20th-century Engineer Quotes

Engineering drawings are expressed in a graphic language, the grammar and syntax of which are learned through use; it also has idioms that only initiates will recognize. And because the drawings are neatly made and produced on large sheets of paper, they exhume an air of great authority and definitive completeness.

Eugene S. Ferguson

You keep returning to the thought that only very thin walls separate you from the deathly cold and incomprehensible emptiness of space, which can extinguish life instantly and piteously.

Oleg Grigoryevich Makarov

It is easier to distinguish between the "scientific function" and the "engineering function" than to distinguish between the man who should be called a scientist and [he] who should be termed an engineer. Many men perform both functions, and do it very well.

William Littell Everitt

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

This decade holds many changes for the United States, but the greatest needs regarding America's productivity in the 1990s, are better education and employee training.

Gregory Balestrero

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The only way to make it clear to him that he should not come here to our lists in the future, is to teach him a hard lesson, and that is done by continually re-adding cc's back to him — because the mails talk about him — even when his friends come our mailing lists and delete the his address from the cc list. Like this message, which adds him back in. Richard, you are a lying cheating hypocrite.

Of the four project development variables - scope, cost, time and quality - quality isn't really a free variable. The only possible values are "excellent" and "insanely excellent", depending on whether lives are at stake.

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

[Netscape will soon reduce Windows to] a poorly debugged set of device drivers.

Marc Andreessen

Playing catch-up with the competition can only ever help you make incremental gains. It will never help you create something new.

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.

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

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.

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.

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