NTFS doesn't do COW, but it's had snapshotting for a while under the name "volume shadow copy". This was added in XP or 2003, and even given somewhat of a UI in the form of "previous versions" in Vista.
I'm not sure I buy disk access latency though; my impression is most of the textures and whatnot the program will need are loaded into RAM during the loading screen. How much disk access is going on while you're actually playing?
Scheduling threads within a process is important, but it's in some sense a somewhat different and easier problem than timesharing across processes.
And I left this out before but I'll say it now... I browse with plugins (& Javascript) turned off globally. The number of websites I turn it on for is depressingly high.
The other huge advantage that Flash has is authoring tools: if you're actually doing some sort of animation, I don't know anything in the same arena that is even remotely close.
Only sort of: I was going to say "if you're using a browser that supports H.264, which includes neither the most popular browser out there (IE), what is probably the most popular browser amongst geeks (Firefox, though Chrome might have this title), or my chosen browser (Opera)", but it seems that this is starting to change. (I didn't actually notice this.)
But it hasn't changed yet: lots of videos haven't been transcoded to WebM yet, and the browser support is only barely starting to get there. (E.g. if you're a Firefox user, not only will many videos not play because they aren't yet WebM, but you have to use a beta release of the browser.)
And that may even ignore all the websites that embed YouTube videos locally; you'll need Flash if you want to see what they have for a long time I suspect.
Actually, a game is going to be a pretty good way to measure the performance of an operating system. Games tend to be under severe competition pressure to do better than their predecessors both in technical and artistic terms.
It also doesn't test several other aspects of an OS though. Games do the bulk of their disk accesses at startup and loading, rather than while going along. It doesn't test as well the OS's scheduler, because if you're gaming you're probably not running a bunch of tests in the background. (This is less and less true now that multithreading is more common, but there are still a number of things that differ when scheduling multiple processes that all want the CPU. And that is leaving behind scheduling to improve I/O performance or interactivity.)
2) nVidia in particular but ATi as well are real good at writing drivers. They don't crash much, if ever. They are not going to be our source of instability.
Wait, what changed in the last couple years? Last I heard, graphics drivers were a very substantial cause of Windows crashes. This article says nVidia + ATI together was over 1/3 of reported crashes, and nVidia was responsible for 1.5 times the number of crashes that MS was.
Was that just a temporary situation caused by Vista's release? Or maybe things were different in the XP era when it was easier for a driver to crash a system?
Whoa, I never said I think that Episode 3 won't come out (even if it feels that way sometimes), which is how it sounds like you're interpreting me... just that it won't be bundled with Portal 2.
Not at all. The court did not rule that the wiretapping law prohibited the recording but that prohibition was unconstitutional, or that Congress couldn't prohibit it; what they ruled was that the law just didn't prohibit it in the first place. (At least based on TFA and a search in the opinion for "Constitution", which doesn't appear.)
I agree the game was too short and except for level 16 (I think, it is very long and requires good timing for half-stepping through a portal to press a button) I got through it in a few hours.
I think that if you think that 16 (the turret level) was harder than the others, you didn't go about it the best way. As long as you stay out of the advanced version of that chamber* and aren't trying to speed run it, you can easily knock down all of the turrets while barely exposing you at all. Many of the puzzles from the other rooms have tighter timing windows and harder executions.
* Which has a couple puzzles with pretty difficult executions IMO. For instance, the only way I could figure out to get into the really big room is to go through the portal into the hall with turrets at each end facing each other (entering turret fire), place a portal on the "front" wall in the big room, do a 180, go through the portal, place another portal on the back wall of the big room, go through the portal again, and finally make sure you're out of line-of-sight of any turrets including through the portal you just placed (finally exiting turret fire). That took a few tries.
Huh? Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age shipped with only a disc check; no online activation at all, let alone each time you want to play. (At least if you bought the DVD version; I don't know how the online versions work.)
You're misinterpreting mens rea (maybe because I didn't explain it well enough). The state-of-mind requirements for a crime specify (usually) only your attitude toward what you're doing, but not any attitude toward understanding the law.
In the shoplifting example, the knowledge that you need to have the necessary mens rea for theft is knowing you're taking the object -- you don't need to know that action is actually illegal, just that you are doing it.
(Again, there are exceptions: occasional laws specify that you actually need to know that what you're doing is actually against the law in order to have the requsite mens rea to have committed the offense.)
Felony-murder is only one instance of what's called a "strict liability" crime; others include things like statutory rape (often the age limit for when it's strict liability is lower than what it is if you know the person's age) and minor violations like many traffic violations. That said, there aren't many strict liability crimes.
Felony-murder can lead to some relatively hilarious scenarios though, like prosecuting a one person in a robbery for murder for the death of a co-conspirator if the victim turns out to be armed and successfully fights back. I'm not sure I think such situations are an appropriate use of the felony-murder rule, but at the same time it's hard to muster up much sympathy.
So, when the speed limit changes from a 55 to a 35 MPH zone in 100 feet and I didn't see the sign, does that mean I don't get a ticket because I didn't intend to commit a crime?
That analogy makes perfect sense because all offenses require similar mental states.
That judge is a retard. You should have asked if he knows every law on the books (civil, criminal, tax code,...) In all likelihood, he doesn't. So if a judge can't be expected to know every law he might possibly break, how is it possible for a normal (non-lawyer) citizen?
It isn't, but that doesn't mean that you won't be held accountable if your time in court comes. The judge is no more a retard than anyone else on the bench anywhere in the US. (Or really, probably most anywhere with a legal system based on English common law.)
There are some laws out there that require knowledge that you are actually breaking the law, and not just knowledge that you are doing what you're doing (as opposed to accidentally doing it), but they are in the minority.
Yes, but doesn't the law also have some concept of "sufficiently advance stupidity is indistinguishable from intent"? Like if I go around shooting out car windows and accidentally pick one with a person in it and kill them, I can be charged with murder or manslaughter, despite the fact that I did not *intend* to kill anyone, just vandalize cars.
There is this level of sanity in the legal system, right?
Yes and no. There is not any general concept of "sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from intent", however many specific acts have multiple distinct offenses with differing mens rea requirements.
To use your example of homicide, there are of course several grades. A typical one might have first degree murder, second degree murder, and voluntary manslaughter. First degree murder would be reserved if you had premeditated your killing -- going around shooting in random car windows would not count. (The "pre" part of "premeditation" doesn't have to be long at all, just for clarification. Doesn't mean you have to have slept on the decision, just that you had time to think about it a little.) Much more likely you'd find yourself charged with second degree murder. That typically has wording like you killed someone "with reckless indifference to the value of human life" -- for instance shooting a gun at cars in the streets in your town. Possibly you'd find yourself charged with manslaughter, which has an even lesser mens rea requirement, usually "plain" recklessness.
So you don't always need specific intent in order to commit a crime, and things like recklessness and negligence sometimes can count, but they don't by default. The offenses are specifically written to use those lower standards, and will have a lower grade than what is basically the same offense with a higher amount of culpability.
While intent and motive can go a long way in helping to prove guilt, neither are by no means necessary. I can commit a crime (and get convicted) without ever intending to have commuted it.
That's true, but not nearly as true as you make it sound. There are two reasons that you'd be convicted:
1) The crime is what's called a "strict liability" crime -- this is one that doesn't require intent. However, most crimes are not strict liability -- more on that in a sec.
2) The jury didn't believe that you didn't have intent. This is much more likely.
IANAL, but I have done a bit of reading of some legal stuff (it was a side interest of mine back as an undergrad). The lawyerfolk will talk about two aspects to crimes -- the "actus reus" ("guilty act") and the "mens rea" ("guilty mind"). The actus reus is the actual thing you did -- punch someone, shoplift a CD, or wiretap. The mens rea describes your state of mind. This is where, say, a negligent homicide differs from a murder. The actus reus is the same in each case, but what matters is your intent.
Most crimes require that you have a substantial amount of intent -- you either "purposely" or "knowingly" carry out the act. Some crimes have a lower burden -- you either "recklessly" or "negligently" carry out the action. There really aren't that many crimes that have no mens rea requirement (the "strict liability" crimes, as mentioned above).
To go to the shoplifting example, let's say you have a backpack/bag/etc you're carrying around. If you accidentally knock a CD into your bag, see it's there, and think "oh, I can walk out with that", you're committing theft because you're knowingly walking out the door with it. If you accidentally knock a CD into your bag, don't notice it, and walk out the door, you're not committing theft because the mens rea isn't there. Whether a jury would buy your excuse that you didn't know it was there is another matter entierly.
(Similarly, "inchoate" crimes -- attempt and conspiracy mostly -- are somewhat the opposite of strict liability crimes. There the offense is almost all the mens rea, and you needn't have committed the actus reus yet. That is a bit of a lie, because you need to have done something concrete, even for inchoate crimes.)
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NTFS doesn't do COW
I think I misspoke here; volume shadow copy can do COW.
What NTFS doesn't do is the ZFS "always allocate a new block when writing" thing, and that's what I was thinking of when I wrote that.
NTFS doesn't do COW, but it's had snapshotting for a while under the name "volume shadow copy". This was added in XP or 2003, and even given somewhat of a UI in the form of "previous versions" in Vista.
Free Software has a tendency to get stuck at "good enough" sometimes.
Not just free software. IE6 has the poster child of getting stuck at "good enough" until it was kicked out of place.
ZFS has becoming vapor ware since apple announced snow kitty wasnt gunna support it.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Network access latency, sure.
I'm not sure I buy disk access latency though; my impression is most of the textures and whatnot the program will need are loaded into RAM during the loading screen. How much disk access is going on while you're actually playing?
Scheduling threads within a process is important, but it's in some sense a somewhat different and easier problem than timesharing across processes.
I didn't actually notice this
s/notice/know/
And I left this out before but I'll say it now... I browse with plugins (& Javascript) turned off globally. The number of websites I turn it on for is depressingly high.
The other huge advantage that Flash has is authoring tools: if you're actually doing some sort of animation, I don't know anything in the same arena that is even remotely close.
Most youtube videos run just fine as HTML5.
Only sort of: I was going to say "if you're using a browser that supports H.264, which includes neither the most popular browser out there (IE), what is probably the most popular browser amongst geeks (Firefox, though Chrome might have this title), or my chosen browser (Opera)", but it seems that this is starting to change. (I didn't actually notice this.)
But it hasn't changed yet: lots of videos haven't been transcoded to WebM yet, and the browser support is only barely starting to get there. (E.g. if you're a Firefox user, not only will many videos not play because they aren't yet WebM, but you have to use a beta release of the browser.)
And that may even ignore all the websites that embed YouTube videos locally; you'll need Flash if you want to see what they have for a long time I suspect.
Actually, a game is going to be a pretty good way to measure the performance of an
operating system. Games tend to be under severe competition pressure to do better
than their predecessors both in technical and artistic terms.
It also doesn't test several other aspects of an OS though. Games do the bulk of their disk accesses at startup and loading, rather than while going along. It doesn't test as well the OS's scheduler, because if you're gaming you're probably not running a bunch of tests in the background. (This is less and less true now that multithreading is more common, but there are still a number of things that differ when scheduling multiple processes that all want the CPU. And that is leaving behind scheduling to improve I/O performance or interactivity.)
with Wintel you can buy nice graphics but the monitor won't be as good
Or... you can get a good monitor. And not have to throw it away when you upgrade.
2) nVidia in particular but ATi as well are real good at writing drivers. They don't crash much, if ever. They are not going to be our source of instability.
Wait, what changed in the last couple years? Last I heard, graphics drivers were a very substantial cause of Windows crashes. This article says nVidia + ATI together was over 1/3 of reported crashes, and nVidia was responsible for 1.5 times the number of crashes that MS was.
Was that just a temporary situation caused by Vista's release? Or maybe things were different in the XP era when it was easier for a driver to crash a system?
Whoa, I never said I think that Episode 3 won't come out (even if it feels that way sometimes), which is how it sounds like you're interpreting me... just that it won't be bundled with Portal 2.
Not at all. The court did not rule that the wiretapping law prohibited the recording but that prohibition was unconstitutional, or that Congress couldn't prohibit it; what they ruled was that the law just didn't prohibit it in the first place. (At least based on TFA and a search in the opinion for "Constitution", which doesn't appear.)
I agree the game was too short and except for level 16 (I think, it is very long and requires good timing for half-stepping through a portal to press a button) I got through it in a few hours.
I think that if you think that 16 (the turret level) was harder than the others, you didn't go about it the best way. As long as you stay out of the advanced version of that chamber* and aren't trying to speed run it, you can easily knock down all of the turrets while barely exposing you at all. Many of the puzzles from the other rooms have tighter timing windows and harder executions.
* Which has a couple puzzles with pretty difficult executions IMO. For instance, the only way I could figure out to get into the really big room is to go through the portal into the hall with turrets at each end facing each other (entering turret fire), place a portal on the "front" wall in the big room, do a 180, go through the portal, place another portal on the back wall of the big room, go through the portal again, and finally make sure you're out of line-of-sight of any turrets including through the portal you just placed (finally exiting turret fire). That took a few tries.
I"m still waiting for HL2 Episode 3, which might be the reason for the delay, to package together with Portal 2
Don't hold your breath; Valve has been quite adamant that Portal 2 is a standalone release, and there's been basically no word on Ep3's progress.
Plans can change of course, or they could be lying (much less likely IMO), but I think that a Portal 2 + Episode 3 release is very much a longshot.
Or the recent Bioware games.
Huh? Both Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age shipped with only a disc check; no online activation at all, let alone each time you want to play. (At least if you bought the DVD version; I don't know how the online versions work.)
Not a hard release date, but they did originally say "this holiday season". So I count this is attempt #2 already.
The Release Date is a Lie! (I just had to ;)
More likely than I'd like to admit, unfortunately.
IT'll be interesting to see if they make it.
You're misinterpreting mens rea (maybe because I didn't explain it well enough). The state-of-mind requirements for a crime specify (usually) only your attitude toward what you're doing, but not any attitude toward understanding the law.
In the shoplifting example, the knowledge that you need to have the necessary mens rea for theft is knowing you're taking the object -- you don't need to know that action is actually illegal, just that you are doing it.
(Again, there are exceptions: occasional laws specify that you actually need to know that what you're doing is actually against the law in order to have the requsite mens rea to have committed the offense.)
See also mistake-of-fact vs mistake-of-law.
That was sort of my point. Should I have included a "</sarcasm>" tag? :-)
and the reverse can be true
Felony-murder is only one instance of what's called a "strict liability" crime; others include things like statutory rape (often the age limit for when it's strict liability is lower than what it is if you know the person's age) and minor violations like many traffic violations. That said, there aren't many strict liability crimes.
Felony-murder can lead to some relatively hilarious scenarios though, like prosecuting a one person in a robbery for murder for the death of a co-conspirator if the victim turns out to be armed and successfully fights back. I'm not sure I think such situations are an appropriate use of the felony-murder rule, but at the same time it's hard to muster up much sympathy.
So, when the speed limit changes from a 55 to a 35 MPH zone in 100 feet and I didn't see the sign, does that mean I don't get a ticket because I didn't intend to commit a crime?
That analogy makes perfect sense because all offenses require similar mental states.
That judge is a retard. You should have asked if he knows every law on the books (civil, criminal, tax code, ...) In all likelihood, he doesn't. So if a judge can't be expected to know every law he might possibly break, how is it possible for a normal (non-lawyer) citizen?
It isn't, but that doesn't mean that you won't be held accountable if your time in court comes. The judge is no more a retard than anyone else on the bench anywhere in the US. (Or really, probably most anywhere with a legal system based on English common law.)
There are some laws out there that require knowledge that you are actually breaking the law, and not just knowledge that you are doing what you're doing (as opposed to accidentally doing it), but they are in the minority.
Yes, but doesn't the law also have some concept of "sufficiently advance stupidity is indistinguishable from intent"? Like if I go around shooting out car windows and accidentally pick one with a person in it and kill them, I can be charged with murder or manslaughter, despite the fact that I did not *intend* to kill anyone, just vandalize cars.
There is this level of sanity in the legal system, right?
Yes and no. There is not any general concept of "sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from intent", however many specific acts have multiple distinct offenses with differing mens rea requirements.
To use your example of homicide, there are of course several grades. A typical one might have first degree murder, second degree murder, and voluntary manslaughter. First degree murder would be reserved if you had premeditated your killing -- going around shooting in random car windows would not count. (The "pre" part of "premeditation" doesn't have to be long at all, just for clarification. Doesn't mean you have to have slept on the decision, just that you had time to think about it a little.) Much more likely you'd find yourself charged with second degree murder. That typically has wording like you killed someone "with reckless indifference to the value of human life" -- for instance shooting a gun at cars in the streets in your town. Possibly you'd find yourself charged with manslaughter, which has an even lesser mens rea requirement, usually "plain" recklessness.
So you don't always need specific intent in order to commit a crime, and things like recklessness and negligence sometimes can count, but they don't by default. The offenses are specifically written to use those lower standards, and will have a lower grade than what is basically the same offense with a higher amount of culpability.
Hah, and now I read further down the page and see this just below my post. Feel free to mod me into oblivion.
While intent and motive can go a long way in helping to prove guilt, neither are by no means necessary. I can commit a crime (and get convicted) without ever intending to have commuted it.
That's true, but not nearly as true as you make it sound. There are two reasons that you'd be convicted:
1) The crime is what's called a "strict liability" crime -- this is one that doesn't require intent. However, most crimes are not strict liability -- more on that in a sec.
2) The jury didn't believe that you didn't have intent. This is much more likely.
IANAL, but I have done a bit of reading of some legal stuff (it was a side interest of mine back as an undergrad). The lawyerfolk will talk about two aspects to crimes -- the "actus reus" ("guilty act") and the "mens rea" ("guilty mind"). The actus reus is the actual thing you did -- punch someone, shoplift a CD, or wiretap. The mens rea describes your state of mind. This is where, say, a negligent homicide differs from a murder. The actus reus is the same in each case, but what matters is your intent.
Most crimes require that you have a substantial amount of intent -- you either "purposely" or "knowingly" carry out the act. Some crimes have a lower burden -- you either "recklessly" or "negligently" carry out the action. There really aren't that many crimes that have no mens rea requirement (the "strict liability" crimes, as mentioned above).
To go to the shoplifting example, let's say you have a backpack/bag/etc you're carrying around. If you accidentally knock a CD into your bag, see it's there, and think "oh, I can walk out with that", you're committing theft because you're knowingly walking out the door with it. If you accidentally knock a CD into your bag, don't notice it, and walk out the door, you're not committing theft because the mens rea isn't there. Whether a jury would buy your excuse that you didn't know it was there is another matter entierly.
(Similarly, "inchoate" crimes -- attempt and conspiracy mostly -- are somewhat the opposite of strict liability crimes. There the offense is almost all the mens rea, and you needn't have committed the actus reus yet. That is a bit of a lie, because you need to have done something concrete, even for inchoate crimes.)