Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

Hans Reiser was recently convicted for first degree murder for killing his wife in 2006. The six month trial and three days of Jury deliberation reached the guilty verdict primarily based on circumstantial evidence and poor testimony from Hans Reiser:

In a murder case with no body, no crime scene, no reliable eyewitness and virtually no physical evidence, the prosecution began the trial last November with a daunting task ahead. By the time prosecutor Paul Hora rested his case February 14, he had called some 60 witnesses, but presented mostly circumstantial evidence demonstrating animus between Reiser and his wife, and suspicious behavior by the defendant following Nina’s disappearance in September, 2006.

The turning point in the trial came when Reiser took the stand in his own defense March 3.

In his 11 days of testimony, Reiser offered lengthy and verbose explanations for every piece of circumstantial evidence. But Reiser’s version of events often drew disbelieving head shakes from jurors — and occasional smirks from the trial judge.

Namesys, who develops the ReiserFS and Reiser4 linux filesystems, is essentially dead after the verdict. The Namesys website is down due to a DNS problem, and a potential private sale of the company found no buyers. Worse, ReiserFS sucks, according to Kerneltrap:

Reiserfs might be suitable for very specific applications, but to use it in production machine, you need to have some guts.

My last reiserfs partition was blown up two days ago, because of a bad sector, plus a fatal oops, looping endlessly. This was the second time, and the last one, as none of my ext3 filesystems *ever* had similar problems, despite numerous other bad sector issues. Not mentioning the funny “recovery” tool, which generally finishes to trash your data.

And in a bit of off-the-mark dark humour, an anonymous Wikipedia editor added a new column to Comparison of file systems:

There are some irregularities surrounding the Hans Reiser trial, namely that “Sean Sturgeon, a one-time friend of Reiser, and alleged ex-lover of Nina, confessed to killing eight other people and leaving a ninth for dead. However, he claims he did not kill Nina. According to preliminary court testimony, Sturgeon dated Nina, but she broke off the relationship in January 2006.”

Update: Wired is reporting that Hans Reiser is offering the location of Nina’s body in exchange for a reduced sentence. Interestingly, he refused a deal of an “11-year term in exchange to pleading guilty to manslaughter” before the trial started.

The more I look at visual search engine SearchMe, the more I like it. In a way that text-based search engine Google has never done, SearchMe brings thumbnails to search results without losing any of the textual indicators we need to process relevance. SearchMe is also innovating in clustering search results into categories or topics, something Google has experimented with their sets demo but never implemented into the larger search engine. Perhaps the best way to show you how much more relevant SearchMe can be is through a short example, searching for “Obama.”

The first thing I get, as I type “Obama,” is a list of categories that SearchMe finds relevant. I click on “Politicians” and it takes me to the next screen, the main area for exploring search results:

There are a few features you should note that set the SearchMe results apart from their competition. First, they keep the list of categories you’re interested in just one click away from instant filtering at the top of the results. Second, all of the available space of the page is filled with a gigantic preview of the search results. The title of the website is shown at the bottom, along with the site URL when you mouseover the results. Essentially, their search results are a better version of Apple’s coverflow, applied to websites. Clicking on a preview will take you directly to the page of interest, in the same tab, just like most search engines do today.

Their dynamic snippets code is nice, as well, highlighting the search terms you used in multiple colours. It appears to have been implemented directly in the coverflow-like flash engine, or behind the scenes is coming back as a new layer of image, as it loads only after the high resolution preview has loaded. An unfortunate side-effect of their highlighting algorithm is that when searching for multiple words, like “Calderon de la Barca,” the words will be highlighted separately, even if found next to each other.

Not all their results work well; for example, searching for “China” leads me into irrelevance, regardless of the category I choose, and also brings up this half-rendered view of NBA China, that my own browser renders properly. Other search terms also return odd categories and funny previews, but I imagine that this is something that will improve over time. The big problems for a search engine, responsiveness and interface, are already solved as SearchMe is both lightning fast and beautiful.

If you’re interested, you can go check out their blog or signup to the private beta. Apparently, the venture is Sequoia backed, according to Techcrunch, which probably means it’s serious about being a big web search contender in the future. According to Louis Grey, the searchme spider is aggressively hitting his blog, too. It will be interesting to come back and a year and see how SearchMe has evolved. The most likely outcome for this is being acquired by one of the big four–Facebook, Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft–since it’s hard to imagine unseating any of them in the popular mindset.

So far, the answer is clearly no. Go vote yourself on Expelled: The Movement’s website.

I thought that I would give Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the PC a spin, since I saw it come out on steam. Ratings for the game rate it mediocre, as Amazon users rate it 3.5/5, and Metacritic puts it in the mid 70s so far, with user opinions in the 60s.

The premise of the game so far–and I’ve only played through the first four missions–is that there are terrorists, and you must kill them. That’s it. It’s not a tactical shooter, has no real objectives, it’s just a spray and pray race through various environments. As a commenter on Amazon puts it, “the planning and team aspects of the game have been reduced or in some cases deleted. In previous titles you could command a team of up to eight operatives and then systematically plan your assault by assigning waypoints and goals utilizing a map layout of the mission. Now your team never consists of more than three members (including yourself) and you cannot plan your mission out. At all.”

The draw of the game is that you can look at ladders, doors, and ropes and indicate that you or your teammates should use them. Aside from that, there’s nothing interesting or novel. What’s worse, the FPS interface and controls are absolutely terrible. The view angle feels awkward, and the UI for switching and customizing weapons is slow. Also, in the windows port, alt-tabbing in and out of the game takes a full minute (on a Q6600, 8800GTS, 4GB ram; it’s not a bad machine), and loading maps is sluggish.

To it’s credit, as the above screenshot indicates, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (RSV2?) is not a bad looking game, but it’s total lack of plot, tactics, and a usable control system make it a toss-and-return. Don’t buy this game, get Call of Duty 4 (COD4) instead–it’s a better modern warfare simulation.

A little company called Pystar just threw down the gauntlet by offering a $399 Apple Mac Mini clone they’re calling an OpenMac. Currently their website is overloaded with traffic, so don’t expect the links to work just yet.

For an additional $155 you get Apple OSX 10.5 Leopard installed on the system using a Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) emulator and the OSx86 project. Upgrading to an NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT will cost an additional $110, while Firewire ports costs $50. The base specs are formidable:

• 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 2GB of DDR2 667 memory
• Integrated Intel GMA 950 Graphics
• 20x DVD+/-R Drive
• 4 USB Ports
• 250GB 7200RPM Drive

Buying a similarly spec’d mac-mini will cost you at least $1000 for a computer with worse specifications and a slightly nicer looking chassis. That’s right, Apple is charging you 250% more than Pystar will. Where’s the catch? It’s the Apple Leopard 10.5 EULA, which reads “You agree not to install, use or run the Apple Software on any non-Apple-labeled computer, or to enable others to do so.” The Fortune Blog highlights a similar EULA section, which reads “This License allows you to install, use and run one (1) copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time,” and concludes “that’s what’s wrong with this.”

The EULA, Does It Mean Anything?

No, it doesn’t. Based on the First sale doctrine, when you buy something, you essentially have the right to do whatever you want with it (a fact that bothers libertarians, corporations, but few else). That’s right, in the United States, you can buy a copy of OSX 10.5, install it on commodity x86 hardware, and ignore anything in the EULA to the contrary. Apple needs to learn that simply printing indecipherable text buried in a legal document doesn’t make it truth. If their hardware is truly superior, they should welcome the competition.

Note that I am not a lawyer, and this does not in any way provide legal advice

Apple Fans, They’re Hating!

Apple fans have a huge, negative response to this news. They just can’t stand someone creating a cheaper, faster clone of their favorite computer brand. Here are a few select samples, with citations:

• “This is illegal and will never happen. This is EXACTLY what Apple doesn’t want: it’s brand diluted with an ugly product full of bargain-bin components to appeal to the wellfare market. No thanks.” [src]
• “I smell a fly-by-night scam.” [src]
• “Many people may find paying 150% the price for a mac mini with less performance just as insulting” [src]
• “God damn that thing is UGLY. Building a box like that really destroys most of the joys of owning a mac” [src]
• “I can’t even imagine why someone would want all of the crap from the PC world swirling around inside of a well made fine piece of machinery. Good luck with that.” [src]

Essentially, this is the same reaction as Apple fans had to the $200 iPhone price cut: “You can’t drop the price and give Apple to the plebes!” Any Macintosh fans who are honestly upset by a little competition need to tone-down their absolute devotion to the Cult of Jobs, and see how this is good for everyone.