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Tridgell and Samba Recognized
An anonymous reader writes "It's official, Samba creator Andrew Tridgell is Australia's smartest man... in IT anyway. He's received Bulletin magazine's 'Smart 100' award for the IT sector. He's also written about how Samba came into being, which was basically because he was trying to avoid doing any real work on his PhD. He also tells us how he discovered Linux and why he believes Open Source Software is superior to proprietary code... He also talks about rsync and his plans for the future..."
Admit it. With the exception of Apache, Samba is the number one reason that Linux (and BSD, too!) has been able to invade the datacenters of companies the world over.
:)
Without Samba, Linux et al would be in a much less pretty position.
Perhaps we should call it Samba/GNU/Linux?
Kudos to the Samba Team, Tridge, and all Samba developers/testers/users!
Fellowship 9/11
Rsync is overrated. It's useful for files with local edits (eg, text and source code), but performs poorly on files which tend to have global, sparse, changes (eg, most data files, and all executables). Changing one character will result in an entire block being transmitted -- put another way, the bandwidth usage is O(n/k+kD), where n is the file size, D is the edit distance, and k is a parameter (the block size).
This is considerably worse than necessary; it is possible to cut the bandwidth down to O(n/k+kI+S), where n,k are as above, I is the number of inserts/deletes, and S is the number of substitutions. For executable files, this can easily result in a fivefold improvement.
Rsync is certainly a useful tool, but it isn't the synchronization-tool-to-end- all-synchronization-tools which many people consider it to be.
(Side note: I have the same DPhil supervisor as Andrew Tridgell, so I feel perfectly entitled to bash my fellow student's work.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
"So, it's the "proprietaries" as I will not call them that only write bad code? Didn't he just suggest that his first attempt was poorly written. Or maybe he's arguing that it's continually poor no matter how many times it's re-written."
His argument, I think, is that with closed source, dozens of companies are all writing bad code to do the same thing, whereas with open source, that bad code only has to be written once... and then either the programmer soon gets so embarassed that they end up rewriting it properly, or someone else gets so disgusted that they do so.
He didn't write the code with that flaw in it, I did.
So did you get exploited by this flaw ? Did you lose data or
get compromised ? Do you have a legitimate complaint, or are
you carping anonymously about "communist collective's" because
you don't know how to code yourself, and you fear them ?
The psychology behind comments like this is interesting to me,
I always wonder if you're the same kind of people who "key"
expensive cars because you don't own one ? Did you ever write
software yourself ? Do you know how ?
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.