Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible – and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.
Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.
Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
Free markets select for winning solutions.
And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.
Anybody who has ever owned a dog who barked when strangers came near its owner’s property has experienced the essential continuity between animal territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of the wolf are instinctively smarter about this than a good many human political theorists.
The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.
Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.
In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.
Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color.
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.
With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.
The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.
You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.