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If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works.

Jamie Zawinski

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Jamie Zawinski
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: November 3
Blogger
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Nightclub Owner
Programmer
Pittsburg
Pennsylvania
jwz
James Werner Jamie Zawinski
First
Hackers
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Giving
Apart
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More quotes by Jamie Zawinski

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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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[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
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You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of open source, and have everything magically work out.
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Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?
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To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that.
Jamie Zawinski
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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
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I dont get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.
Jamie Zawinski
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And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux.
Jamie Zawinski
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There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course.
Jamie Zawinski
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C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.
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
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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
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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
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On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense.
Jamie Zawinski
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My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.
Jamie Zawinski
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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
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Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
Jamie Zawinski
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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
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Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!
Jamie Zawinski
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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