Wholesale Computer Quotes

Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for privacy.

A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.

In the absence of expert [senior military] advice, we have seen each successive administration fail in the business of strategy - yielding a United States twice as rich as the Soviet Union but much less strong. Only the manner of the failure has changed. In the 1960s, under Robert S. McNamara, we witnessed the wholesale substitution of civilian mathematical analysis for military expertise. The new breed of the "systems analysts" introduced new standards of intellectual discipline and greatly improved bookkeeping methods, but also a trained incapacity to understand the most important aspects of military power, which happens to be nonmeasurable. Because morale is nonmeasurable it was ignored, in large and small ways, with disastrous effects. We have seen how the pursuit of business-type efficiency in the placement of each soldier destroys the cohesion that makes fighting units effective; we may recall how the Pueblo was left virtually disarmed when it encountered the North Koreans (strong armament was judged as not "cost effective" for ships of that kind). Because tactics, the operational art of war, and strategy itself are not reducible to precise numbers, money was allocated to forces and single weapons according to "firepower" scores, computer simulations, and mathematical studies - all of which maximize efficiency - but often at the expense of combat effectiveness. An even greater defect of the McNamara approach to military decisions was its businesslike "linear" logic, which is right for commerce or engineering but almost always fails in the realm of strategy. Because its essence is the clash of antagonistic and outmaneuvering wills, strategy usually proceeds by paradox rather than conventional "linear" logic. That much is clear even from the most shopworn of Latin tags: si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, prepare for war), whose business equivalent would be orders of "if you want sales, add to your purchasing staff," or some other, equally absurd advice. Where paradox rules, straightforward linear logic is self-defeating, sometimes quite literally. Let a general choose the best path for his advance, the shortest and best-roaded, and it then becomes the worst path of all paths, because the enemy will await him there in greatest strength... Linear logic is all very well in commerce and engineering, where there is lively opposition, to be sure, but no open-ended scope for maneuver; a competitor beaten in the marketplace will not bomb our factory instead, and the river duly bridged will not deliberately carve out a new course. But such reactions are merely normal in strategy. Military men are not trained in paradoxical thinking, but they do no have to be. Unlike the business-school expert, who searches for optimal solutions in the abstract and then presents them will all the authority of charts and computer printouts, even the most ordinary military mind can recall the existence of a maneuvering antagonists now and then, and will therefore seek robust solutions rather than "best" solutions - those, in other words, which are not optimal but can remain adequate even when the enemy reacts to outmaneuver the first approach.

Neoclassical economics has effectively insulated itself from the great advances made in science and engineering over the last 40 years. This self-imposed isolation must come to an end. For while the concepts of neoclassical economics appear difficult, they are actually quaint in comparison to the sophistication evident in today's mathematics, engineering, computing, evolutionary biology and physics. In order to advance, economics must humbly submit to learning from disciplines that it has studiously ignored for so long. Some researchers in outside fields have called for the wholesale replacement of standard economics curricula, using at least the building blocks of modern thought inherent in other disciplines.

Learning is forgetting the details as much as it is remembering the important parts. Computers are the ultimate idiot savants: they can remember everything with no trouble at all, but that’s not what we want them to do. The problem is not limited to memorizing instances wholesale. Whenever a learner finds a pattern in the data that is not actually true in the real world, we say that it has overfit the data. Overfitting is the central problem in machine learning. More papers have been written about it than about any other topic.

Writing and repairing software generally takes far more time and is far more expensive than initially anticipated. “Every feature that is added and every bug that is fixed,” Edward Tenner points out, “adds the possibility of some new and unexpected interaction between parts of the program.”19 De Jager concurs: “If people have learned anything about large software projects, it is that many of them miss their deadlines, and those that are on time seldom work perfectly. … Indeed, on-time error-free installations of complex computer systems are rare.”20 Even small changes to code can require wholesale retesting of entire software systems. While at MIT in the 1980s, I helped develop some moderately complex software. I learned then that the biggest problems arise from bugs that creep into programs during early stages of design. They become deeply embedded in the software’s interdependent network of logic, and if left unfixed can have cascading repercussions throughout the software. But fixing them often requires tracing out consequences that have metastasized in every direction from the original error. As the amount of computer code in our world soars (doubling every two years in consumer products alone), we need practical ways to minimize the number of bugs. But software development is still at a preindustrial stage—it remains more craft than engineering. Programmers resemble artisans: they handcraft computer code out of basic programming languages using logic, intuition, and pattern-recognition skills honed over years of experience.

boils.” Terrin didn’t jump at the interruption of his thoughts, but only because he’d come to expect it. The voice was perky and upbeat and annoying as all hell. He closed his eyes for a moment, gathered his patience and turned to face Petty Officer Third Class Francesca Hayden, apparently the most cheerful and effervescent computer technician in the whole Spartan Navy. Even when she was standing still, she gave the impression of constantly bouncing on the balls of her feet. “Pardon?” he said, the actual content of her words lost in his irritation. “It’s just a saying my great grandmother used to tell me,” she clarified, still grinning brightly, her teeth almost painfully white in the glare of the temporary lighting they’d set up in the auxiliary control center down on the third level of the Terminus facility. There’d been too much damage to the primary control center from the fight with Starkad, and this one had come with actual, physical input terminals instead of haptic holograms. “If you watch a pot of water on the stove, it seems like it takes forever to boil, you know.” “I don’t believe I’ve ever had the occasion to boil water on a stove,” he admitted. He winced, realizing it made him sound like a privileged douchebag, and he amended the statement. “I mean, in college, I made my own meals sometimes, and in the lab at the university, but those were all just ready-made heat-n-eat bowls.” He shrugged, trailing off. Why did she always have this effect on him? She was no different than any other tech. Okay, maybe she was cute, if you were into the whole pixie look, with her bobbed brown hair and upturned nose and the impish grin. She certainly did nice things to a set of blue Navy utility fatigues but that could have been the effect of months away from civilians. He glanced around the control room to see if any of the other technicians had noticed his embarrassment, but the only two he could see looked to be absorbed in their work. “I love a home-cooked meal,” she went on as if he hadn’t