Jamie Zawinski Quotes

I think that by October the whole company has to migrate to OpenOffice, and then I think it's by June next year we all migrate to Linux - you don't want to migrate 6,000 people both operating system and office suite in a single jump.

From day one our next generation system will run all our exsisting software - so that gives us a head start.

Putting Windows [3.11] on top of DOS is like putting whipped cream on a road apple [horse poop].

Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware.

Macs are not intuitive. It's intuitive to the person who created it. It's not intuitive to me.

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

Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth the effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us.

Macintosh felt like a system. As I learned more, I felt like I was able to guess how new things would work. I felt like the bugs in my programs were more my bugs and not things I misunderstood.

I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we'll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people.

The iPad needs to catch up with Flash before I put a hand on it.

Unix has, I think for many years, had a reputation as being difficult to learn and incomplete. Difficult to learn means that the set of shared conventions, and things that are assumed about the way it works, and the basic mechanisms, are just different from what they are in other systems.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated.

If you depend on a secret for your security, what do you do when the secret is discovered? If it is easy to change, like a cryptographic key, you do so. If it's hard to change, like a cryptographic system or an operating system, you're stuck. You will be vulnerable until you invest the time and money to design another system.

I've been using a computer for quite some time, and I don't understand everything.

Whoever invented double clicking should be shot in the head! Twice!

I remember endless Apple v. Windows debates in the early '90s when I was in college. Macs were better machines, everyone said; the whole Office thing was a huge pain. It was difficult to transfer files between operating systems, and generally speaking, if you wanted to do Office stuff, you needed a Windows machine.

Well, the first thing to say is that we've worked hard to maintain compatibility, so that any program written with an earlier version of Mathematica can run without change in 3.0, and any notebook can be converted.

For many years, even as users became more sophisticated, personal computers took too much effort to use without problem-solving, keeping alive the yearning for greater simplicity. Microsoft's dominant Windows platform, in particular, was a home for all manner of bugs and problems that required IT people to straighten out.

I write almost entlirely on Macs, because: Windows gives me hives.

I think that Windows 8 is kind of a catastrophe for everybody in the PC space.

I don't understand what apps are on my phone. Why do they ask for passwords? Why do they all ask for different passwords? It's so frustrating that I end up just reading a book every time I try to go online.

This Windows 95 hairball has become so big, so unmanageable, so hard to use, so hard to configure, so hard to keep up and running, so hard to keep secure. Windows 95 is a great gift to give your kid this Christmas because it will keep your kid fascinated for months trying to get it up and running and trying to figure out how to use it.

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

Maybe we're about to radically change the operating system of the human condition. If so, then this would be a really good time to make backups of our civilization.