QuotesChange is easy, except for the changed part. Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way
to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable
funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's
Laws! (Compared to software, ) The brain alone is intricate beyond
mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and
self-renewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built. The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan.
Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted. If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than
the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a
dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains,
"The light is better there." Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and he will become as he can and should be. All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I
should have been more specific. Having sex is like playing bridge: If you don't have a good partner, you'd better
have a really good hand.
The things you owe end up owing you. We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like, but you can
never leave. If you ever injected truth into politics you would have no politics. Power is the recognition of necessity. The right man is the one that seizes the moment. I would live to study, not study to live. Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind. The eyes are not responsible when the mind does the seeing. The value of a sentiment is the amount of sacrifice you are prepared to make for
it. When a man opens the car door for his wife, it's either a new car or a new wife. When women go wrong, men go right after them. An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our
relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience,
just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another. Good morning! And in case I don't see you: If you shed tears when you miss the sun, you also miss the stars. Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind,... it doesn't matter. By forcing our surrender to the authority of the clock systematic timekeeping has
imposed a form of tyranny on society. If duty is the natural outgrowth of one's control over the course of future events, then people who are powerful have duty placed on them whether they like it or not. People should not be praised for their virtue if they lack the energy to be wicked; in such cases, goodness is merely the effect of indolence. The Muses are vindictive deities: they avenge themselves without mercy on those who weary of their charms. Cynics believe that people who shrug off compliments do so in order to be praised twice. There is perhaps some truth in that waggish old definition of a scholar --- a siren that calls attention to a fog without doing anything to dispel it. Every burned book enlightens the world. Fashion is partly a search for a new language to discredit the old, a way in which generation can repudiate its immediate predecessor and distinguish itself. Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. We tend to blame the physical media for most of our
implementation difficulties; for the media are not "ours" in the way the ideas
are, and our pride colors our judgement.
(Compared to software, ) The brain alone is intricate beyond mapping, powerful beyond imitation, rich in diversity, self-protecting, and self-renewing. The secret is that it is grown, not built. --- Fredirick Brooks, "The Mythical Man-month", "No Silver Bullet" It is a common experience that attempts to solve just one piece
of a problem first, then others, and so on, lead to endless involutions. You no
sooner solve one aspect of a thing, than another point is out of point. And
when you correct that one, something else goes wrong. You go round and round in
circles, unable to produce a form that is thoroughly right. Loneliness is often at the heart of job dissatisfaction. Everybody in a business unit has exactly the same ... job
description, and that is to ship products. Your job is not to write code, your
job is not to test, your job is not to write specs. Your job is to ship
products ... You're trying not to write code. If we could make all this money
by not writing code, we'd do it. Production speed is severely slowed down if one works with
half-time people who have other obligations as well. This is at least a factor
of four; probably it is worse. The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern
times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more
than a whim of the gods and that men and women are not passive before nature.
Until human beings discovered a way across that boundary, the future was the
mirror of the past or the murky domain of oracles and soothsayers who held a
monopoly over knowledge of anticipated events.
|