"Hans Reiser is waiting for me, standing on the other side of an imitation-wood table. The room is small, the concrete walls bare. A guard locks the steel door from the outside. There is no sound. Reiser is wearing the red jumpsuit of a prisoner in solitary confinement, though he has been allowed to meet with me in this chilly visiting room. There was a time when he was known as a cantankerous but visionary open source programmer. His work was funded by the government; he was widely credited (and sometimes reviled) for rethinking the structure of the Linux operating system. Now he is known as prisoner BFP563."
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-08-12
The end of the article (along with Reiser's inability to account for his front seat) seems to suggest Reiser knows more than he is telling.
"Sean Sturgeon — Reiser's childhood friend and Nina's ex-lover" had apparently confessed to eight killings, but would not give names. He swears he did not kill Nina, but claims the author would 'weep and piss blood' if he knew all the details of Reiser's friendship with Sturgeon.
What the hell is that?
Ed: in any case, this would make for an amazing book. It's terrible that it's really happening to someone who seems to be a good man.
Edited 2007-06-28 21:12
Member since:2005-07-06
"Sean Sturgeon — Reiser's childhood friend and Nina's ex-lover" had apparently confessed to eight killings, but would not give names. He swears he did not kill Nina, but claims the author would 'weep and piss blood' if he knew all the details of Reiser's friendship with Sturgeon. "
I wouldn't trust that Sturgeon guy as far as I could throw him...sounds like an extremely twisted f*ck who just wants attention.
Member since:2006-01-18
Member since:2005-07-24
"""
i loved reiserfs and am teribly sad to see it go.
"""
A plug for ext3, here. I've been noticing that while reiserfs still has the reputation for being faster for lots of small files in a directory, ext3 has been steadily improving, in the absence of fanfare, and in the last informal (bonnie++) testing I did between reiserfs 3 and ext3 on my desktop box, ext3 absolutely blew reiserfs away for that situation. And generally beat it on block io as well.
I was shocked at the results, as it was not what I was expecting. And this was on Suse where reiserfs is the default, so it is unlikely some problem with the default configuration.
Also, on a performance note, I always like to remind people that the reiser4 vs ext3 benchmarks on the Namesys site had the phases of the mongo benchmark in which Reiser4 was solidly trounced ("embarrased" might be a better word) by ext3 removed before publication. Hans admitted it when confronted on Linux kernel a couple of years ago, mumbled something about fixing it, and then never got around to actually correcting the highly misleading published results.
I can did up a link to the fiasco if required.
Edited 2007-06-29 22:20
Member since:2005-11-05
No need to dig it up dude, google bookmarks to the rescue. Hans was called out by a former Namesys employee for "doctoring" the benchmarks. He must have "forgot" 90 second stalls in file operations.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/8/27/70
Hopefully justice is served. Fry him if guilty and let him get on with his life if innocent.
Oh yeah:
http://linuxgazette.net/122/piszcz.html
Reiser4 actually isn't all that fast. Scroll down and read the conclusion.
Edited 2007-06-30 05:47
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy."In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Member since:
2005-12-05
i loved reiserfs and am teribly sad to see it go.
also as much as i try to avoid reading into conspiracy theories and things like that, i truly believe he is innocent. and i wish him the best of luck in proving this.