Poor Hans? Epic Fail!
Some of you may have heard about the goings-on surrounding Hans Reiser, creator of ReiserFS, and how he was convicted of killing his wife. Most recently, he lead police to her body in an effort to get his sentence reduced. An interesting idea came up on Ubuntu’s Brainstorm site that sparked a lot of controversy. Exhibit A: Brainstorm Idea #10930. The summary is that the submitter things sending a laptop to Reiser while in jail would give him a chance to contribute to society. Ignoring the fact that the laptop would never see it’s intended recipient, some of the comments got rather interesting. Eldmannen, the originator of the post, sees Hans as a ‘victim’ in all of this and has some rather ludicrous thoughts.
There’s this gem:
mtrausch,
Whatever, it was just one kill. Big deal. Others have killed way more. George W Bush is responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people.
Also if he commit a crime, he should be locked up so he is no harm to society. But he should still be allowed participate and contribute to society so that he can become a good and productive citizen.
Plus, she deserved it. She cheated with Sean Sturgeon, embezzled money from his company, and was an irresponsible mother who abused illegal substances such as ecstasy.
Let this be a lesson to all; avoid post-order mail brides.chipbennett,
It is much better to let him be a productive citizen of society that contributes to society, than have him locked up and do nothing, just waste tax money.neon,
It is not like he killed Gandhi, he just killed his wife.
Perhaps other people can work on it too, but Hans is the genius who designed it, he can make bring the best to it.
And this is the comment that spurred me to post this:
Endperform,
She was a irresponsible mother abused illegal substances such as ecstasy, putter her kids at risk and who dated Sean Sturgeon a dangerous serial-killer who have admitted to killing 8 people and leaving a ninth for dead.
* http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/05/reiserI cant imagine the tremendous stress and abuse that poor Hans must have endured. :(
Driving an kind and peaceful man into such an act. :(“He took someone else’s life and should have to pay for his crimes.”
The guy is paying for his crime. He is doing time.
But he should be given an laptop so that he can be a productive citizen and contribute to the society.
Poor Hans? The guy KILLED HIS WIFE. Eldmannen seems to think Hans is the victim in this, and that his wife drove him to murder her. If you’re having problems with your significant other, there are ways to fix or defuse the situation. If he was really that ’stressed’, he should have separated from her, or better yet, divorced her completely. The fact remains that he killed his wife. We don’t know the exact surroundings of the murder, but to say in no uncertain terms that she deserved to die is just completely insane.
The comments come from geeks that care more about a pc component than a human being. Reiser might have been a computer genius but his arrogance drove him to believe that he could commit the perfect crime. What a coincidence that in this tale of spousal abuse he decided to confess his guilt and where the body was only before being sentenced for life. Even his own son drew a picture of his dad carrying a bag that had his mother inside. He took the blame, he should be punished for this, after all, his kids do not have any more parents thanks to his genial idea. Let him look at a wall for 15 years and NOT be productive so he understands the magnitude of his actions!
dahlia
10 Jul 08 at 1:25 am
As it turns out, it would appear that Reiser strangled her during an argument about their divorce, the kids, or something along those lines. He has managed to get a reduced sentence—though it would seem that they offered him a vastly reduced sentence of only 3 years, before the thing ever went to trial, if he were to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter and simply reveal the details of what he did.
What really bugs me the most about the entire “Poor Hans” statement is that Reiser was known to be somewhat nutty and volatile in his dealings with people (check out his posts to the LKML for example, reading through his history there; Reiser is a rather argumentative individual, it would appear). Unfortunately, trying to find some of the posts that I had in mind is a bit difficult at the moment, with all of the things that are being written about him making their way to the top of Google.
The other thing is that I just don’t get it. How someone could sit there, knowing that a person killed another (and not even out of self-defense!), and then claim that he’s the victim in all of this, further making us users out to be victims by stating that we’ll not get the best performing filesystem ever designed… well, I just don’t understand that. If Reiser4 is all that and a bag of chips, then the people that worked for Namesys, or someone else entirely, will come up, pick up the filesystem, and continue its development. If nobody does it, then nobody was interested in it. If nobody is interested in it, then it’s very likely that it wasn’t all of that and a bag of chips anyway.
That having been said, I’ve used Reiser4 on some of my systems, and I did really like the performance that it had with very small files on very fast internal hard drives. However, I use ext3 for all of my systems today, and I will likely switch to ext4 sometime soon, now that at least one of the developers of it is using it, too. I’ve used (and trusted) the ext[23] filesystems for a very long time, and it’d take a good deal of proof that something else was trustworthy for me to switch over to trusting it for my primary storage needs. So, I guess in a way, I simply don’t care if Reiser4 is ever complete or ever manages to make it into the Linux kernel mainline; I have something which works, works well, is reasonably fast, and doesn’t limit me in any practical way—oh, and isn’t a nearly opaque blob of bits on the hard drive. There is something to be said for filesystems which aren’t like databases. :)
Michael B. Trausch
10 Jul 08 at 3:07 am