Quotes About Documentation

The U.S. Army records alone for World War II weigh 17,000 tons, and even the best historians have not done more than just scratch the surface. The story is such that 500 years from now people will be writing and reading about it.

I used to work in 'Big Brother' in the third series, I was a logger, which was the worst of all jobs, you had to sit and watch what happens and type it into a computer.

There's a whole load of stuff in life that is worth documenting. You see it every day but don't even notice.

I am one of many people documenting damage and looting at ancient sites from space - it is such a crucial tool.

As our technology evolves, we will have the capacity to reach new, ever-increasing depths. The question is what kind of technology, in the end, do we want to deploy in the far reaches of the ocean? Tools of science, ecology and documentation, or the destructive tools of heavy industry?

Everyone has a smart phone, and everything is recorded. One event spills into another. Conclusions come quickly at the near total expense of consideration of what just actually happened.

Everywhere you go, people have recorded or captured events in real time on their mobile phones. It becomes one of the first questions you ask when you go in to investigate something.

History is: + the lies of the victors + the self-delusions of the defeated + a raw onion sandwich + certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation

If you can't figure out how to use a class based solely on its interface documentation, the right response is not to pull up the source code and look at the implementation. That's good initiative but bad judgment. The right response is to contact the author of the class and say I can't figure out how to use this class.

The right response for the class author is to check out the class-interface file, modify the class-interface documentation, check the file back in, and then say See if you can understand how it works now.

She told them everything she could. Garvin asked all the questions; Scarpino, clearly the recessive gene, said nothing, took notes.

The ONI's software and documentation have already been emailed to your private OASIS account

There is a possibility that there is somebody out there alive today over 122, but we'll probably never know it, because in all likelihood they come from either China or India, and they don't have reliable birth records.

One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.

History, like journalism, is ever a journey outwards, and you must report back what you find and no more.

We are the recorders and reporters of facts - not the judges of the behaviors we describe.

Washington worked very hard to create his legacy. Even before the War of Independence was over, he was assembling his papers and making sure they were going to be in a state of preservation that would represent as best he could the official side of what occurred during the Revolution.

We have documented in this book that: • Cost overruns of 50 per cent to 100 per cent in real terms are common in megaprojects; overruns above 100 per cent are not uncommon; • Demand forecasts that are wrong by 20 per cent to 70 per cent compared with actual developments are common; • The extent and magnitude of actual environmental impacts of projects are often very different from forecast impacts. Post-auditing is neglected;

The German penchant for detailed record keeping proved to be their undoing: the date and cause of death for each inmate was dutifully recorded.

Jefferson makes note of the date on which particular flowers bloom. Once autumn comes, he will record the migratory patterns of birds.4

The men who founded and governed Massachusetts and Connecticut took themselves so seriously that they kept track of everything they did for the benefit of posterity and hoarded their papers so carefully that the whole history of the United States, recounted mainly by their descendants, has often appeared to be the history of New England writ large.

For this purpose I determined to keep an account of the voyage, and to write down punctually every thing we performed or saw from day to day, as will hereafter appear.

We want a world with both historians and novelists, don't we? Not with one or the other. Every fiction writer crosses the line that divides artistry and documentation - or erases it.

History is a facsimile of events held together by finally biographical information.