20th-century Engineer Quotes

Women think that an engineer is a man in hip boots building a dam. They don't realize that 95 percent of engineering is done in a nice air-conditioned office.

Even if a company maybe makes a promise and says, "Well, hey, look, we're not going to do anything with the data." You have no way to verify that.

Explaining why Apple will allow inspection of its AI server software

Craig Federighi

This leap into, "Somebody is going to produce a superhuman intelligence, and then there's going to be all these ethical issues" is unwarranted and borderline irresponsible. I'm definitely not worried about the AI apocalypse.

John Giannandrea

Only a certain probability remains of a one-to-one association of any spatial feature now with a similar feature a moment later. It is sheer luck, in a sense, that any physical apparatus stays put, for the laws of quantum mechanics allow it a finite, though small, probability of dispersing while one is not looking, or even while one is.

Lancelot Law Whyte

I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy.

Successful visionaries start from where they are, what they have, and what their customers have.

Like concepts such as national energy policy or war on drugs, competitiveness covers a lot of territory

Allen B. Rosenstein

The world about us can be looked at in a variety of ways. One way is to see the world as made up from many interacting systems: weather, societal, economic, ecological, floral, faunal, tectonic plate, oceanic, and so on. This is very much a connected view of the world: nothing is isolated and totally independent; everything is part of something bigger, and everything comprises many interacting parts — subsystems.

Sometimes it is more difficult to formulate the criterion for a problem than to state the question itself.

Robert E. Machol

The greatest risk we face in software development is that of overestimating our own knowledge.

One advantage of static factory methods is that, unlike constructors, they have names.

In the near future, the web is going to be the master copy of human knowledge. We need to figure out ways to use that knowledge.

Håkon Wium Lie

The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal, and in 1776, that's exactly what they meant. Women could not vote, women could not own property, and blacks were considered property. After 200 years of enlightenment, we have realized that gender and race are inappropriate distinctions for determining who has individual rights. Anytime Gov gives you permission they let you know that you have permission by giving you a permit or a license. If you have a marriage license, what permission do you have to do now that you did not have permission to do before, who gave you that permission, and who gave them the authority to give you that permission in the first place?

Michael Badnarik

Building software implies various stages of planning, preparation and execution that vary in kind and degree depending on what's being built. [...]
Building a four-foot tower requires a steady hand, a level surface, and 10 undamaged beer cans. Building a tower 100 times that size doesn't merely require 100 times as many beer cans.

Steve McConnell

We offer them mediocrity while calling it magic. We offer them the illusion of intelligent software, seducing them into surrendering the task of thinking to the machine. Of course, the machine isn't thinking, which means that nobody is.

Larry Constantine

Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors -- malleable entities like ethnicities, for example -- are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.

Like many fields in their early stages, the software field has had its share of project disasters: the software equivalents of Beauvais Cathedral, the S. S. Titanic, and the "Galloping Gertie" Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The frequency of these disaster projects is a serious concern: a recent survey of 600 firms indicated that 35% of them had at least one "runaway' software project.

Responsibility-driven design is inspired by the client/server model. It focuses on the contract by asking: What actions is this object responsible for? and What information does this object share?

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock

The designs we see in nature are not the result of chance. They rise naturally, spontaneously, because they enhance access to flow…

Unless you are very rich and very eccentric, you will not enjoy the luxury of a computer in your own home.

Typically, a subclass augments or redefines the existing structure and behavior of its superclasses.

First law: The pesticide paradox. Every method you use to prevent or find bugs leaves a residue of subtler bugs against which those methods are ineffective.

It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.

Human anatomy is either general, specific, topographical or surgical. These terms do not imply the dissection and anatomy of generals, specialists, topographers and surgeons, as they might seem to imply, but really mean something else. I would explain here what they actually do mean if I had more room and knew enough to do it.

We consider an organization to be a set of constraints on the activities performed by agents. This view follows that of Weber, who views the process of bureaucratization as a shift from management based on self-interest and personalities to one based on rules and procedures.

Mark S. Fox | Michael Gruninger