Quotes About Efficiency

On the first day from Tarnag, Eragon made an effort to learn the names of Ûndin's guards. They were Ama, Tríhga, Hedin, Ekksvar, Shrrgnien—which Eragon found unpronounceable, though he was told it meant Wolfheart—Dûthmér, and Thorv.

And the elves...the elves were elegant and efficient and polite to a fault, but once they made a decision, they would not or could not change their minds. Dealing with them had proven far more frustrating than Eragon had anticipated, and the more time he spent around them, the more he'd begun to agree with Orik's opinion of elves. They were best admired from a distance.

First is the worst, second is the same, last is the best in any old game.

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines. They sold their computers to people who were actually going to use them, not to middlemen, and this market required good manners. Microcomputer companies sold equipment as if it were corn, in large quantities; they spent most of their money making things and competed not by being polite but by being aggressive.

I want a UI that is so simple that drunks can use it and ADDs won't be distracted away.

Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day of their own choosing than eight that are prescribed. Provided, of course, that the work is interesting. That was the main thing.

It is not a large exaggeration to say that everything else in a computer exists in order to bring information swiftly to the ALU for manipulation; and for the ALU, adding is the mechanical equivalent of breathing. But

West once said, "An analyzer costs ten thousand dollars. Overtime for engineers is free.

IBM and other mainframe companies spent more money selling their products and serving their customers than they did in actually building their machines.

Medicine is not efficient," I heard Jim say to a group of interns many years after Taube had retired. "It's not supposed to be efficient. It has nothing to do with efficiency.

Firms and employers and monitors will be able to measure economic value with a sometimes oppressive precision.

And to be blunt—while I know I can't prove this—I wonder how much of the middle class consists of people in government or protected service-sector jobs who don't actually produce nearly as much as their pay.

Some commanders can move troops so as to get the maximum distance out of them without fatigue, while others can wear them out in a few days without accomplishing so much.

If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.

Have you ever wondered why in the last century all the great metropolises hastened to build subways?" "To solve traffic problems?" "Before there were automobiles, when there were only horse-drawn carriages? From

Tell me what this means, Dax said. I'm a busy woman with a ship to run and a crisis to handle and I've surrounded myself with smart, dedicated people for the sole purpose of interpreting unintelligible squiggles for me.

Our friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all.

In two centuries, the human labor to produce a kilogram of American wheat was reduced from 10 minutes to less than two seconds.

we create the modern world's material wealth with no more than a quarter of all energy we use.

In 1800 New England farmers (seeding by hand, with ox-drawn wooden plows and brush harrows, sickles, and flails) needed 150–170 hours of labor to produce their wheat harvest. By 1900 in California, horse-drawn gang-plowing, spring-tooth harrowing, and combine harvesting could produce the same amount of wheat in less than nine hours

And long-distance electricity-powered commercial flight (equivalent to a kerosene-powered Boeing 787 from New York to Tokyo) is the outstanding example of the last category: as we will see, this is an energy conversion that will remain unrealistic for a long time to come.

More efficient photovoltaic cells would be most welcome because of their relatively high power densities: efficiencies close to twenty percent would translate to electricity generation rates between 20–40 W/m2, two orders of magnitude better than biomass conversion, and one better than most hydro and wind projects.

Between 1800 and 2020, we reduced the labor needed to produce a kilogram of grain by more than 98 percent—and we reduced the share of the country's population engaged in agriculture by the same large margin.50 This provides a useful guide to the profound economic transformations that would have to take place with any retreat of agricultural mechanization and reduction in the use of synthetic agrochemicals.

Heat thus occupies a unique position in the hierarchy of energies: all other forms of energy can be completely converted to it, but its conversion into other forms can never be complete, as only a portion of the initial input ends up in the new form.