

  4. Re:two questions on Hacker May Have Discovered Plans For A Tesla P100D (jalopnik.com) · · Score: 1

    There is no P70 or P90. The "P" series are the performance cars. There is only a P90D. There is a S70 and S90 and S90D, however.

    I drive a P85 which is no longer made, the performance version of the 85KWh model.

  5. Re:I have some predictions of my own. on Bloomberg Predicts EVs Cheaper than IC Engine Cars Within 10 Years (computerworld.com) · · Score: 1

    Generally the recharge time is not that big of an issue. Last September I drove from the Bay Area to Seattle in my Tesla and it took two days, which is what it would take if I were driving a gasoline car since I don't like driving for 16 hours straight. It added maybe 2-3 hours to my trip compared to if I had driven a gasoline car. In many cases I took the time while the car was charging (usually less than 40 minutes) to get something to eat and stretch my legs. In fact, I had to stop more often than my car did.

    For most driving the charging time is irrelevant since it takes me five seconds to plug my car in at night when I come home and 5 seconds to unplug in the morning in the comfort of my garage. I would argue that generally I spend less time waiting for my car to charge than I did filling up my gasoline car at a gas station. Charging spaces are becoming more and more common as well, at shopping centers, workplaces and hotels.

    I also don't have to deal with the boom-bust cycles of gas prices every few years. I pay about $50 per 1000 miles with the EV PG&E rate whether gas cost $2/gallon or $5/gallon. When I drove to Spokane it cost me $0 for the car. My only cost was meals since I stayed at a friend's place in Oregon.

    Tesla put in a battery swap station at Harris Ranch off of highway 5 on the way to Los Angeles. That was a poor choice of location. I could spend $50 for a couple battery swaps or spend the money on a great steak dinner while charging for free.

    In a few years many more EVs that cost considerably less will be available which will also support rapid charging. Hopefully the other charging networks will grow like Tesla's has. Putting in charging infrastructure is pretty cheap and easy, all that's needed is electricity, which is just about everywhere. I've stayed at hotels that have RV parks and just park at the RV park and charge there, often for free. Again, the charging time doesn't matter since it happens while I sleep.

    People tend not to realize that charging an EV is not the same as filling a gasoline car. You generally can't fill your car up at home so you are reliant on the service stations.

    Now, if you're regularly driving back and forth on long trips then an EV probably isn't the right choice in the near future. However, if one follows the trends, charging time has been going down, capacity has been increasing and the cost of batteries has been dropping.

    Also, charging an EV is not the same as filling up a car. When filling up a car you basically need to stay with the car at the service station while filling it up. An EV charging station can be anywhere. Most of Tesla's superchargers are located at malls or places where there are other places close by. You don't have to stay with the car while it's charging.

    A number of stores have realized that putting in free charging makes them money. For example, Target found that EV drivers who shop spend a bit more time shopping when there's free charging at the store. Target plans to install EV chargers at all of their stores now. Other chains are also getting into the act, like Walgreens and Whole Foods.

  6. I tend to frequently punch it in my Tesla P85. I've done it a few times and realized after the fact that there was a cop behind me. They never seem to bat an eye though I know enough to let up before exceeding the speed limit, usually before I reach the other side of the intersection. No tickets in almost three years of driving it.

  7. Low-end MIPS processor on Released: First PC Based On Russia's Homegrown "Baikal" Processor (t-platforms.ru) · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's basically a low-end MIPS 32-bit processor. You can basically get everything that's in the chip as off-the-shelf cores. MIPS is popular because it's quite a bit cheaper to license than ARM. I'm surprised they didn't go with a 64-bit MIPS core since it's been available for a very long time.

    Once nice thing about MIPS is that it's very easy to add your own instructions to it via coprocessor 2. My employer has used COP2 to add a lot of encryption and hashing instructions to their MIPS cores. ARM does not allow you to add your own instructions. The only thing that's mildly interesting is the 10G Ethernet support, but then that will be limited by the 32-bit MIPS. I'm not sure if it's a cache-coherent core but my guess is that it's not, which adds significant overhead in my experience since every buffer must be invalidated when it's received and flushed when transmitted. In MIPS this is done by issuing CACHE instructions for every cache line used in the buffer.

    Since it lacks a decent sized L2 cache the performance is going to suck.

  8. Re:Help me understand something here... on Nissan Leaf HVAC-Hack Vulnerability Disclosed (bbc.com) · · Score: 1

    My Tesla model S has a similar feature and I use it frequently in the winter to warm up my car in the parking lot before I leave the building. It means I don't have to wait for the windows to defog and the car's warm by the time I head out. I can also monitor the temperature and wait until the car is warm before heading out to it. If I do nothing then after a while it shuts itself off.

    In my case there's no place to plug in at work, but that's not an issue since I have plenty of range. Tesla also has a history of taking security seriously.

  9. Re:Good it's fixed, but not too bad of a bug. on Linux Virtual Ethernet Bug Delivers Corrupt TCP/IP Data (vijayp.ca) · · Score: 2

    A lot of traffic is sent unencrypted because encryption just isn't needed. You don't get encryption for free in most cases since it requires a fair amount of CPU overhead to implement it and/or additional hardware, plus there's all the overhead of setting up an encrypted link. Within a LAN, encryption usually isn't required for most of the data being sent.

    As for corrupting packets, I had a setup in my cubical a few weeks ago running 10G traffic where I could corrupt packets on request by switching the fluorescent light above my desk on and off. I was implementing support for a new phy chip connected to our ASIC that supports 100Base-T 1GBase-T, 2.5G, 5G and 10GBase-T.

  10. Re:Data needed on Linux Virtual Ethernet Bug Delivers Corrupt TCP/IP Data (vijayp.ca) · · Score: 1

    I once ran into problems where a server with a certain Intel chip would sometimes corrupt data over the PCI bus. I had to put in a check in my driver to detect that chip and turn off a major PCI optimization if that one chip was detected. CRC errors would not detect it because that was handled in the network adapter. At the time some of my tests were with Netbeui which has no L3/L4 checksums and resulted in corrupt files (which were detected by the test scripts).

    I've run into a number of times where data gets corrupted like this and while the ip/tcp/udp checksum isn't all that great it did allow identifying the problem.

  11. Re:Brazil on Rio Has Given Up On Clean Water For Olympics (go.com) · · Score: 1

    All they did is bribe the right people. The IOC is a corrupt joke.

  12. Re:Kind of crippled there... on UK Company Riversimple Plans a Fuel-Sipping Hydrogen Car (techienews.co.uk) · · Score: 1

    The top speed of a Prius is over 100, though it will take a while to get there. I know my '06 topped out at 109MPh.

  13. Re: "peak efficiency"? ya right.. on Camless Internal Combustion and the Digital Age (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    Tesla actually offers this, however few people take them up on it. They contacted me about doing it but it's at Harris Ranch. I replied that I would rather take the money spent on a battery swap and buy a nice steak dinner there and that seems to be the common thread. Not a lot of people take advantage of it. If Tesla put it someplace else then I might use it, but not there.

  14. I read one estimate that it probably costs $30K per chip, though it might be quite a bit more. It would likely be well within the FBI's budget, however, and probably no more than a few million dollars. Sure, Apple probably never created the tools, but having the design available should not make it all that difficult especially once the keys are extracted from the chips through physical means. Once the keys are extracted and the flash contents are extracted it then just becomes a software problem to brute force it.

    Chip reverse engineering happens all the time, and it's not like they have to reverse engineer the chip since Apple has access to everything, where every trace and transistor is on the chips. FIBing chips isn't particularly expensive these days either and is now becoming quite common in the chip development phase. Sure, Apple may not have the tools, but there are plenty of other people out there that do have the tools.

  15. Re: "peak efficiency"? ya right.. on Camless Internal Combustion and the Digital Age (hackaday.com) · · Score: 1

    I drive a Tesla model S and sold my gasoline car since I drove it so rarely. For most of my driving I spend 5 seconds every night plugging it in and 5 seconds in the morning unplugging it. It doesn't even matter if I forget a day or two. When I do take it on long trips the waits haven't been that big a deal in most cases. I drove from the Bay Area up to Seattle and it took two days (and no, I don't feel like driving 14 hours straight). Most of the stops had plenty of stuff around to do and more often than not the car was ready to continue before I was. One stop had a nice brew pub across the street. Another was at a nice upscale outlet mall. Most had good places to eat or do other activities within easy walking distance.

    Total cost to drive to Seattle, not including food: $0 (I stayed with friends near the halfway point). Even if I stayed in a hotel it's only $60 each way, far less than I'd spend on gas.

    It gets easier and easier to travel as more and more charging stations are built along more and more routes.

    I never had to stop for over an hour. The longest I had to stop was around 40 minutes.

    It gave me a chance to stretch my legs and get something to eat. The only drawback is I had to stop more often than my car did for bathroom breaks.

    People tend to make a big deal over the charging time, but unless you're regularly going on these long drives where you drive non-stop it really is no big deal. I spend far less time charging than most people spend filling up their cars at gas stations. As I said, it takes me 5 seconds to plug in in my garage every night. Take 2 steps back, grab the cord, press a button on the connector (which opens the charging door) and plug it in. I don't have to get out of my car and stand in the cold filling my car up. Every morning I start out with my car 80% full. I drive around 1000 miles/month on average and my monthly electricity bill for the car (using PG&E, not one of the cheaper utilities) is $50. I don't take it easy either when driving. I don't miss gas stations.

  16. Re:I can see it now... on Judge Tells Apple To Help FBI Access San Bernardino Shooters' iPhone (engadget.com) · · Score: 1

    And that is why you use techniques like FIB. You can basically add your own probes anywhere on the chip, cut or create new traces, etc. Hence when you have physical access, and especially when you have access to the chip designed all bets are off. You can literally just modify the SOC to read the keys.

  17. Re:I can see it now... on Judge Tells Apple To Help FBI Access San Bernardino Shooters' iPhone (engadget.com) · · Score: 2

    It's actually fairly reliable today and is fairly common. I regularly work with boards with BGAs with over 1000 balls that are replaced.

    Also, look up what is possible with FIB. You can basically cut through traces and build new traces on the fly on a chip, going through multiple layers or even adding new layers on top of a chip. It's not even particularly expensive and it is done regularly in the semiconductor industry especially during chip prototyping. Hell, a recent chip I worked with had to be "Fibed" to fix a critical problem. It was cheaper to fib a number of chips than it was to make a change in the metal layer and wait for the results to come back so development could proceed. Now there are some techniques with antifuse that can make this difficult, but I'm sure ways around it if you spend the money.

  18. It's not as expensive as you might think, especially if you have the original chip design and layout available. It may be as low as $50-$100K, though it can also become quite a bit higher in some cases. It's amazing what can be done with FIB today.

  19. It probably is not as expensive as you think to extract the key from the physical chip. Where I work we had a new chip with a critical bug in it that prevented it from working. We were able to use FIB (Focused Ion Beam) in order to correct a number of chips for development. It should be possible to go through the layers on the chip where the various fields are stored and extract them. Once you have all of the information it should be possible to use an FPGA or other setup (or even software) to brute force the user's pin and extract the data, completely bypassing the secure enclave. It certainly didn't cost millions of dollars to FIB our chips in order to fix the problem or we would have just skipped that step, updated the metal mask layer and made new chips.

    Once you decap a chip and have the right tools it should be possible to obtain all the needed data to brute-force the key. Usually the hard part is reverse engineering the chip layout, but Apple already has the design. Antifuse can make this rather difficult but I imagine that with a decent amount of money it should be possible to obtain the keys.

  20. Re:I can see it now... on Judge Tells Apple To Help FBI Access San Bernardino Shooters' iPhone (engadget.com) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It should be possible to bypass the erase operation with physical access to the device. Most NAND devices have a write protect pin which when pulled low will disable program and erase operations.

    It may also be possible to add a socket and duplicate the encrypted flash chip so that the original is never in the phone. This could be complicated if the flash device supports a unique ID and the encryption platform makes use of it. I could think of several ways to bypass even that though. One way is to use an FPGA to create a flash emulator that can simulate the NAND device. One other advantage of this is that it could guarantee that the data is never erased. The encryption hardware itself must also store the number of authentication attempts in some non-volatile storage. Usually this would be on another chip or die since it's still not very common to mix flash and logic on the same chip.

    Unless the encryption and erase functionality is built into the Toshiba NAND device Apple uses it should be possible to pop the NAND device and use an FPGA and/or other hardware for forensic purposes since the iPhone is not built to FIPS standards (which usually pot the boards in epoxy and provide a number of methods to prevent physical intrusion).

    Even the secure keys that are not known by Apple should be accessible with physical access to the device. It's expensive, but it should be possible to read the blown fuses by digging through the layers if the exact location is known on a chip.

    https://media.blackhat.com/bh-...

  21. Re:What should happen but won't on US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia Has Died (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    Right now it cost more to generate oil from the tar sands than they can sell it for. There's a glut of oil thanks to Saudi Arabia opening the taps. Why do you think so many fracking companies are looking at bankruptcy right now?

  22. Re:Why is this x86 and not 64bit? on CERN Engineer Details AMD Zen Processor Confirming 32 Core Implementation, SMT (hothardware.com) · · Score: 1

    They were both considered 16-bit processors despite the bus being only 8-bits. The ALUs operated on 16-bit values. On the other hand, the 8080 was 8-bit because the ALU was typically limited to 8-bit operations.

  23. Re:So what should we do? on Jeep/Chrysler's New Gearshift Appears To Be Causing Accidents (roadandtrack.com) · · Score: 1

    The manuals I've driven never had this. I've driven cars with both foot and hand brakes and for manuals neither was very friendly if you didn't know how to use the clutch properly. One of those cars also had the high beam as a button you used your foot to press under the parking brake pedal. It took a lot of practice with one of those cars. It had a very finicky clutch that was either on or off with very little play in between. I had another manual where the only time I ever used the clutch was to go in and out of first gear or reverse from a stop. I could upshift and downshift just by rev matching. I also learned to do some interesting things using my foot to hit both the brake and the accelerator to get the engine to rev up if I were on a hill because the car was so gutless. My current car is the first car I've owned with a hill hold feature. It was added in a software update. I never really saw the need for it. My Tesla behaves like a cross between a manual and an automatic with the way I have it configured. I let up off the accelerator and it decelerates strongly. If I'm stopped and I lift my foot off the brake (and I'm not on a hill), the car rolls like a manual with the clutch pedal engaged with no creep like an automatic. Basically as far as I'm concerned hill hold is needed for inexperienced drivers or those with slow reaction times or if you have a really gutless engine.

  24. Re:So what should we do? on Jeep/Chrysler's New Gearshift Appears To Be Causing Accidents (roadandtrack.com) · · Score: 1

    And how often do you RTFM when you get a rental car and are in a hurry to get to your hotel room after a long flight? The controls on most cars are fairly universal. The only ones I've driven that behave differently are the Prius and some high-end cars like my Tesla. It's muscle memory with most cars with automatics.

  25. Re:So what should we do? on Jeep/Chrysler's New Gearshift Appears To Be Causing Accidents (roadandtrack.com) · · Score: 1

    I rode in a Fisker Karma that behaved like that, except it kept going bong bong bong the whole time it was being driven due to a software bug. You could clearly hear the turn signal clicker also screwing up. They fixed that in a later software update but the software was so buggy I couldn't believe it was used on a production car. It was maybe OK for a prototype, but not even alpha quality.