The ITU got it half right. What is 4G if not the fourth generation of cellular networks? To me, LTE and WiMax, both coming after 3G networks and being both faster and newer technology are a fourth generation. Anything HSPA-derived is not, it's just evolved 3G technology, so call it 3.5G or 3.9G, whatever. Unfortunately, when changing the terms to allow the current incarnations of LTE and WiMax to count as 4G the ITU basically gave in to T-Mobile's marketing team and allowed HSPA networks to be called 4G as well if they're fast enough. AT&T was rightfully fighting this behavior before the ITU allowed it, then immediately changed course and jumped on the "oh yea, we have '4G' too!!!!" bandwagon.
I wonder what AT&T and T-Mobile plan to do to differentiate their LTE-equipped proper 4G devices from the pile of current 3G devices their marketards have labeled as 4G. The average consumer is likely to be very confused.
And it wouldn't be, since the Constitutional guarantee of free speech only applies to the government interfering with your speech. I'm actually having a hard time coming up with an example for any case that a contract between two private parties even could possibly be in violation of the Constitution. Not to say that it's not possible (I'd imagine some examples could be quite interesting cases, as an armchair lawyer), just unlikely.
Seriously. My last phone was a Sony K850 "candybar" style dumbphone. It was thicker than most due to having a really nice camera, but in terms of length and width was about the size of half of a "king size" actual candy bar. The top corners of the phone created pressure points on my ear when on long calls since it was so narrow. I don't need a smaller phone, in fact I'm quite happy with the size of my Evo, which was the largest smartphone on the market when it came out.
Except the malware currently being seen exploits nothing but the meatbag in front of the computer. It's the same kind of fake antivirus shit we've seen for the last year or two on Windows. Not of course to discount the importance of fixing real security issues in a reasonable amount of time, but even correlating the two is stretching quite a lot.
Virtual desktops are nothing like multiple monitors. With multiple monitors, I can have a SQL browser, my code, the documentation for whatever I'm coding with, and a test window open and visible at the same time. Virtual desktops make it easier to keep different tasks separated, multiple monitors let you see everything at once.
And for the record, I disable virtual desktops immediately on my Linux installs. I've tried using them many times and aside from being excellent as a "boss key" to switch from browsing the internet to work I've always found them lacking compared to multiple monitors. The only time I ever found them truly useful is if I have a VM running on a laptop and want to easily switch between a full screen VM and my normal desktop.
In the case of movies, it's not so much that it saves space, it's more that it breaks the large file up into more manageable chunks and it also gives you checksums to know if something got corrupted.
But we already have things for that which do it better. Bundled checksum files in the normal SFV, MD5, or SHA1 formats handle detecting corruption and PAR2 can not only detect but also repair files. Hell, PAR2 can even split and reassemble files when needed (though it is NEVER needed, since every protocol in use today either transfers things in chunks no matter what (BitTorrent, Usenet) or supports retrieving arbitrary portions of a file (FTP, HTTP) to retry a damaged chunk.
Basically there is absolutely zero reason for the continued use of split RAR files, the "scene" continues to use them solely on inertia.
I wish there were better legitimate ways to do video-on-demand. Dealing with the pirate scene and their stupid standards is probably the worst part of having a decent HTPC setup these days. They'll go out of their way to demand a specific type of encoding solely to retain compatibility with a hardware Xvid player only made for three months in China, but they won't give up on useless extra layers of archive formats.
It just makes things faster. My downloading habits haven't changed as my internet connection's gotten faster, I still average below 500GB and occasionally peak over 1TB on 50Mbit the same as I did on 10Mbit, the difference is that my computers can be off or idle at some points and my internet connection isn't always clogged up.
There's only so much to download, but a faster connection lets it take less time and allows more things to be happening at once.
Uh...wha? I've smoked salvia many times and know the crazy shit it can make you see (I've seen television characters become demons in my living room, thought that all of existence was an illusion created by rapidly moving air bubbles in a universe of folded rubbery sheets,etc.), but you seem to be taking hallucinogen "revelations" a bit too seriously.
Don't get me wrong, drugs can be great for getting an alternate perspective on something, but you have to look at what you think you've discovered while high through the lens of reality before you can know if it's something worthwhile or just something you thought made sense at the time.
Also, personally I wouldn't be recommending salvia to everyone. It's effects are short-lived but incredibly potent and it certainly should not be used outside of appropriate environments. The reason it's getting banned in so many states are idiots who think they can treat it like weed and end up doing something stupid/dangerous in public.
I think that's the point. Who cares if you can port between two things that don't run the same kind of software? It's not like you're going to be playing Crysis on your phone. It's like having easy portability between Solaris and Android -- OK sure, but why?
Take a look at the titles available on Xbox Live Arcade. Out of the top 10, eight of them have simple enough controls that they could easily be played on a phone. If I was the developer of any of those games I'd be seriously looking in to adapting it to touch input. If that's all it takes to open up a new market for one's title, why not?
Everyone keeps referring to these apps as "Checkpoint Evasion" apps, implying their primary purpose is to help drunks dodge DUI checks. Both PhantomAlert and Trapster are primarily built to identify SPEED TRAPS, not DUI checkpoints. They just happen to allow users to tag checkpoints as well. I've been a Trapster user pretty much since it came out and have never seen a checkpoint listed. The "Buzzed" app seems to be focused on DUI checks and thus could be much more questionable, but again at least the other two are not explicitly for DUI checkpoint evasion.
Hell I'm all for both of these, I just figure baby steps and such. Fortunately while many don't write it that way, I haven't met a person who didn't understand YYYYMMDD HHmmss format for date/time. It's those early days in the month with Europeans using DD-MM-YYYY format that screw me up, being used to MM-DD-YYYY. I'm sure the same is true the other way around too.
No disrespect to the man and the effort that must have gone in to creating this, but from a rational perspective we shouldn't need more than one more update ever. Unfortunately as a population we seem to be far too dumb to handle the idea of moving away from something we've done for a long time to something that makes more sense.
Here's all we need for a logical, permanent time solution:
Eliminate useless crap like Daylight Savings Time. Legal noon and solar noon should have the same offset every day of the year. If you believe that shifting schedules with the seasons has a useful impact, changing your alarm is just as easy as changing your clock. 12 hour clocks should be phased out officially as well, they serve no purpose but confusion.
Define a set of purely geographical time zones, equally sized to some chosen chunk of time (likely one hour in keeping with current general practice). Names should be simple and non-political, personally I favor just the standard UTC+/-x:xx format.
Geographical time zones should then be assigned to countries based purely on physical location. Where a country crosses a geographical time zone line, it should keep its normal time zone unless it goes significantly in to the next one.
Where two or more time zones are in use by a country, they should be assigned over as large of political subdivisions as reasonable. Using the US as an example, I'd mainly ride the state lines unless a state had significant ground in multiple geographical zones, then go to county by county if a state needed to be split.
I'm sure there are a few odd cases where exceptions to these guidelines would make sense, and I'm not against it in those cases, but the way we handle time zones now is completely irrational.
No there aren't. In fact Google explicitly states not to, and that those found to be doing so may have their pagerank reduced or be entirely eliminated from the index.
The classic example is JavaScript-rendered dynamic content. This tends not to work so well when you're dealing with search engines. However, if you can serve them a static page that contains the text of the page minus all the rendering, then it can index the content without choking on the JavaScript. I'm not sure how important this is these days, but it certainly was a problem at one time.
If this happens, you did it wrong to begin with. If you're publishing any content where you'd ever care about whether it's searchable, it should always degrade cleanly when features are missing or disabled in a user's browser. The blind, users on less powerful mobile platforms, and those who just disable JS for security or privacy reasons won't get your content either if a search engine wouldn't.
It's also useful to serve modified versions for search engines so that searches for content within your site can return more relevant results. For example, you might insert certain keywords that describe the content of the page using terms that don't actually appear. Case in point, your page talks about Airport, but you serve a copy to Google that inserts the terms 802.11 and Wi-Fi.
There are meta tags for this or you can make up for it by writing in a more "SEO" way. Refer to the "Airport 802.11 (Wi-Fi) access point" rather than just "Airport" in the first paragraph and it's all good.
Finally, there's the question of bandwidth and CPU overhead. If your site changes a lot, Google beats on your servers rather frequently. You can reduce the bandwidth hit by stripping JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. from your content before serving it to Google. This won't significantly change the searchability of the content, but will reduce the bandwidth overhead. And, of course, if there are static versions of content that you can serve instead of a server-side-dynamic version, this also saves on CPU overhead.
The plain Googlebot, as well as most search crawlers, will not even request CSS or Javascript. The Instant Preview bot does, but it's generating a screen capture of your site so you want it to. If you send sane headers this isn't a problem anyways, as the spider will only hit updated content.
For example, when you're writing a blog, you might decide that you don't care if the comments are searchable in Google. Thus, instead of wasting your server's CPU to compute the HTML for the comments, you can serve up a web page containing only the actual blog content when queried by a search engine.
That's really stretching for a justification, if for some reason your comment system is so bad that displaying comments adds a notable load to each page view you should probably go like Ars Technica and some other sites and simply put comments on a deeper linked page behind a rel=nofollow.
CarPC? HTPC? Just being able to turn the computer entirely off when it's not in use rather than suspend?
This particular example was focused on embedded applications, but the general idea of being able to boot a computer reasonably close to instantly is advantageous pretty much anywhere.
From my experience, retiring XBMC would do you more good than such a hack;).
Ye gods, did I hate XBMC.
You are literally the only person I've ever seen say anything close to that. Unless your only experience has been with the early PC builds where hardware video decoding and the like weren't yet working I really don't see any reason to hate, or even dislike, XBMC.
It provides a great 10 foot UI for accessing your media on a TV, plays everything known to man, and runs on all three major OSes plus two "appliance" type devices (three if you count the XBMC-derived Boxee Box). Sigma Designs is even porting it to their SoCs.
Show me another home media platform with nearly the flexibility and ease of use. The closest competition is Boxee, which sacrifices local media features for internet media capabilities.
That's just a matter of what the developer(s) had handy at the time. If you have a homebrew-capable PS3 (3.41 or older) you don't upgrade it for now, so a lot of homebrew initially shows up for some specific firmware version and then gets ported to others. Soon enough we'll have proper homebrew-capable custom 3.55 firmwares thanks to the key release, so give it time.
I don't grow myself, but bored curiosity and being involved in legalization efforts have given me a decent general knowledge of the topic.
You're pretty much right on the nose with the comparison to a PC. Last time I checked my PC with a Kill-A-Watt it ran between 110 and 180 watts depending on load. From the grow threads I've read, a small personal-size grow using CFL lamps requires 4-8 bulbs, and a quick search shows them around 18w on average for the bright ones, so once you factor for cooling fans it's probably between 80 and 160 watts.
Many smart meters use similar technology to BPL for their communication, so it's no surprise at all they can cause interference to HF. The FCC has shown themselves to be so disinterested in its effects on amateur radio that the ARRL had to sue them over it, so while you are technically correct the practical situation is different.
Very good point. I'm currently running my HTPC on an nVidia Ion based Acer nettop, but as soon as someone supports all the important video decode features in a fully open-source driver I'll be building myself a new machine. Dealing with the binary drivers, particularly for HDMI audio, is a pain in the ass.
The fail0verflow team released SPU emulation, so if there aren't public Cell emulators today there's no reason not to expect someone to develop one at some point. The rest is all down to how hard it is to emulate the custom and semi-custom components.
Of course I wouldn't expect PS3 emulation performance to be usable for years. The best PowerPC emulation I've used is Apple's Rosetta and even that is significantly slower than native code for anything non-trivial. Take that and combine it with how the PS3's PPU is both faster and derived from a later generation of POWER than the G4s Rosetta emulates, plus that the rest of the system would also need to be emulated and it becomes a real challenge.
I'd be shocked to see PS3 emulation reach a state where games can be played with an experience within a reasonable margin of error of the real thing before the next generation of game consoles hit mid-life.
That's not to say it can't happen, after all the Wii is quite well emulated and many popular games are entirely playable, sometimes with a better experience than the real thing (1080p for example), but that's a significantly lesser hardware platform which is heavily derived from its predecessor, so the level of work in emulating it was nowhere close to the same level (not at all putting down the work of the Dolphin crew though, that's a great program).
Typically on consoles the media type is one of the bits in the signed area. On the original Xbox and to my knowledge the Xbox 360 it's four bytes with different bits indicating whether the program is allowed to run from various media, including USB devices and rewritable discs. I wouldn't expect Sony's system to be any more strict, so it should at least look at an executable on any valid media to see if it's signed for that media. Since we have the keys, we should be able to modify the flags and re-sign, making copies on rewritable media appear perfectly legitimate to the console.
2: Three Ethernet ports, so it can do some complicated firewalling/IDS/IPS/content filtering/NAT.
You're looking at some really old specs. Sony made that claim early on (actually with the intent that the PS3 be used as a wireless router itself), but production models all have a single gigabit ethernet port. All but the original 20GB model also have 802.11b/g.
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The ITU got it half right. What is 4G if not the fourth generation of cellular networks? To me, LTE and WiMax, both coming after 3G networks and being both faster and newer technology are a fourth generation. Anything HSPA-derived is not, it's just evolved 3G technology, so call it 3.5G or 3.9G, whatever. Unfortunately, when changing the terms to allow the current incarnations of LTE and WiMax to count as 4G the ITU basically gave in to T-Mobile's marketing team and allowed HSPA networks to be called 4G as well if they're fast enough. AT&T was rightfully fighting this behavior before the ITU allowed it, then immediately changed course and jumped on the "oh yea, we have '4G' too!!!!" bandwagon.
I wonder what AT&T and T-Mobile plan to do to differentiate their LTE-equipped proper 4G devices from the pile of current 3G devices their marketards have labeled as 4G. The average consumer is likely to be very confused.
And it wouldn't be, since the Constitutional guarantee of free speech only applies to the government interfering with your speech. I'm actually having a hard time coming up with an example for any case that a contract between two private parties even could possibly be in violation of the Constitution. Not to say that it's not possible (I'd imagine some examples could be quite interesting cases, as an armchair lawyer), just unlikely.
Seriously. My last phone was a Sony K850 "candybar" style dumbphone. It was thicker than most due to having a really nice camera, but in terms of length and width was about the size of half of a "king size" actual candy bar. The top corners of the phone created pressure points on my ear when on long calls since it was so narrow. I don't need a smaller phone, in fact I'm quite happy with the size of my Evo, which was the largest smartphone on the market when it came out.
Except the malware currently being seen exploits nothing but the meatbag in front of the computer. It's the same kind of fake antivirus shit we've seen for the last year or two on Windows. Not of course to discount the importance of fixing real security issues in a reasonable amount of time, but even correlating the two is stretching quite a lot.
Virtual desktops are nothing like multiple monitors. With multiple monitors, I can have a SQL browser, my code, the documentation for whatever I'm coding with, and a test window open and visible at the same time. Virtual desktops make it easier to keep different tasks separated, multiple monitors let you see everything at once.
And for the record, I disable virtual desktops immediately on my Linux installs. I've tried using them many times and aside from being excellent as a "boss key" to switch from browsing the internet to work I've always found them lacking compared to multiple monitors. The only time I ever found them truly useful is if I have a VM running on a laptop and want to easily switch between a full screen VM and my normal desktop.
Nope. They have released the GPL bits as required, just the vast majority of Android is not GPL and Google can legally do whatever they want with it.
In the case of movies, it's not so much that it saves space, it's more that it breaks the large file up into more manageable chunks and it also gives you checksums to know if something got corrupted.
But we already have things for that which do it better. Bundled checksum files in the normal SFV, MD5, or SHA1 formats handle detecting corruption and PAR2 can not only detect but also repair files. Hell, PAR2 can even split and reassemble files when needed (though it is NEVER needed, since every protocol in use today either transfers things in chunks no matter what (BitTorrent, Usenet) or supports retrieving arbitrary portions of a file (FTP, HTTP) to retry a damaged chunk.
Basically there is absolutely zero reason for the continued use of split RAR files, the "scene" continues to use them solely on inertia.
I wish there were better legitimate ways to do video-on-demand. Dealing with the pirate scene and their stupid standards is probably the worst part of having a decent HTPC setup these days. They'll go out of their way to demand a specific type of encoding solely to retain compatibility with a hardware Xvid player only made for three months in China, but they won't give up on useless extra layers of archive formats.
It just makes things faster. My downloading habits haven't changed as my internet connection's gotten faster, I still average below 500GB and occasionally peak over 1TB on 50Mbit the same as I did on 10Mbit, the difference is that my computers can be off or idle at some points and my internet connection isn't always clogged up.
There's only so much to download, but a faster connection lets it take less time and allows more things to be happening at once.
I've downloaded over 600GB this month on a 50Mbit line. I usually average around 350-450, but I had a hard drive crash and lost a lot.
Uh...wha? I've smoked salvia many times and know the crazy shit it can make you see (I've seen television characters become demons in my living room, thought that all of existence was an illusion created by rapidly moving air bubbles in a universe of folded rubbery sheets,etc.), but you seem to be taking hallucinogen "revelations" a bit too seriously.
Don't get me wrong, drugs can be great for getting an alternate perspective on something, but you have to look at what you think you've discovered while high through the lens of reality before you can know if it's something worthwhile or just something you thought made sense at the time.
Also, personally I wouldn't be recommending salvia to everyone. It's effects are short-lived but incredibly potent and it certainly should not be used outside of appropriate environments. The reason it's getting banned in so many states are idiots who think they can treat it like weed and end up doing something stupid/dangerous in public.
I doubt anyone who's interested in an app to help them walk and text at the same time lacks a texting plan.
I think that's the point. Who cares if you can port between two things that don't run the same kind of software? It's not like you're going to be playing Crysis on your phone. It's like having easy portability between Solaris and Android -- OK sure, but why?
Take a look at the titles available on Xbox Live Arcade. Out of the top 10, eight of them have simple enough controls that they could easily be played on a phone. If I was the developer of any of those games I'd be seriously looking in to adapting it to touch input. If that's all it takes to open up a new market for one's title, why not?
Everyone keeps referring to these apps as "Checkpoint Evasion" apps, implying their primary purpose is to help drunks dodge DUI checks. Both PhantomAlert and Trapster are primarily built to identify SPEED TRAPS, not DUI checkpoints. They just happen to allow users to tag checkpoints as well. I've been a Trapster user pretty much since it came out and have never seen a checkpoint listed. The "Buzzed" app seems to be focused on DUI checks and thus could be much more questionable, but again at least the other two are not explicitly for DUI checkpoint evasion.
Hell I'm all for both of these, I just figure baby steps and such. Fortunately while many don't write it that way, I haven't met a person who didn't understand YYYYMMDD HHmmss format for date/time. It's those early days in the month with Europeans using DD-MM-YYYY format that screw me up, being used to MM-DD-YYYY. I'm sure the same is true the other way around too.
No disrespect to the man and the effort that must have gone in to creating this, but from a rational perspective we shouldn't need more than one more update ever. Unfortunately as a population we seem to be far too dumb to handle the idea of moving away from something we've done for a long time to something that makes more sense.
Here's all we need for a logical, permanent time solution:
I'm sure there are a few odd cases where exceptions to these guidelines would make sense, and I'm not against it in those cases, but the way we handle time zones now is completely irrational.
There are actually valid reasons for doing that.
No there aren't. In fact Google explicitly states not to, and that those found to be doing so may have their pagerank reduced or be entirely eliminated from the index.
The classic example is JavaScript-rendered dynamic content. This tends not to work so well when you're dealing with search engines. However, if you can serve them a static page that contains the text of the page minus all the rendering, then it can index the content without choking on the JavaScript. I'm not sure how important this is these days, but it certainly was a problem at one time.
If this happens, you did it wrong to begin with. If you're publishing any content where you'd ever care about whether it's searchable, it should always degrade cleanly when features are missing or disabled in a user's browser. The blind, users on less powerful mobile platforms, and those who just disable JS for security or privacy reasons won't get your content either if a search engine wouldn't.
It's also useful to serve modified versions for search engines so that searches for content within your site can return more relevant results. For example, you might insert certain keywords that describe the content of the page using terms that don't actually appear. Case in point, your page talks about Airport, but you serve a copy to Google that inserts the terms 802.11 and Wi-Fi.
There are meta tags for this or you can make up for it by writing in a more "SEO" way. Refer to the "Airport 802.11 (Wi-Fi) access point" rather than just "Airport" in the first paragraph and it's all good.
Finally, there's the question of bandwidth and CPU overhead. If your site changes a lot, Google beats on your servers rather frequently. You can reduce the bandwidth hit by stripping JavaScript, CSS, images, etc. from your content before serving it to Google. This won't significantly change the searchability of the content, but will reduce the bandwidth overhead. And, of course, if there are static versions of content that you can serve instead of a server-side-dynamic version, this also saves on CPU overhead.
The plain Googlebot, as well as most search crawlers, will not even request CSS or Javascript. The Instant Preview bot does, but it's generating a screen capture of your site so you want it to. If you send sane headers this isn't a problem anyways, as the spider will only hit updated content.
For example, when you're writing a blog, you might decide that you don't care if the comments are searchable in Google. Thus, instead of wasting your server's CPU to compute the HTML for the comments, you can serve up a web page containing only the actual blog content when queried by a search engine.
That's really stretching for a justification, if for some reason your comment system is so bad that displaying comments adds a notable load to each page view you should probably go like Ars Technica and some other sites and simply put comments on a deeper linked page behind a rel=nofollow.
Paywalls, of course, are a dubious reason.
Well, we agree here at least.
CarPC? HTPC? Just being able to turn the computer entirely off when it's not in use rather than suspend?
This particular example was focused on embedded applications, but the general idea of being able to boot a computer reasonably close to instantly is advantageous pretty much anywhere.
From my experience, retiring XBMC would do you more good than such a hack ;).
Ye gods, did I hate XBMC.
You are literally the only person I've ever seen say anything close to that. Unless your only experience has been with the early PC builds where hardware video decoding and the like weren't yet working I really don't see any reason to hate, or even dislike, XBMC.
It provides a great 10 foot UI for accessing your media on a TV, plays everything known to man, and runs on all three major OSes plus two "appliance" type devices (three if you count the XBMC-derived Boxee Box). Sigma Designs is even porting it to their SoCs.
Show me another home media platform with nearly the flexibility and ease of use. The closest competition is Boxee, which sacrifices local media features for internet media capabilities.
That's just a matter of what the developer(s) had handy at the time. If you have a homebrew-capable PS3 (3.41 or older) you don't upgrade it for now, so a lot of homebrew initially shows up for some specific firmware version and then gets ported to others. Soon enough we'll have proper homebrew-capable custom 3.55 firmwares thanks to the key release, so give it time.
I don't grow myself, but bored curiosity and being involved in legalization efforts have given me a decent general knowledge of the topic.
You're pretty much right on the nose with the comparison to a PC. Last time I checked my PC with a Kill-A-Watt it ran between 110 and 180 watts depending on load. From the grow threads I've read, a small personal-size grow using CFL lamps requires 4-8 bulbs, and a quick search shows them around 18w on average for the bright ones, so once you factor for cooling fans it's probably between 80 and 160 watts.
Many smart meters use similar technology to BPL for their communication, so it's no surprise at all they can cause interference to HF. The FCC has shown themselves to be so disinterested in its effects on amateur radio that the ARRL had to sue them over it, so while you are technically correct the practical situation is different.
Very good point. I'm currently running my HTPC on an nVidia Ion based Acer nettop, but as soon as someone supports all the important video decode features in a fully open-source driver I'll be building myself a new machine. Dealing with the binary drivers, particularly for HDMI audio, is a pain in the ass.
The fail0verflow team released SPU emulation, so if there aren't public Cell emulators today there's no reason not to expect someone to develop one at some point. The rest is all down to how hard it is to emulate the custom and semi-custom components.
Of course I wouldn't expect PS3 emulation performance to be usable for years. The best PowerPC emulation I've used is Apple's Rosetta and even that is significantly slower than native code for anything non-trivial. Take that and combine it with how the PS3's PPU is both faster and derived from a later generation of POWER than the G4s Rosetta emulates, plus that the rest of the system would also need to be emulated and it becomes a real challenge.
I'd be shocked to see PS3 emulation reach a state where games can be played with an experience within a reasonable margin of error of the real thing before the next generation of game consoles hit mid-life.
That's not to say it can't happen, after all the Wii is quite well emulated and many popular games are entirely playable, sometimes with a better experience than the real thing (1080p for example), but that's a significantly lesser hardware platform which is heavily derived from its predecessor, so the level of work in emulating it was nowhere close to the same level (not at all putting down the work of the Dolphin crew though, that's a great program).
Typically on consoles the media type is one of the bits in the signed area. On the original Xbox and to my knowledge the Xbox 360 it's four bytes with different bits indicating whether the program is allowed to run from various media, including USB devices and rewritable discs. I wouldn't expect Sony's system to be any more strict, so it should at least look at an executable on any valid media to see if it's signed for that media. Since we have the keys, we should be able to modify the flags and re-sign, making copies on rewritable media appear perfectly legitimate to the console.
2: Three Ethernet ports, so it can do some complicated firewalling/IDS/IPS/content filtering/NAT.
You're looking at some really old specs. Sony made that claim early on (actually with the intent that the PS3 be used as a wireless router itself), but production models all have a single gigabit ethernet port. All but the original 20GB model also have 802.11b/g.