|
47a4fc4
|
If two smart and logical people disagree it's because they are acting on different information
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
08c25ee
|
If you do the right thing well, you avoid futility.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
c9de196
|
In the modern computer, software has developed in such a way as to fill this role of go-between. On one end you have the so-called end user who wants to be able to order up a piece of long division, say, simply by supplying two numbers to the machine and ordering it to divide them. At the other end stands the actual computer, which for all its complexity is something of a brute. It can perform only several hundred basic operations, and long..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
fa7d74b
|
In the sixties there was proposed a "National Data Bank," which would, theoretically, improve the government's efficiency by allowing agencies to share information. The fact that such a system could be abused did not mean it would be, proponents said; it could be constructed in such a way as to guarantee benign use. Nonsense, said opponents, who managed to block the proposal; no matter what the intent or the safeguards, the existence of suc..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
80e8351
|
He recites the names of the trees, vines, shrubs, flowers that he's planted here over the years. I count about forty different species. Finally, in the dim light from the patio, he studies a new fern that has just come up. "It's just vibrant and happy and healthy. The way a patient should be."
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
01f5445
|
Dokte Paul works with both hands" -- that is, both with science and with the magic necessary to remove ensorcellments."
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
0bf80ec
|
Farmer liked to tell his Harvard students that to be a good clinician you must never let a patient know that you have problems too, or that you're in a hurry.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
7c5683c
|
Beyond mountains there are mountains." - Haitian proverb"
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
915326b
|
The last thing I want to do is expend my energy trying to convince my own coworkers.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
2d84391
|
I think I wanted to see how complicated things happen," West said years later. "There's some notion of control, it seems to me, that you can derive in a world full of confusion if you at least understand how things get put together. Even if you can't under stand every little part, how infernal machines get put together."
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
73aa8ec
|
In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxiate on its own success.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
a53a4d9
|
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
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
bae2802
|
He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.
|
|
memory
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
6d98e14
|
One shouldn't expect anyone to be complete at any given moment.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
25c84a2
|
At the level of the microcode, physical and abstract meet. The
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
a30e263
|
abject
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
ac09c1e
|
Roughly one-third of the planet already lived in chronic poverty, according to United Nations statistics. Farmer pointed out that through the spread of disease, illiteracy, and consumption of resources by the poor, prosperous first-world countries would increasingly be affected--unless they scaled back on their own use of resources and brought education and health care to the poor. In his speeches, Farmer liked to talk about "the nation of ..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
c5f1e5a
|
The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains," which meant that when you'd solved one problem, you couldn't rest because you had to go on and solve the next."
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
d1d186d
|
The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb "Beyond mountains there are mountains," which meant that when you'd solved one problem, you couldn't rest because you had to go on and solve the next. The view of the Peligre Dam and its immense lake and the land it had drowned was, so to speak, another mountain to Farmer. It was a story of exploitation and disaster for at least a hundred thousand Haitians, and in one way or another, Farmer had to..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
dd5c5ee
|
To understand Russia, to understand Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Boston, identity politics, Sri Lanka, and Life Savers, you have to be on top of this hill," he announced in a light tone as we studied the view together. But there was a serious point to his words. The sight of the drowned farmland, the result of a dam that had made his patients some of the poorest on this earth, was Farmer's lens on the world. Look through it and you could s..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
eef5677
|
EVERY ADULT IS shaped by the experience of childhood and adolescence.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
f3beab6
|
megalomaniacal.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
6572e93
|
Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
4013d85
|
foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
a9d7157
|
Several talked about their "flexible hours." "No one keeps track of the hours we work," said Ken Holberger. He grinned. "That's not altruism on Data General's part. If anybody kept track, they'd have to pay us a hell of a lot more than they do." 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 t..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
275e03f
|
In a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls "the compulsion to program." He describes the afflicted as "bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken, glowing eyes," who play out "megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence" at computer consoles; they sit at their machines, he writes, "their arms tensed and waiting to fire their finge..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
5d73c7b
|
By signing up for the project you agreed to do whatever was necessary for success.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
d06cecf
|
Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
967ad93
|
quixotic,
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
d685289
|
fraternite
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
fb344ca
|
Company engineers helped to design Westborough, and they made it functional and cheap. One contractor who did some work for Data General was quoted in Fortune as saying, "What they call tough auditing, we call thievery."
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
9812364
|
Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
9d6e1ee
|
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..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
86c5f90
|
Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team inside a company an entrepreneurial spirit, which was channeled in the right direction by constraints sent down from the top. But it seems more accurate to say that a group of engineers got excited about building a computer.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
2d71d79
|
I think that the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich." I thought he was done, but he was only pausing for the interpreter to catch up. "Look, I'm very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I'm American. I can travel freely throughout the world, I can start projects, but that's called privilege, not democracy."
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
3c01b4f
|
He liked the "casual" look of the basement of Westborough. "The jeans and so on." Several talked about their "flexible hours." "No one keeps track of the hours we work," said Ken Holberger. He grinned. "That's not altruism on Data General's part. If anybody kept track, they'd have to pay us a hell of a lot more than they do." Yet it is a fact, not entirely lost on management consultants, that some people would rather work twelve hours a day..
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
ea5bfeb
|
Some problems are easy to find and hard to fix; some are hard to find and easy to fix; some go both ways.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
5240607
|
Si los oias solo dos veces, los recuerdos de Lou podian parecer monotonos. Si los oias muchas, se convertian en viejos amigos. Eran reconfortantes.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
2de45dc
|
Infections and Inequalities
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
07222de
|
As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, "I don't know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory."
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
1a307f9
|
Above all, Rasala wanted around him engineers who took an interest in the entire computer, not just in the parts that they had designed.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
dbab61f
|
Executives might make the final decisions about what would be produced, but engineers would provide most of the ideas for new products. After all, engineers were the people who really knew the state of the art and who were therefore best equipped to prophesy changes in it.
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
a5e3d94
|
I stared at the faces of the dead students. "You know, Zacharie, just looking at them, I can't tell you which ones were Tutsis, which Hutus." "Exactly!" said Deo in a loud whisper. Evidently, one was supposed to whisper here. "And neither could the killers!" "The killers couldn't see the difference, too," whispered Zacharie. "So they ask. Because they can't tell. We are the same people."
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |
|
0ce4217
|
Money is a fictional thing that is supposed to go around. Hoarding it is a sin
|
|
|
Tracy Kidder |