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Interview with Andrew Tridgell
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes "See here for a *great* interview with tridge. My favourite quote: 'In 50 years' time I doubt anyone would have ever heard of Samba, but they'll probably be using rsync in one way or another,' Tridgell says. Cheers, Jeremy."
does anybody know what this sequence is.
Tridgell says that he recently discovered a certain combination of data which, when sent down the wire to a Windows server, rebooted it. "Every NT server just completely rebooted. We decided not to emulate that. We contact Microsoft about these bugs, and we get back emails saying, 'Have you got your computer switched on? Are you sure you've got all the latest patches?' Of course, you idiot! Just put me through to someone who knows what they're doing," he says.
I can only post twice a day thanks to the fascists running slashdot.
kthx
But in most *nixes, especially of the open source variety, all one would have to do essentially is change the variables a bit and recompile. Granted, it's somewhat more complicated an effort than just that, but you get the idea. This should be a much simpler problem to fix than the y2k bug that never really was a problem.
I suppose my point is that if we were able to survive the y2k bug without much of a real problem (sure some things were broken, but compared to what we were told was going to happen, it was really smooth), we ought to be able to do the same with *nix, only much easier.
UNIX doomsday, this only applies to 32-bit integers if you recompile your code with time as a 64-bit integer (like on 64-bit processors) then the 32 bit integer which represents time as seconds since circa 1970, will last for 70 ish years, however a 64 bit integer can store 2^32 times more numbers, meaning it will last for 70 * (2^32) years. So as long as all UNIX machines are on 64 bit processors by 2038, doomsday will be avoided until the year 300647712690. In other words approx. 280 billion years. Given that we estimate that the universe is approaching its mid life crisis, 64 bits should keep time for 9.3 universe life times. I have a feeling my math may be a bit off can someone double check this for me. I do know that 64 bit UNIX time will last for a the forseeable future.
You don't know what you're talking about.
Samba isn't developed my Microsoft; SMB is. And the problems SMB solves are fading even now; in 50 years there's no way that SMB will be useful. Microsoft will have moved on to something else.
And, of course, rsync isn't part of the rlogin/rsh/rwhatever toolset. It's completely independant.
The reason that rsync might still be used is that it implements a really powerful algorithm to do its job, which is being adopted in many cutting-edge projects. I don't know if those cutting-edge projects will have relatives which are still in use in 50 years, but they have more of a chance than Samba.
-Billy
It's not that the processor can't count above 32-bits. There are 64-bit (or even higher) long long integers, and Java longs are also 64-bits. The difference is that for 64-bits on a 32-bit computer, the processor actually has to do the addition in two steps, once for each 32-bit dword. Unix programmers knew rightly that this is a little less efficient than straight 32-bit numbers, in addition to the fact that 64-bits takes twice as much memory. So they decided to go the efficient route, instead of the correct route.
There is nothing about 32-bit processors that prevents 64-bit datatypes from being emulated. Many Unixes are already migrating; the new time_t structures really are 64-bit. Java time, and I'm sure there's lots of other examples, is 64-bit as well.
- file ownership
- permissions
- symlinks
- special files (devices, etc)
- hard links
Great bit of software. Perhaps not as technically excellent as Samba, which is more complex, but very useful.This doesn't mention that he's also the person who first did a lot of the tivo hacks that are out there. How can one person do so many good things?
Sig is taking a break!