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The tech is still incredibly impressive, I just wish they'd rename it.
by kick 7y ago
The tech is still incredibly impressive, I just wish they'd rename it.
- maayank 7y agoMy thoughts exactly. It's a shame that such interesting developments are shadowed by the brand-name and infamy.
- mike_hock 7y agoRight? Imagine running a company under the name Hitler Inc. after the end of world war 2. The name just needlessly taints the project which is (obviously) not run by the convicted murderer anymore.
- gerdesj 7y agoI agree. I used to use reiserfs on everything I touched back in the day: Mandrake, SuSE etc. When Hans R became toxic and ext4 happened to suddenly fit the bill, I followed the rest of the herd and reiserfs3 rapidly fell off the top n filesystem charts. I remember reiser doing some things much, much faster than say ext2, eg directory listing with lots of files. It also seemed to know when to repair itself on boot and simply do the right thing - that would be the journalling that ext2 didn't have and ext3/4 took a while to get working properly. They could call it rfs or something, anything but reiserfs.
- joyjoyjoy 7y ago"much faster than say ext2" Mordsschnell!
- gerdesj 7y agoNot fast but quick. Aside: "Quick" can mean "alive" - I think that was its original meaning. We should also note that schnell is often translated as "quick" but I think "faster" is better in general. Using a simple dictionary approach to translate mordsschnell into English might come unstuck pretty quickly. With these clues we could arrive at living dead or zombie! I don't know but given how fast the above comment got downvoted that word has some history.
- xorcist 7y agoIt wouldn't be uncalled for. The past ten years' worth of patches have pretty much come from Edward Shishkin. I can only imagine the work required to keep such a large codebase maintained out of kernel during that time. The ideas described in the linked email looks quite original, too. The abstraction level between blocks and files have always been a leaky one. It would been interesting to see them implemented. I guess it would require a lot more RAM to be effective but that might not be an impediment these days.
- ironMann 7y agoNew allocator idea sounds a lot like the metaslab approach used in ZFS.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago”Hans Thomas Reiser (born December 19, 1963) is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer.” Not a great namesake, is it?
- tonyarkles 7y agoPotentially eligible for parole this month! https://inmatelocator.cdcr.ca.gov/Details.aspx?ID=G31008 https://inmatelocator.cdcr.ca.gov/Details.aspx?ID=G31008
- sjwright 7y agoWouldn't it be ironic if the county somehow ...lost the file
- ilammy 7y agoWhy? That’s just a name. If people are that reluctant to use a technology just because a murderer used to develop some parts of it, what would they think of current developers who renamed the project just to conceal that historical fact? Wouldn’t they initiate a grand purge once they learn that somethingelsefs is actually a project that uses code and ideas of reiserfs?
- throwlaplace 7y ago>Why? That’s just a name. is it really that difficult to attempt empathy? imagine being one of his kids, growing up to become a developer, and then having to work on code that intersects with reiserfs.
- cassianoleal 7y agoHis kids probably bear that same name though, don't they?
- throwlaplace 7y ago>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser#Reiser_pleads_not_guilty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser#Reiser_pleads_not_... since kids are in Russia i highly doubt that.
- cassianoleal 7y agoI don't see the relation between the country where they live and them changing their names. I couldn't find any news to that effect either. Seems like a bit of a stretch.
- ilammy 7y agoSo... how changing a name averts that situation? By hoping that the kid never finds out? And should current developers rather abstain from continuing development as they obviously behave as insensitive egoistic jerks that instead should drink some brain bleach, bury the project, and move on? Come one, that’s ridiculous. It’s more irrational than blaming the gun for the murder: it’s like blaming the word for that and pretending that if you call it something else then it did not happen.
- sneak 7y agoWhy? He’ll probably be out next summer.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoHis former wife will still be dead.
- roenxi 7y agoBranding isn't a very logical science; so sure they probably should. Them and the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which has 100% lost users because of the stupid name. That said, we also need to be able to separate the good and bad people do. Reiser in his capacity as a programmer is really a different entity to him in his capacity as a murderer. Celebrating one is not celebrating the other. It is the stereotypical example, but it is such a good one that it deserves to become a cliche. Fritz Haber was sufficiently evil that apparently his wife committed suicide because of him. The Haber–Bosch process is probably one of the greatest technical contributions to humanity, ever, full stop. Maybe the steam engine can compete or a handful of other things. We can't allow technical excellence to be shunned because the technician had horrible problems - the shunning lessens us all. We can afford for bad people to be remembered if the price they pay is to create something of great use.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kick 7y agoGIMP changing its name seems pointless at this point, especially because of where the conversations there led. It would have been smarter for them to argue that "gimp" is a sexual term, and therefore gross, rather than an antiquated ableist term, because the former is more common than the latter usage (which is never used). Reiser's accomplishments are already out there, there's no need to continue with his name on something he hasn't contributed a patch to in a decade, and there's literally no harm in changing the name of a program like this; it's not a binary decision between "remember the person" and "use their work," plenty of people have their work utilized despite no one knowing their name. I think that's fine.