Okay good point. Did not read it that way. Still lets think if this re-interpretation makes any difference to the abinding issue....
assume a very liberal 200 watts per sq meter over a large part of the day and ten sq meters of "effective" normally incident solar energy. that's 2KW for perhaps 8 hour of the day. That's 16KJ. one hour of driving in your car on the highway would take 23KJ.
Furthermore, to do a swap as you suggest, then the household 16KJ/day which it probably does not. So this means you have to pump this back into the grid and take the transmission losses.
So now what? well we have not solved the power distribution problem. That night, you are still going to have to have a whole lot of kilojoules delivered to every house on the block. And your power grid is not going to like that.
Second, your power generation capability has to be as big as the maximum load, not the average load. Thus despite the solar gain injected into the system you still need to build the excess capacity to handle winter, when it low light and people still want to drive their cars, heat their homes, and turn on lights, and make aluminum.
Finally I've been pretty generous here by not including all the storage, grid re-transmission, and conversion losses, the fact that we don't live on the equator, etc...
If I were to cut that 16Kj by two to say 8Kj, then all this solar gain abounts to 20 minutes of driving time under ideal conditions. That does not even dent the problem.
None of the currently available hybrids use a setup where the gas engine can run at constant RPM.
Right. So that means they get poorer efficiency that I described. if they ran at constant rates they could be tuned to get maximal efficiency.
1. Your engine is the same total power, but now has two pieces. You can turn half of it off when both are not needed, such as when cruising.
First I did mention you could turn off the engine if you were parked. however the idea you could turn it off when cuising is ass backward nonsense. When you are cruising, you MUST run the engine. infact in a steady state condition (i.e. "cruising") 100% of the power comes from the engine. I realize people have a hard time grasping this trivial observation which is why I posted it.
2. In stop-and-go traffic, regenerative braking turns your kinetic energy back into stored power you can use to accelerate.
WHich I included in my calculations when I said that hydrids allow, in the ideal limit, city driving to become as efficeint as highway driving by elminating stops and acceleration. So this is already included in everything I said.
4. The high-torque electric motor lets the gas motor be run on the more efficient but less torquey atkinson cycle.
Duh. See the whole point I made about constant speed motors and tuning them for efficient operation and using forms of motors that are not "sexy" in vehicles. Sheesh, what is so hard to undertand in my original post. I'd really like to know so I can explain it at a level people can grasp.
Now there is one efficiency I did not mention in my original post and that was that hybrids are more efficient and peppy in rolling hill country. Their more efficient but sluggish on mountain country once the lenght of the hill exceeds your stored battery energy and you are running only on gas with a screaming flea engine. Hybrids essentially flatten the hills since you can recover the up energy on the down slope regeneratively. In theoury anyhow, in practice it's not that great.
but I'll excuse myself for not mentioning other obvious forms of regenrerative recovery since I assumed all that when I said it takes 30-40Hp to push a car at 55Mph. I was assuming flat driving with no stops or starts.
Moreover I was not attacking hybrids, I was simply saying, as noted inthe title and the subject of the article, that electric cars have serious impediments to adoption. Your kneejerk ill considered response thinking I was atacking hybrids is perplexing. Your belif they are magical does not help reality based conclsuions about them.
I'm not forgetting it. I'm assuming it. The limiting case is at 100% recovery and lossless acceleration, city driving approaches highway driving efficiency where the motor runs at a constant rate. Depending where the engine was tuned (highway or city) one of the two might be slightly better on average but since I've already ignored conversion losses, basically those numbers I sight are best case scenarios and include the effect you mention.
On the other hand don't think I'm arguing against hybrids. I'm arguing that wholsale conversion to electric cars is absurd until we consider how we deliver the power in a way that lets people actually use their cars as they please. I'm also pointing out that counter to everyones assumptions about hybrids--they don't do magic, they are 100% gas engines. the battery is just for acceleration and breaking.
the solar flux on a cloudless day at noon at the equator is about 1 Kilowatt/sq meter. if we assume that solar cells can be made to run at 20% effiiciency, and that given that cars won't have panels aligned to the sun we assume liberally that 1 meter of useful area is presented then that is 200 watts of power. driving at 55 requires 23 kilo watts. So you simple cannot even come close to driving sustainably at 55 mph. not even close.
to put this in perspective: if you parked your car for two days you could drive it for 1 hour on the highway.
this assumes you are able to park it on the equator and not in a parking garage.
"sorry boss, it was cloudy so I can't drive to work today".
oops. The last paragraph is wrong. the 300 terawatt hours would provide a lot more gas stations than that. so that's a red herring. However all the numbers and conclusion up that point still stand.
When a hybrid is traveling on a highway for an extended period, 100% of it's power is coming from the engine. To push a modest car (honda accord) down the road a 55MPH requires about a 30-40 HP engine. You probably want a larger one so it does not wimp out if you want to go faster for an extended period.
The batteries in hybrid cars are only used for acceleration in city driving and short periods of excess speed on highways. They are NOT used for anything else because ultimately 100% of the average power comes from the gasoline.
Thus the sole benefit of hybrids is that it turns city driving inefficiency (stop and accelerate) into the equivalent of highway driving since the engine can run at a constant, efficeint, tuned point almost continuously. For people who actually stop and leave the engine running for long periods, the hybrid can save a few sips by shutting down the engine. Also the hybrid can make use of engine type not associated with sexy car performance, like diesel.
But anyhow it cant avoid getting 100% of the energy from the gas.
What about charging the batteries off the grid? That will not work if everyone tries to do it.
If you wanted to be able to pull your car into gas station and gas it up in under 10 minutes to a range of 300 miles like you can with gasoline then the gas station would have to deliver power to your car at a rate of a megawatts. Besides the absurdity of delivering that over the powerlines, any practical battery would explode when charged that fast.
Okey you say, well what about trickle charging it overnight or while you are parked for a long time at work. Well that would work, for you. But if everyone else in your neighborhood did it, then we are back to delivering many megawatts to every neighbor hood. that simply is impossible until we have underground superconduction transmission lines in every city in america.
Thus electric cars re nice show pieces but cannot replace gasoline on a large scale at this time.
Thus the only way to charge an electric car is to have distributed power production or distributed chemical fuel delivery.
So this can mean: 1) hydrids that burn fuel like now. 2) hydrids that burn hydrogen like fuel cells (make the hydrogen at nuclear plants and ship it as chemical energy not over wires)
or charge batteries at nuclear plants and ship them in trucks to refueling stations where you swap batteries.
Thus you can only transport the power needed for typical driving as chemical energy.
30 HP = 22,371 watts
300 miles @ 55 Miles/hour = 19,636 seconds
30hp for 19636= 43,9285,090 joules
delivering 24 mega joules in one minute requires
7,321,418 watts from "pump" at gas station to recharge one car.
If a gas station was a busy one and was processing one car per minute all day long then it would have continous feed of 7 megawatts.
The total capacity of the US for power production is 300 terrawatt hours. so that would mean that if we doubled the entire electrical capacity of the US we could build less than 10,000 gas stations, ignoring all the transmission problems.
So MS does not have to pay to have it's search first on the bowser. Nonsense. They pay and pay a lot. Who do you think pays the salary of the IE developers? it comes from Windows sales. Just as Firefox developers get paid by google (and others). End of story.
If cash makes it okay, then this is pot calling the kettle black.
When NeXT came out every box shipped with ZILLA installed. It was the forerunner of modern screen-saver grid computers. You donated unused cycles to the Zilla organization and they did intersting stuff. In particular they allegedly did much of the four-color map theorem proof on Zilla and some of the early movie CGI work was done on Zilla.
Another example of how far ahead NeXT was at the time. (another groovy thing on NeXT was it's early use of Mime and markup formatting for e-mail, something we take for granted now. e.g. all the NeXT e-mail clients had built in voice recording. Neither mac, windows, linux or sun had that at the time. And these days it's not even built in.)
The neat thing apple brings to the table here is not the technology to do grid computing like this, but to do micropayments. This has been worked out via the apple stores and even better for them is if they can do barter (itunes) rather than cash.
Someday they could do much more than torrent. Maybe they will lease xgrid to say airline companies to do scheduling. You get paid too!
Nonsense. The network is the computer was a Sun marketing blurk back in the late 80's before java was anything. And back in the early days of java, it's first marketing was as an appliance driver (known as "oak" at that time). Then they envisioned it would power mini computers you'd take with you with just enough brains to either authenticate the local machine or phone home and mount your personal info on a desktop whereever you were. It was not till much later. Then they started pushing it as a middleware that could replace both the browser and the OS. and finally as something integrated into the browser.
The reason we are cursed with such a horror as NFS, is that in fact, at the time, it was so damn good and so much better than everything else and so early on the scene that it's practically embedded in our computer's dna. Sun I believe is responsible for that. And that is what they meant when they said the network is the computer. Not the internet, but the LAN.
Everyone who hates apple is quick to say that apple is all just reality distortion field and expensive hardware. But apple executes. Apples has a track record of seeing potential and executing reall working visions not just fancy stickers. Consider the first accessible use of Post script for Desktop publishing. Hell consider the first __stable__ implemetation of dynamic ram (at the time of the apple two the intel world was 100% static ram (I should know I used to sell and design s-100 bus memory boards) in a real reconfigurable computer. This brought cheap low power but reconfigurable systems to the masses. Or Windows Mouse Pointers in the living room. Or consider the all those other half assed implementations of every other innovation in computing that apple managed to make "just work". The iPod only being the latest.
You can bet the video center will happen after apple shows the world how to make it work in the average home. Sure you have myth TV and tuners now, but how many people would trade in their TiVO for one of those.
You could have said the same thing about computers being sold to balance your checkbook or layout your news letter. Before Visical and MacWrite no one was going to trade in their calculator or stop going to the professional graphics company for their work. After that they had a choice where the computer made sense for many more people.
Cringley predicted this months ago. Cringleys speculation was that the reason Apple chose Intel over the nominally superior AMD was to get access to intel technologies on a broad level, including their low power embeded chips for the ipod. (Which they were familiar with from the Newton).
I'm sort of puzzled on the pricing of these machines. A Del inspirion with a core duo costs about $1000-1400 when nicely trimmed (still a tad underspeced on bus speed wrt to the macbook pro, and without the mac software and groovy mac OS). Even so that price beats the pants off of a MacbookPro for the raw hardware however. So one naturally wonders if the macs are overpriced.
Yet now we see that when Dell puts out a more highly speced machine the price jumps up enormously. ENORMOUSLY. so what the heck is going on here. Is there some huge magic under the hood here that says all core duos vary enormously. If so then comparing the Inspirion price to the core duo to the mac book pro is not apropos.
If we compare this core duo against the mac, the macbook pro is clearly a much better price and dell is way overpriced.
So can anyone interpolate these differences. Where does the mac fit in this scheme and which is the apropos comparison.
In some ways, the lawsuit against Microsoft exonerates Apple. The reason Burst won it's lawsuit against MS was because they had engaged in negotiations with MS and revealed their technology secrets to MS. And because MS's subsequent behaviour convinced the jury MS had negiotated in bad faith as a means of stealing the IP.
I think we can be pretty sure that 1) MS would not have shared this with APPLE. 2) the MS was doing this to gain a competative advantage in streaming over the fairly well established quicktime standard at the time.
Thus if Apple copied Burst technology it was at a very high conceptual level, because they woul dnot have had access to the methods like MS did. And arguably, what made Bursts techinology valuable at the time was as a response to Apple's prior art, not because it was such a world-beating technology. That is, if quicktime had not existied MS would not have felt pressured to acquire Busts technology with any alacrity but woul dhave just developed their own.
and the company has code that is still better than anything else on the market -- code not even Microsoft has seen.
Uh if the code is so super secret where how does Cringley know it's superior? And if the code is so much superior to everyones elses including Apple, then obviously apple must not be infringing much since their code is so allegedly sub par. Cringley wants it both ways.
If this IP is so dramatically enabling and un obvious then apple's quicktime should also be vastly superior to microsofts viewer and it's not. (it's more polished and seemless, but does not have any earthshaking superiority in gapless playback or compression--(with the exception of the new data formats)).
If the IP is so obvious that everyone has it, then one might argue it's also not a worthwhile patent either.
If it's actually secret then no one has copied it at a high level implmentation.
They forget that Burst spent 21 years and $66 million developing that IP
21 real years? or 21 man years? either way, if the claims are true they had plenty of time to get this to market ahead of apple and MS so how can they argue they were injured by unfair competition.
It looks to me that the success of itunes is built on a lot more than some sort of streaming technology. So maybe they should get some royalties on the actual product they were competing against, quicktime, and not on the applicaitons it was put too. If apple had built itunes on top of a transport layer based on Windows Media player under the hood it would still function the same.
Now all that being said it's not impossible that apple did go ahead and knowing filtch methods and put them in quick time. Take for example, Stacker going into windows/DOS. I don't think Stacker technology really had anything to do with the success, short or long term, of windows. Still it was proven MS stole the technology. So maybe Apple is also capable of stealing someone elses IP. But the damages out to reflect the harm done. Stacker probably could have made a pile of money in the short term selling their code but would they deserve an ongoing percentage of MS gross sales???
These guys may deserve something if it can be shown their prior art was first, patented, and the methods actually infringed. (remember patents are supposed to be strictly for methods of implementing the actions of an idea not the idea itself. e.g You cant patent the idea of swinging but you can patent a specific method of propelling yourself.) But these guys are being one-click greedy on the scale of NTP.
Here's something I've noticed lately: Big companies believe in patents as long as they are talking about THEIR patents
Finally, cringley has his head up his ass there. As general rule big companies DON'T use their patents as weapons. They use them as defense and act on the tiniest fraction of their portfolio. Witness IBM which patents everything and sues infrequently. They whip those out when people sue them to turn it into a case of mutually assured destruction: if the plaintiff chooses to persue they could well end up paying IBMs court costs for their infrindgment of IBM counter-patents. The same is true of Apple. Cases like Windows Mouse Pointer Look and feel suit against MS and the Rotary dial suits against MP3 Players are the exception not the rule.
to answer your question.
If you only have a subspace of example keys (that is to say, you only have devices whose additiion mask bits span say 30 bits not the full 40) then at best you can only solve for the 30 corresponding key values. So the spoof Sony XXXX can answer correctly when queried with any addition mask that is contained in the 30 key values it knows. The first time it gets a query outside that range it cant come up with the correct decode secret. Now a real Sony XXXX can create the right secret no matter what the addition mask because it knows all 40 key values.
the keys are never transmeitted only the addition rules. So here's a hypthetical exchange
device 1: my addition rule is 17+13 device 2: my addition rule is 24+5 device 1: okay I computed the secret= key[24]+key[5] (which I alone know) device 2: okay I computed the secret = key[17]+key[13] (which I alone know)
at this point both secrets are the same but neither secret has appeared on any tapable wire.
now dev1 says: dev1: youre challenge is to encrypt this number: rand = 1380912 dev2: my resonpsne is theat encrypting 1380912 with my secret key gives 478120181 dev1: hey that's right, I was able to check that using my secret dev2: youre challenge is to encrypt this number: eand = 18171710...
and so on.
now each device has poven to each other they share the same secret key but they have never transmitted it. You cna't memorize the transaction pattern for two reasons. 1) the random challenge will vary even if the addition keys dont
and any time you connect a new device the addition keys will change.
Here's how spoofing would fail. Suppose I tell a new device I'm a a sony xxxx and my addition key is 1,4,7,... etc and it omitts the last ten bits. Okay that half of the process works. but then the player replys, I'm a panasonic yyyy and my addition key is 1,3,15,...39,40.
Now you're screwed because your spoof device does not know what the keys for 39 and 40 are.
Thus you can't work with the new device. You CAN work with any old device whose subspace of addition keys you have mapped, but not any new device.
Finally just for completeness note that when I say certain bits are held back, that's a simplification. What I mean is that certain basis vectors are held back. Thus to make the point. if every time 39 appears, 40 were also to appear in the addition vector then you can never reverse engineer what 39 and 40 are in the key. you can only figure out what 39+40 are. Thus this talk of certain bits being held back is just for pedagogical simplification.
You have it partly right and partly wrong. First, HDCP does not require super security. It's not how the media is encoded it's just the transport from the player to the viewer that is being encoded. There's a whole nother more secure code for the media encryption. I think what they want to avoid is some gizmho you could put inline that would decode it. SO if they can create a situtation where there is no universal gizmho for every player/viewer combination or one that breaks every year when a new device is released it accomplishes a lot of their purposes.
One supposes that the point of attack has to be outside the media player (dvd) since otherwise there is no need to attack the transport layer and you already have everything you need to decode the video if you are in controll of the inner workings of the player.
So in trying to attack the transport layer there's no reduction of the complexity of the key by restricting the addition vector to a subset of the possible bits. In general it's always going to be about half the bits (half on half off).
By restricting the addition key space its sort of like restricting the space of challenge codes to a challenge response algorithm. The main effect of this is to prevent a challenge code from being seen previously and thus the response learned.
Of course it does, as you surmise, reduce the brute force number of challenge codes one might try to learn every possible attack for that series of player. But I suspect the set is still so large it matters not. And moreover, as I said, that still wont let you build a universal decoded gizmho, just one that works for that particular player for that model year.
Of course for some folks that's all the want. e.g. if it becomes known that there is a gizmho that can be attached to a 2007 sony model XXXXX that can then be spoofed with a certain addition vector then all the hackers will go out and buy that 2007 model which will then work indefintely. But one guesses that maybe the media will then come with something that recognizes that model number and refuses to play in high def. Not sure if they could get away with that as it would piss off some consumers.
I had exactly the same thought. I think this attack may fail. Or rather not be as immediately successful as imagined. Ironically, the fatal flaw is contained in the same algebra mistake made in the orginal post.
In order to prevent this attack from being done easily, the central authority could deliberately hand out linearly dependent addition vectors to any company that applies. For example, suppose a company applies for 10,000 keys. The central authority gives them 10,000 keys and 10,000 addition vectors. But the addition vectors are all crammed into the first 14 or 15 bits of the 40 bit addition vector. (that is bits 16 to 40 are zero). This would assure that the addition vectors are linearly dependent and the code cannot be cracked.
In effect the 10,000 keys are hobbled to representing no more than 15 independent keys, not the requisite 40 to crack this.
Thinking even more globally, the central authority could reserve say the last 10 bits of the addition vector, so that all devices manufactured from 2008 to 2010 never used the last 10 bits. then all devices manufactured from 2010 to 2012 always used the 31st bit but none of the last 9. Then in 2013-2014, all devices always use the 32nd bit but none of the last 8. and so on.
thus they can prevent anyone from collecting all 40 so far into the future that they can assure that any crack that works this year will fail on all new devices.
Of course, the hackers only need to stay on the ball and update their hacks as they can. But it's going to take a very large consipiracy among multiple companies to collect large enough set of addition vectors to crack this.
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What do you do when you want to drive long distance?
Okay good point. Did not read it that way.
Still lets think if this re-interpretation makes any difference to the abinding issue....
assume a very liberal 200 watts per sq meter over a large part of the day and ten sq meters of "effective" normally incident solar energy. that's 2KW for perhaps 8 hour of the day. That's 16KJ. one hour of driving in your car on the highway would take 23KJ.
Furthermore, to do a swap as you suggest, then the household 16KJ/day which it probably does not. So this means you have to pump this back into the grid and take the transmission losses.
So now what? well we have not solved the power distribution problem. That night, you are still going to have to have a whole lot of kilojoules delivered to every house on the block. And your power grid is not going to like that.
Second, your power generation capability has to be as big as the maximum load, not the average load. Thus despite the solar gain injected into the system you still need to build the excess capacity to handle winter, when it low light and people still want to drive their cars, heat their homes, and turn on lights, and make aluminum.
Finally I've been pretty generous here by not including all the storage, grid re-transmission, and conversion losses, the fact that we don't live on the equator, etc...
If I were to cut that 16Kj by two to say 8Kj, then all this solar gain abounts to 20 minutes of driving time under ideal conditions. That does not even dent the problem.
Right. So that means they get poorer efficiency that I described. if they ran at constant rates they could be tuned to get maximal efficiency.
1. Your engine is the same total power, but now has two pieces. You can turn half of it off when both are not needed, such as when cruising.
First I did mention you could turn off the engine if you were parked. however the idea you could turn it off when cuising is ass backward nonsense. When you are cruising, you MUST run the engine. infact in a steady state condition (i.e. "cruising") 100% of the power comes from the engine. I realize people have a hard time grasping this trivial observation which is why I posted it.
2. In stop-and-go traffic, regenerative braking turns your kinetic energy back into stored power you can use to accelerate.
WHich I included in my calculations when I said that hydrids allow, in the ideal limit, city driving to become as efficeint as highway driving by elminating stops and acceleration. So this is already included in everything I said.
4. The high-torque electric motor lets the gas motor be run on the more efficient but less torquey atkinson cycle.
Duh. See the whole point I made about constant speed motors and tuning them for efficient operation and using forms of motors that are not "sexy" in vehicles. Sheesh, what is so hard to undertand in my original post. I'd really like to know so I can explain it at a level people can grasp.
Now there is one efficiency I did not mention in my original post and that was that hybrids are more efficient and peppy in rolling hill country. Their more efficient but sluggish on mountain country once the lenght of the hill exceeds your stored battery energy and you are running only on gas with a screaming flea engine. Hybrids essentially flatten the hills since you can recover the up energy on the down slope regeneratively. In theoury anyhow, in practice it's not that great.
but I'll excuse myself for not mentioning other obvious forms of regenrerative recovery since I assumed all that when I said it takes 30-40Hp to push a car at 55Mph. I was assuming flat driving with no stops or starts.
Moreover I was not attacking hybrids, I was simply saying, as noted inthe title and the subject of the article, that electric cars have serious impediments to adoption. Your kneejerk ill considered response thinking I was atacking hybrids is perplexing. Your belif they are magical does not help reality based conclsuions about them.
I'm not forgetting it. I'm assuming it. The limiting case is at 100% recovery and lossless acceleration, city driving approaches highway driving efficiency where the motor runs at a constant rate. Depending where the engine was tuned (highway or city) one of the two might be slightly better on average but since I've already ignored conversion losses, basically those numbers I sight are best case scenarios and include the effect you mention.
On the other hand don't think I'm arguing against hybrids. I'm arguing that wholsale conversion to electric cars is absurd until we consider how we deliver the power in a way that lets people actually use their cars as they please. I'm also pointing out that counter to everyones assumptions about hybrids--they don't do magic, they are 100% gas engines. the battery is just for acceleration and breaking.
Actually it's worse than I just said.
if you charged it for 2 weeks you could drive it on the highway for an hour.
So yes I will make fun of your "solutions".
the solar flux on a cloudless day at noon at the equator is about 1 Kilowatt/sq meter. if we assume that solar cells can be made to run at 20% effiiciency, and that given that cars won't have panels aligned to the sun we assume liberally that 1 meter of useful area is presented then that is
200 watts of power. driving at 55 requires 23 kilo watts. So you simple cannot even come close to driving sustainably at 55 mph. not even close.
to put this in perspective: if you parked your car for two days you could drive it for 1 hour on the highway.
this assumes you are able to park it on the equator and not in a parking garage.
"sorry boss, it was cloudy so I can't drive to work today".
oops. The last paragraph is wrong. the 300 terawatt hours would provide a lot more gas stations than that. so that's a red herring. However all the numbers and conclusion up that point still stand.
When a hybrid is traveling on a highway for an extended period, 100% of it's power is coming from the engine. To push a modest car (honda accord) down the road a 55MPH requires about a 30-40 HP engine. You probably want a larger one so it does not wimp out if you want to go faster for an extended period.
The batteries in hybrid cars are only used for acceleration in city driving and short periods of excess speed on highways. They are NOT used for anything else because ultimately 100% of the average power comes from the gasoline.
Thus the sole benefit of hybrids is that it turns city driving inefficiency (stop and accelerate) into the equivalent of highway driving since the engine can run at a constant, efficeint, tuned point almost continuously. For people who actually stop and leave the engine running for long periods, the hybrid can save a few sips by shutting down the engine. Also the hybrid can make use of engine type not associated with sexy car performance, like diesel.
But anyhow it cant avoid getting 100% of the energy from the gas.
What about charging the batteries off the grid? That will not work if everyone tries to do it.
If you wanted to be able to pull your car into gas station and gas it up in under 10 minutes to a range of 300 miles like you can with gasoline then the gas station would have to deliver power to your car at a rate of a megawatts. Besides the absurdity of delivering that over the powerlines, any practical battery would explode when charged that fast.
Okey you say, well what about trickle charging it overnight or while you are parked for a long time at work. Well that would work, for you. But if everyone else in your neighborhood did it, then we are back to delivering many megawatts to every neighbor hood. that simply is impossible until we have underground superconduction transmission lines in every city in america.
Thus electric cars re nice show pieces but cannot replace gasoline on a large scale at this time.
Thus the only way to charge an electric car is to have distributed power production or distributed chemical fuel delivery.
So this can mean: 1) hydrids that burn fuel like now. 2) hydrids that burn hydrogen like fuel cells (make the hydrogen at nuclear plants and ship it as chemical energy not over wires)
or charge batteries at nuclear plants and ship them in trucks to refueling stations where you swap batteries.
Thus you can only transport the power needed for typical driving as chemical energy.
30 HP = 22,371 watts
300 miles @ 55 Miles/hour = 19,636 seconds
30hp for 19636= 43,9285,090 joules
delivering 24 mega joules in one minute requires
7,321,418 watts from "pump" at gas station to recharge one car.
If a gas station was a busy one and was processing one car per minute all day long then it would have continous feed of 7 megawatts.
The total capacity of the US for power production is 300 terrawatt hours. so that would mean that if we doubled the entire electrical capacity of the US we could build less than 10,000 gas stations, ignoring all the transmission problems.
So MS does not have to pay to have it's search first on the bowser. Nonsense. They pay and pay a lot. Who do you think pays the salary of the IE developers? it comes from Windows sales. Just as Firefox developers get paid by google (and others). End of story.
If cash makes it okay, then this is pot calling the kettle black.
When NeXT came out every box shipped with ZILLA installed. It was the forerunner of modern screen-saver grid computers. You donated unused cycles to the Zilla organization and they did intersting stuff. In particular they allegedly did much of the four-color map theorem proof on Zilla and some of the early movie CGI work was done on Zilla. Another example of how far ahead NeXT was at the time. (another groovy thing on NeXT was it's early use of Mime and markup formatting for e-mail, something we take for granted now. e.g. all the NeXT e-mail clients had built in voice recording. Neither mac, windows, linux or sun had that at the time. And these days it's not even built in.) The neat thing apple brings to the table here is not the technology to do grid computing like this, but to do micropayments. This has been worked out via the apple stores and even better for them is if they can do barter (itunes) rather than cash. Someday they could do much more than torrent. Maybe they will lease xgrid to say airline companies to do scheduling. You get paid too!
Nonsense. The network is the computer was a Sun marketing blurk back in the late 80's before java was anything. And back in the early days of java, it's first marketing was as an appliance driver (known as "oak" at that time). Then they envisioned it would power mini computers you'd take with you with just enough brains to either authenticate the local machine or phone home and mount your personal info on a desktop whereever you were. It was not till much later. Then they started pushing it as a middleware that could replace both the browser and the OS. and finally as something integrated into the browser.
The reason we are cursed with such a horror as NFS, is that in fact, at the time, it was so damn good and so much better than everything else and so early on the scene that it's practically embedded in our computer's dna. Sun I believe is responsible for that. And that is what they meant when they said the network is the computer. Not the internet, but the LAN.
Everyone who hates apple is quick to say that apple is all just reality distortion field and expensive hardware. But apple executes. Apples has a track record of seeing potential and executing reall working visions not just fancy stickers. Consider the first accessible use of Post script for Desktop publishing. Hell consider the first __stable__ implemetation of dynamic ram (at the time of the apple two the intel world was 100% static ram (I should know I used to sell and design s-100 bus memory boards) in a real reconfigurable computer. This brought cheap low power but reconfigurable systems to the masses. Or Windows Mouse Pointers in the living room. Or consider the all those other half assed implementations of every other innovation in computing that apple managed to make "just work". The iPod only being the latest.
You can bet the video center will happen after apple shows the world how to make it work in the average home. Sure you have myth TV and tuners now, but how many people would trade in their TiVO for one of those.
You could have said the same thing about computers being sold to balance your checkbook or layout your news letter. Before Visical and MacWrite no one was going to trade in their calculator or stop going to the professional graphics company for their work. After that they had a choice where the computer made sense for many more people.
Cringley predicted this months ago. Cringleys speculation was that the reason Apple chose Intel over the nominally superior AMD was to get access to intel technologies on a broad level, including their low power embeded chips for the ipod. (Which they were familiar with from the Newton).
Trek and Trekker: When Kirk met Spock.
I'm sort of puzzled on the pricing of these machines. A Del inspirion with a core duo costs about $1000-1400 when nicely trimmed (still a tad underspeced on bus speed wrt to the macbook pro, and without the mac software and groovy mac OS). Even so that price beats the pants off of a MacbookPro for the raw hardware however. So one naturally wonders if the macs are overpriced.
Yet now we see that when Dell puts out a more highly speced machine the price jumps up enormously. ENORMOUSLY. so what the heck is going on here. Is there some huge magic under the hood here that says all core duos vary enormously. If so then comparing the Inspirion price to the core duo to the mac book pro is not apropos.
If we compare this core duo against the mac, the macbook pro is clearly a much better price and dell is way overpriced.
So can anyone interpolate these differences. Where does the mac fit in this scheme and which is the apropos comparison.
In some ways, the lawsuit against Microsoft exonerates Apple. The reason Burst won it's lawsuit against MS was because they had engaged in negotiations with MS and revealed their technology secrets to MS. And because MS's subsequent behaviour convinced the jury MS had negiotated in bad faith as a means of stealing the IP.
I think we can be pretty sure that 1) MS would not have shared this with APPLE. 2) the MS was doing this to gain a competative advantage in streaming over the fairly well established quicktime standard at the time.
Thus if Apple copied Burst technology it was at a very high conceptual level, because they woul dnot have had access to the methods like MS did. And arguably, what made Bursts techinology valuable at the time was as a response to Apple's prior art, not because it was such a world-beating technology. That is, if quicktime had not existied MS would not have felt pressured to acquire Busts technology with any alacrity but woul dhave just developed their own.
Uh if the code is so super secret where how does Cringley know it's superior? And if the code is so much superior to everyones elses including Apple, then obviously apple must not be infringing much since their code is so allegedly sub par. Cringley wants it both ways.
If this IP is so dramatically enabling and un obvious then apple's quicktime should also be vastly superior to microsofts viewer and it's not. (it's more polished and seemless, but does not have any earthshaking superiority in gapless playback or compression--(with the exception of the new data formats)).
If the IP is so obvious that everyone has it, then one might argue it's also not a worthwhile patent either.
If it's actually secret then no one has copied it at a high level implmentation.
They forget that Burst spent 21 years and $66 million developing that IP
21 real years? or 21 man years? either way, if the claims are true they had plenty of time to get this to market ahead of apple and MS so how can they argue they were injured by unfair competition.
It looks to me that the success of itunes is built on a lot more than some sort of streaming technology. So maybe they should get some royalties on the actual product they were competing against, quicktime, and not on the applicaitons it was put too. If apple had built itunes on top of a transport layer based on Windows Media player under the hood it would still function the same.
Now all that being said it's not impossible that apple did go ahead and knowing filtch methods and put them in quick time. Take for example, Stacker going into windows/DOS. I don't think Stacker technology really had anything to do with the success, short or long term, of windows. Still it was proven MS stole the technology. So maybe Apple is also capable of stealing someone elses IP. But the damages out to reflect the harm done. Stacker probably could have made a pile of money in the short term selling their code but would they deserve an ongoing percentage of MS gross sales???
These guys may deserve something if it can be shown their prior art was first, patented, and the methods actually infringed. (remember patents are supposed to be strictly for methods of implementing the actions of an idea not the idea itself. e.g You cant patent the idea of swinging but you can patent a specific method of propelling yourself.) But these guys are being one-click greedy on the scale of NTP.
Here's something I've noticed lately: Big companies believe in patents as long as they are talking about THEIR patents
Finally, cringley has his head up his ass there. As general rule big companies DON'T use their patents as weapons. They use them as defense and act on the tiniest fraction of their portfolio. Witness IBM which patents everything and sues infrequently. They whip those out when people sue them to turn it into a case of mutually assured destruction: if the plaintiff chooses to persue they could well end up paying IBMs court costs for their infrindgment of IBM counter-patents. The same is true of Apple. Cases like Windows Mouse Pointer Look and feel suit against MS and the Rotary dial suits against MP3 Players are the exception not the rule.
to answer your question. If you only have a subspace of example keys (that is to say, you only have devices whose additiion mask bits span say 30 bits not the full 40) then at best you can only solve for the 30 corresponding key values. So the spoof Sony XXXX can answer correctly when queried with any addition mask that is contained in the 30 key values it knows. The first time it gets a query outside that range it cant come up with the correct decode secret. Now a real Sony XXXX can create the right secret no matter what the addition mask because it knows all 40 key values.
No this scheme won't work. Here's why.
...
the keys are never transmeitted only the addition rules. So here's a hypthetical exchange
device 1: my addition rule is 17+13
device 2: my addition rule is 24+5
device 1: okay I computed the secret= key[24]+key[5] (which I alone know)
device 2: okay I computed the secret = key[17]+key[13] (which I alone know)
at this point both secrets are the same but neither secret has appeared on any tapable wire.
now dev1 says:
dev1: youre challenge is to encrypt this number: rand = 1380912
dev2: my resonpsne is theat encrypting 1380912 with my secret key gives 478120181
dev1: hey that's right, I was able to check that using my secret
dev2: youre challenge is to encrypt this number: eand = 18171710
and so on.
now each device has poven to each other they share the same secret key but they have never transmitted it.
You cna't memorize the transaction pattern for two reasons. 1) the random challenge will vary even if the addition keys dont
and any time you connect a new device the addition keys will change.
close but not quite.
... etc and it omitts the last ten bits. Okay that half of the process works. but then the player replys, I'm a panasonic yyyy and my addition key is 1,3,15,...39,40.
Here's how spoofing would fail. Suppose I tell a new device I'm a a sony xxxx and my addition key is 1,4,7,
Now you're screwed because your spoof device does not know what the keys for 39 and 40 are.
Thus you can't work with the new device. You CAN work with any old device whose subspace of addition keys you have mapped, but not any new device.
Finally just for completeness note that when I say certain bits are held back, that's a simplification. What I mean is that certain basis vectors are held back. Thus to make the point. if every time 39 appears, 40 were also to appear in the addition vector then you can never reverse engineer what 39 and 40 are in the key. you can only figure out what 39+40 are. Thus this talk of certain bits being held back is just for pedagogical simplification.
okay then 20 not 15. whatever. they just don't release the full basis to any vendor. then you cant universally reverse emgineer it.
and no. you are confusing devices with dimensionality. a 20 dimensional spaces spans much more then 10,000 devices.
You have it partly right and partly wrong.
First, HDCP does not require super security. It's not how the media is encoded it's just the transport from the player to the viewer that is being encoded. There's a whole nother more secure code for the media encryption. I think what they want to avoid is some gizmho you could put inline that would decode it. SO if they can create a situtation where there is no universal gizmho for every player/viewer combination or one that breaks every year when a new device is released it accomplishes a lot of their purposes.
One supposes that the point of attack has to be outside the media player (dvd) since otherwise there is no need to attack the transport layer and you already have everything you need to decode the video if you are in controll of the inner workings of the player.
So in trying to attack the transport layer there's no reduction of the complexity of the key by restricting the addition vector to a subset of the possible bits. In general it's always going to be about half the bits (half on half off).
By restricting the addition key space its sort of like restricting the space of challenge codes to a challenge response algorithm. The main effect of this is to prevent a challenge code from being seen previously and thus the response learned.
Of course it does, as you surmise, reduce the brute force number of challenge codes one might try to learn every possible attack for that series of player. But I suspect the set is still so large it matters not. And moreover, as I said, that still wont let you build a universal decoded gizmho, just one that works for that particular player for that model year.
Of course for some folks that's all the want. e.g. if it becomes known that there is a gizmho that can be attached to a 2007 sony model XXXXX that can then be spoofed with a certain addition vector then all the hackers will go out and buy that 2007 model which will then work indefintely. But one guesses that maybe the media will then come with something that recognizes that model number and refuses to play in high def. Not sure if they could get away with that as it would piss off some consumers.
I had exactly the same thought. I think this attack may fail. Or rather not be as immediately successful as imagined. Ironically, the fatal flaw is contained in the same algebra mistake made in the orginal post.
In order to prevent this attack from being done easily, the central authority could deliberately hand out linearly dependent addition vectors to any company that applies. For example, suppose a company applies for 10,000 keys. The central authority gives them 10,000 keys and 10,000 addition vectors. But the addition vectors are all crammed into the first 14 or 15 bits of the 40 bit addition vector. (that is bits 16 to 40 are zero). This would assure that the addition vectors are linearly dependent and the code cannot be cracked.
In effect the 10,000 keys are hobbled to representing no more than 15 independent keys, not the requisite 40 to crack this.
Thinking even more globally, the central authority could reserve say the last 10 bits of the addition vector, so that all devices manufactured from 2008 to 2010 never used the last 10 bits. then all devices manufactured from 2010 to 2012 always used the 31st bit but none of the last 9. Then in 2013-2014, all devices always use the 32nd bit but none of the last 8. and so on.
thus they can prevent anyone from collecting all 40 so far into the future that they can assure that any crack that works this year will fail on all new devices.
Of course, the hackers only need to stay on the ball and update their hacks as they can. But it's going to take a very large consipiracy among multiple companies to collect large enough set of addition vectors to crack this.
thanks for the sensible reply.