Jamie Zawinski Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“Linux is only free if your time has no value.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
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“If you give a cracker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is carve his initials in it. Fortunately, most crackers get over that once they're through puberty.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“I use a really simple calendar program on my computer.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“Nothing stands still. The real question is can you change it?”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“I find that getting something on the screen as soon as possible really helps focus the problem for me. It helps me decide what to work on next. Because if you're just looking at that big to-do list it's like, eh, I don't know which one I should do—does it matter which one I do? But if there's something you can actually look at, even if it's just the debug output of your mailbox parser, it's like, OK, there!”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
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“To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“Because, you see, what I want to do is to commoditize the OS. I want to have access to all the applications that I need to do the things that I need to do, regardless.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
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“It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
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“Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“Today, I use Linux as my primary OS (on an x86 PC, and on a Thinkpad), and I also use Irix (on an SGI O2). Linux has improved a great deal since I wrote this, specifically with respect to its ease of installation.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
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“[Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are ... something else entirely.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“Your needs are big because the Internet is big.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
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“If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“I dont get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“You can always affect things - so can you change it in a way that will make you as happy with it in the future as you were in the past? Maybe it won't be the same, but it might be something else you also like.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
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“See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy.”
-- Jamie Zawinski -
“You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company.”
-- Jamie Zawinski
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