Ken Thompson Quotes
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A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.
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So maybe I can go back to being a Gardeners' World addict again.
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It is only the inadequacy of the criminal code that saves the hackers from very serious prosecution.
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The average gardener probably knows little about what is going on in his or her garden.
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I also have an idea for a book on biodiversity, and why and how we should be conserving it.
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There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.
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One is that the perfect garden can be created overnight, which it can't.
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We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.
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In fact, we started off with two or three different shells and the shell had life of its own.
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I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.
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One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.
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'I've seen visual editors like that, but I don't feel a need for them. I don't want to see the state of the file when I'm editing.'
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The press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids. ... There is obviously a cultural gap. The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house. It should not matter that the neighbor's door is unlocked.
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The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you.
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There are no projects per se in the Computing Sciences Research Center.
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It does everything Unix does only less reliably.
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I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.
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Unauthorized access to computer systems is already a serious crime in a few states and is currently being addressed in many more state legislatures as well as Congress.
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In college, before video games, we would amuse ourselves by posing programming exercises.
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It's always good to take an orthogonal view of something. It develops ideas.
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On the one hand, the press, television, and movies make heroes of vandals by calling them whiz kids.
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I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrant death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies.
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Hi, this is Ken. What's the root password?
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grep was a private command of mine for quite a while before i made it public.