Specifications Quotes

To try to become happy is to try to build a machine with no other specifications than it shall run noiselessly. ~ J. Robert Oppenheimer

There isn't a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own. ~ Charles Dudley Warner

Just be aware that you reach a point of diminishing, or even negative, returns as the specifications get more and more detailed. ~ Andrew Hunt

You can't exactly bake a man to your specifications. Most of all, one shouldn't alienate a candidate. A hybrid of Einstein, Tarzan and Inge Meysel doesn't exist. Besides, the images of politicians in the media aren't always accurate. I've had my share of experiences in that regard. ~ Peer Steinbruck

There is a great risk that Christians may become idolaters if they lose the meaning of silence. Our words inebriate us; they confine us to what is created. Bewitched and imprisoned by the noise of human speech, we run the risk of designing worship to our specifications, a god in our own image. Words bring with them the temptation of the golden calf! Only silence leads man beyond words, to the mystery, to worship in spirit and in truth. Silence is a form of mystagogy; it brings us into the mystery without spoiling it. ~ Robert Sarah

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain. ~ China Mieville

I loved music, and in my ninth year at MIT, I decided to buy a hi-fi set. I figured that all I needed to do was look at the specifications. So I bought what looked like the best one, turned it on, and turned it off in five minutes, the sound was so poor. ~ Amar Bose

In programming, it's often the buts in the specification that kill you. ~ Boris Beizer

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. ~ Marcel Proust

Most clients expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service. ~ Dan Brown

Our schools are, in a sense, factories, in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down. ~ Ellwood Patterson Cubberley

More importantly, our software worked. I don't just mean that it didn't bump, or that it performed according to the written specifications, or that it was efficient in producing reports. It really worked ~ Eliyahu M. Goldratt

Now that we've come up with all the obvious answers to our problem, it's time to come up with some truly ridiculous ones."
"Ridiculous?" asked Brasque.
"Yes, ridiculous. Think of something impossible, improbable or downright ridiculous and go from there."
"Like we all flap our arms and fly out of here," said Katherine.
"Exactly!" said Spider.
"How about we form a long line all the way to the mountains and pass the charges along it?" said Brasque.
"Excellent," said Spider. "Keep it coming."
"What if we each carry one charge, run back, carry another, and so on?" said Tom, getting into the swing of things.
"Lovely!" laughed Spider. "Now we're cooking."
The shower of sparks shot out of the top of the Amadragon. Joe shielded his eyes with his hand.
"Yeah, and we can all climb on the Amadragon and ride out of here," he said.
"What was that, Joe?" said Spider, suddenly dropping the jokey manner. "What's the Amadragon?"
Katherine's eyes glittered. "He means that," she said, pointing at the excavator. Everyone except Spider turned and looked. "He's talking about the giant machine, the one that keeps shooting sparks in the air."
Spider cocked his ear and listened to the rumble of the Amadragon's engine. "So Orlemann built the dragon, did he?" he said. "I'd been wondering what the noise was. If they built it to the original specifications, it should get us out of here within an hour. Let's pray that will give us enough tim ~ Carol Hughes

Yet a much more fundamentally political dimension of the socially constructed nature of capital - nothing less than the specification of a parallel universe with its own natural laws and rules for the physical existence and subsistence of financial capital and its interaction with the other factors of production - has also often been overlooked in contemporary academic literature. Under the current monetary arrangements financial capital is a peculiar creature indeed. Money can be created ex nihilo at the stroke of a pen - or a keyboard - by a specific type of legal person entrusted with the task, not other legal or natural person. With the socially constructed ability to attract compound interest in a world where physical assets rot and break, it does not share the same physical reality with the mere mortal factors of production: even in cases where productive investments which enable the payment of interest in real terms can be identified, the compounding of interest on financial capital is not temporally limited to the period that the relevant physical assets can continue to produce exponential returns in real terms. Rather than representing accumulated wealth that could be "saved" to finance investment, the bulk of money disappears as soon as other factors of production are not willing to pay a tribute to induce its continuing circulation in the form of interest payments. In addition to the inherently political nature of specifications of money have been detached from vir ~ Tero Auvinen

To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself. The ~ Tana French

We must define quality as conformance to specifications if we are to manage it. ~ Phil Crosby

There's a lot of people I know who have a lot of synthesisers and they don't really know anything about them, they know the specifications and everything, but they don't really get to know them. ~ Thighpaulsandra

US government button specifications run to twenty-two pages. This fact on its own yields a sense of what it is like to design garments for the Army. ~ Mary Roach

Let's see, you will need a project plan, resource allocation, a timeline, test cycles, a budget, a contingency budget, lots of diagrams, flowcharts, a media release, a strategic vision, a charter, technical specifications, business rules, travel expenses, a development environment, deployment instructions, a user acceptance test, stationary, overtime schedule, a mock-up, prototypes ... "
"Tell me," she said, "did the people who built the pyramids have any of those?"
"Mostly, they had beer. Come to think of it, if there had been such a thing as a Business Analyst in ancient Egypt, then the hieroglyph for it would have been very graphical, if you know what I mean. ~ Sorin Suciu

Make him [the reader] think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. ~ Henry James

Pull approaches differ significantly from push approaches in terms of how they organize and manage resources. Push approaches are typified by "programs" - tightly scripted specifications of activities designed to be invoked by known parties in pre-determined contexts. Of course, we don't mean that all push approaches are software programs - we are using this as a broader metaphor to describe one way of organizing activities and resources. Think of thick process manuals in most enterprises or standardized curricula in most primary and secondary educational institutions, not to mention the programming of network television, and you will see that institutions heavily rely on programs of many types to deliver resources in pre-determined contexts.

Pull approaches, in contrast, tend to be implemented on "platforms" designed to flexibly accommodate diverse providers and consumers of resources. These platforms are much more open-ended and designed to evolve based on the learning and changing needs of the participants. Once again, we do not mean to use platforms in the literal sense of a tangible foundation, but in a broader, metaphorical sense to describe frameworks for orchestrating a set of resources that can be configured quickly and easily to serve a broad range of needs. Think of Expedia's travel service or the emergency ward of a hospital and you will see the contrast with the hard-wired push programs. ~ John Hagel III

Truth breaks you down so it can rebuild you according to its specifications in Heaven. ~ Vernon Howard

The original specifications for Apollo navigation called for the ability to fly a complete mission, including a lunar landing, with no help from Earth - none, not even voice communications. ~ Henry Spencer

Young has a personal relationship with electricity. In Europe, where the electrical current is sixty cycles, not fifty, he can pinpoint the fluctuation --- by degrees. It dumbfounded Cragg. "He'll say, 'Larry, there's a hundred volts coming out of the wall, isn't there?' I'll go measure it, and yeah, sure --- he can hear the difference."

Shakey's innovations are everywhere. Intent on controlling amp volume from his guitar instead of the amp, Young had a remote device designed called the Whizzer. Guitarists marvel at the stomp box that lies onstage at Young's feet: a byzantine gang of effects that can be utilized without any degradation to the original signal. Just constructing the box's angular red wooden housing to Young's extreme specifications had craftsmen pulling their hair out.

Cradled in a stand in front of the amps is the fuse for the dynamite, Young's trademark ax--Old Black, a '53 Gold Top Les Paul some knot-head daubed with black paint eons ago. Old Black's features include a Bigsby wang bar, which pulls strings and bends notes, and Firebird picking so sensitive you can talk through it. It's a demonic instrument. "Old black doesn't sound like any other guitar," said Cragg, shaking his head.

For Cragg, Old Black is a nightmare. Young won't permit the ancient frets to be changed, likes his strings old and used, and the Bigsby causes the guitar to go out of tune constantly. "At Sound check, everything will work great. Neil picks up th ~ Jimmy McDonough

When are programmers happy? They're happy when they're not underutilized - when they're not bored - and also when they're not overburdened with inappropriate specifications or meaningless bureaucracies. In other words, programmers are happiest when they're working efficiently. This is a general preference in creative work. ~ Eric S. Raymond

The police will want particulars, since you are the divorced husband, but I'll leave that to them. One more question, a hypothetical one. If Carol Mardus had a baby by Richard Valdon, conceived in April of last year and born last January, four months after Valdon's death; and if X knew about it, helped her dispose of it, and later, moved by pique or jealousy or spite, took it and left it in Mrs. Valdon's vestibule, who is X? Of the men in Carol Mardus's orbit, which one fits the specifications? I don't ask you to accuse, merely to suggest. ~ Rex Stout

Mathematics as a science, commenced when first someone, probably a Greek, proved propositions about "any" things or about "some" things, without specifications of definite particular things. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Bin Laden was born filthy rich and died in a rich man's house, which he had painstakingly built to the highest specifications. ~ Salman Rushdie

The essence of a software entity is a construct of interlocking concepts: [ ... ] I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. ~ Fred Brooks

manage the community outside of the CIA. An official observed, "The CIA director managed the CIA; it was the best job in the world. Managing the IC meant going out to the NRO and sitting through a three-hour meeting about satellite specifications. So it just was not done well."3 ~ Michael Allen

In experimental art, men are given the exact specifications of coming violence to their own psyches from their own counter-irritant or technology ... But the counter-irritant usually proves a greater plague than the initial irritant, like a drug habit. ~ Marshall McLuhan

Mathilde was there in the dawn, this perfect girl as if made to his specifications. [A different life, had Lotto listened to the terror: no glory, no plays; peace, ease, and money. No glamour; children. Which life was better? Not for us to say.] ~ Lauren Groff

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa. ~ Alan Perlis

Males have been groomed since birth, according to the specifications of a sick and perverse society, to become instruments of war. ~ Bryant McGill

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect ~ Werner Herzog

New Rule: Someone has to make a mustard container that doesn't squirt out yellow water before it gets to the actual mustard. I get all excited for lunch, and then Grey Poupon pees on my sandwich. I suppose I could shake the bottle first, but fuck you, I'm an American consumer. Not only should your mustard be pre-blended to my specifications, it should also whiten my teeth. ~ Bill Maher

It is conventional wisdom now that anything built by the government will be a disaster. But the two "Voyager" spacecraft were built by the government (in partnership with that other bugaboo, academia). They came in at cost, on time, and vastly exceeded their design specifications--as well as the fondest dreams of their makers. Seeking not to control, threaten, wound, or destroy, these elegant machines represented the exploratory part of our nature set free to roam the Solar System and beyond. This kind of technology, the treasures it uncovers freely available to all humans everywhere, has been, over the last few decades, one of the few activities of the United States admired as much by those who abhor many of its policies as by those who agree with it on every issue. "Voyager" cost each American less than a penny a year from launch to Neptune encounter. Missions to the planets are one of those things--and I mean this not just for the United States, but for the human species--that we do best. ~ Carl Sagan

She learns, after she finishes the job, that she programmed very well the specifications as delivered to her, but that they were deficient. If she had only known the purpose of the program, she could have done it right for the purpose, even though the specifications were deficient. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications. ~ Raymond Carver

Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness ... proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. ~ Henry James