Best quotes of 2006

It's that time of year again when we look back and ponder what happened in the last 12 months. Here ZDNet Australia has collected some of the more colourful, amusing and insightful quotes that have passed through our pages in that time.

1. "I'd like to start off with a little joke. T3."
   Comedian Peter Berner sets the festive tone at the annual dinner of the Service Providers Association (now the Communications Alliance).
2. "I'd like to thank Peter for making that kind comment. I've decided that it's going to be a ministerial determination that there will forever be a [broadband] black spot over his home. Never to be fixed."
   Communications Minister Senator Helen Coonan responds to teasing from Berner, on the same night.
3. "Ahoy! She's good to go, hoist anchor. Here's some real booty for all you land-lubbers. There's not too many changes, with t'bulk of the patch bein' defconfig updates, but the shortlog at the aft of this here e-mail describes the details if you care, you scurvy dogs."
   Linux creator Linus Torvalds announcing a new version of the Linux kernel, on Talk Like a Pirate Day.
4. "The next year is shaping up as a high-risk game of chicken."
   Ovum analyst David Kennedy comments on Telstra's stand-off with the federal government over rivals gaining access to its planned fibre to the node network.
5. "I used to love Google. I loved to Google things as much as everyone else. But they've broken my heart and I have to tell them so."
   Protestor Zoe Bedford from the Australia-Tibet Council comments on Google's decision to censor sensitive content from its Chinese search engine.
6. "One of the things I've learnt as I've gone through life is, if you have people who aren't performing, get rid of them."
   Tony Clasquin, chief information officer of the Commonwealth Bank's wealth management division, gives an insight into his management style.
7. "We don't try and understand what sort of deodorant you're likely to use."
   Graeme Wood, the founder and owner of accommodation booking Web site Wotif.com, tells a conference his company has no time for customer relationship management software.
8. "This is not an outage situation, it's an upgrade to a better service."
   SmartyHost managing director Anoosh Manzoori before offering compensation to customers after a botched migration.
9. "I think it's going to be more of a bloody hindrance than anything."
   Bartercard's chief information officer Jason Van on Microsoft's new Office 2007 suite.
10. "We made a small blunder in that. We outsourced all our security to them."
    Westpac's chief information security officer David Backley on the bank's IT services contract with IBM Global Services.
11. "If I give a supplier 25 dollars every time I do call the help desk, [for] major system outages, they sort of go 'yes, we've made another million!'."
    The Commonwealth Bank's general manager of operations management John Talbot on the problems of outsourcers' help desk pricing models.
12. "To say that we were impressed at that moment with the services provided would be a massive overstatement."
    Department of Human Services minister Joe Hockey on receiving a call informing him and Centrelink CEO Jeff Whalan that a power failure in a Cybertrust data centre had hit a critically important Centrelink mainframe.
13. "In the same way as you wouldn't expect to boil your own water before you could use it, in an Internet sense that is what everyone is left to do ... You could say ISPs are pumping out the equivalent of raw sewage and saying: 'you sort it out'."
    MessageLabs CTO Mark Sunner believes it is the duty of ISPs to filter Internet nasties out for their users.

Perhaps the most controversial comment of the year though, came from Westpac's head of its media relations department, David Lording, who said this in response to a question from ZDNet Australia on whether or not Westpac had backup systems in place after hardware failures temporarily knocked out the bank's Internet banking capability:

"Oh mate get real, we are one of the biggest f**king banks in the country."