Quotes About Efficiency

As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

A man, at times, gets something for nothing, but it will, in his hands, amount to nothing.

Man is naturally lazy, therefore he invents labor-saving devices.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

He parks in the far corner of the lot, explaining that it is more logical to do this and then walk for fifteen seconds than it is to spend fifteen minutes looking for a closer space.

Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is—as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms—having problems.

We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.

so efficient it doesn't waste power by making noise

I'm surprised at you! If it will take ten years to make the machine with available technology, and only five years to make it with a new technology, and it will only take two years to invent the new technology, then you can do it in seven years by inventing the new technology first!

Books are the single most efficient technology there is in terms of nimbleness and bang for the buck. You can present a whole universe in a book. It's produced simply by sitting in front of a typewriter or a computer and tapping on keys. There's no real limit to what you can conjure up in the reader's imagination by doing that. The book is irreplaceable.

there didn't seem to be any computer-driven process that couldn't be improved upon by humans crawling around on the actual structure and writing on it with grease pencils.

My thoughts are more in line with those of Jaron Lanier, who points out that while hardware might be getting faster all the time, software is shit (I am paraphrasing his argument). And without software to do something useful with all that hardware, the hardware's nothing more than a really complicated space heater.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself—and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see?

serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies

Shit, if I took time out to have an opinion about everything, I wouldn't get any work done

I'll set up a cron job to do it right now," Corvallis said. "Once an hour?" "I was thinking once a minute.

Nothing is more disagreeable to the hacker than duplication of effort. The first and most important mental habit that people develop when they learn how to write computer programs is to generalize, generalize, generalize. To make their code as modular and flexible as possible, breaking large problems down into small subroutines that can be used over and over again in different contexts.

Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally.

We are technocrats. We make decisions like engineers. Which doesn't always line up with what people imagine they want.

In the old days a proposed system would have been given a three-letter acronym and bounced back and forth between different agencies and contractors for fifteen years before being launched into space.

Plane-change maneuvers are expensive.