Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) | by Linux fortune |
Thus spake the master programmer: "Let the programmers be many and the managers few -- then all will be productive." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
Why are programmers non-productive? Because their time is wasted in meetings. Why are programmers rebellious? Because the management interferes too much. Why are the programmers resigning one by one? Because they are burnt out. Having worked for poor management, they no longer value their jobs. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming" | |
Each team building another component has been using the most recent tested version of the integrated system as a test bed for debugging its piece. Their work will be set back by having that test bed change under them. Of course it must. But the changes need to be quantized. Then each user has periods of productive stability, interrupted by bursts of test-bed change. This seems to be much less disruptive than a constant rippling and trembling. - Frederick Brooks Jr., "The Mythical Man Month" | |
"The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive." -- Linus Torvalds on Microkernels (Open Sources, 1999 O'Reilly & Associates) | |
Brief History Of Linux (#14) Military Intelligence: Not an oxymoron in 1969 It was the Department Of Defense that commissioned the ARPANET in 1969, a rare example of the US military breaking away from its official motto, "The Leading Edge Of Yesterday's Technology(tm)". In the years leading up to 1969, packet switching technology had evolved enough to make the ARPANET possible. Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc. received the ARPA contract in 1968 for packet switching "Interface Message Processors". US Senator Edward Kennedy, always on the ball, sent a telegram to BBN praising them for their non-denominational "Interfaith" Message Processors, an act unsurpassed by elected representatives until Al Gore invented the Internet years later. While ARPANET started with only four nodes in 1969, it evolved rapidly. Email was first used in 1971; by 1975 the first mailing list, MsgGroup, was created by Steve Walker when he sent a "First post!" messages to it. In 1979 all productive use of ARPANET ceased when USENET and the first MUD were created. In 1983, when the network surpassed 1,000 hosts, a study showed that 90.4% of all traffic was devoted to email and USENET flame wars. | |
"Arguments with furniture are rarely productive." -- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit" | |
<Zoid> I still think you guys are nuts merging Q and QW. :P <knghtbrd> Of course we're nuts. Even John said so. => <taniwha> Zoid: we're nuts, but we're productive nuts:) | |
<taniwha> Zoid: we're nuts, but we're productive nuts:) * taniwha wonders what productive nuts taste like | |
In "King Henry VI, Part II," Shakespeare has Dick Butcher suggest to his fellow anti-establishment rabble-rousers, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That action may be extreme but a similar sentiment was expressed by Thomas K. Connellan, president of The Management Group, Inc. Speaking to business executives in Chicago and quoted in Automotive News, Connellan attributed a measure of America's falling productivity to an excess of attorneys and accountants, and a dearth of production experts. Lawyers and accountants "do not make the economic pie any bigger; they only figure out how the pie gets divided. Neither profession provides any added value to product." According to Connellan, the highly productive Japanese society has 10 lawyers and 30 accountants per 100,000 population. The U.S. has 200 lawyers and 700 accountants. This suggests that "the U.S. proportion of pie-bakers and pie-dividers is way out of whack." Could Dick Butcher have been an efficiency expert? -- Motor Trend, May 1983 | |
I'm always looking for a new idea that will be more productive than its cost. -- David Rockefeller | |
Nothing makes a person more productive than the last minute. | |
The greatest productive force is human selfishness. -- Robert Heinlein |