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 More Quotes by Jamie Zawinski More Quotes From Jamie Zawinski Linux is only free if your time has no value. Jamie Zawinski linux funny-inspirational time 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 college use years 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 use ease today 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 design real class 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? Jamie Zawinski corny use doe 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 successful inspirational two To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that. Jamie Zawinski nails design looks C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string. Jamie Zawinski dixie cups two Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer. Jamie Zawinski engineering might science Any time someone says "that's it, I'm leaving" I ask them whether they'd prefer to live under US domestic policy, or US foreign policy. As bad as things get inside an empire, they're usually worse in the protectorates. Jamie Zawinski foreign-policy empires leaving 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 toys giving firsts I use a really simple calendar program on my computer. Jamie Zawinski calendars simple use 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 toys giving firsts 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 magic work-out dust My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others. Jamie Zawinski purpose warning life-is Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. Jamie Zawinski programming program mail Mostly I use the O2 as an X terminal, however, running my apps on Linux and displaying remotely. Jamie Zawinski linux use running [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 aspect worst different 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 focus doe looks I dont get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card. Jamie Zawinski rewards bars cards
