Jamie Zawinski Quotes (19 Quotes)


    The focus must always be on the task that the person wants to accomplish, to communicate, to learn, to create, to be entertained.

    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.

    I don't get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.

    My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

    Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.



    See, unlike most hackers, I get little joy out of figuring out how to install the latest toy.

    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.

    Mostly I use the O2 as an X terminal, however, running my apps on Linux and displaying remotely.

    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.

    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.

    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?

    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.

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


    And when the time comes to replace the O2 I have today, maybe my next machine will run Linux.

    Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

    I use a really simple calendar program on my computer.

    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!


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