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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..."
...about Linus Torvalds:
One of the most memorable parts of that evening was when my Linux NFS [Network File System] server died, to the point that the console seemed completely dead (the load of all those Doom WAD files obviously got to it). I was about to press reset when Linus stepped in and said he wanted to work out why it had crashed, so he could fix it. I then watched in complete amazement as Linus exploited a remote file truncation bug he knew about in the NFS server I was running which allowed him to peek into the proc filesystem on the apparently dead server and work out enough to find the bug. Up till then I had considered myself to be a pretty good programmer, and quite good at debugging system crashes, but that incident taught me that I would always be an also-ran who just isn't in the same league as
people like Linus.
This is from an interview here.
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