Systems Quotations

Animals' taste systems are specialized for the niche they occupy in the environment. That includes us. As hunters and foragers of the dry savannah, our earliest forebears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars. That, in a nutshell, explains the widespread popularity of junk food.

UTC Aerospace Systems has a couple of million dollars of content on every single aircraft that gets delivered. That's the chutes, the electric system, rotors, etc.

It is not necessary to dwell on the political and social principles of Islam, to underline how close they also are in spirit to the concepts of human rights which govern the political and social systems of the West.

As biologists, we contemplate with admiration and awe the wondrous array of sophisticated cell interactions and recognitions evolved in the T cell immune system, which must be a model for other similarly complex biological systems of highly differentiated organisms.

If we want technology to serve society rather than enslave it, we have to build systems accessible to all people - be they male or female, young, old, disabled, computer wizards or technophobes.

In the early centuries of Islam, the great schools of Islamic jurisprudence were built upon the above principles. Basic to all their legal systems they developed the doctrine that liberty is the fundamental basis of law.

I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them, I use it to map complex systems for companies, I use it to run innovation games for business, I use it to get insight on something puzzling me.

For many centuries, humans have speculated that there might be planetary systems around other stars and that there could be extraterrestrial life there and even intelligent being. However, those were simply speculations, and now we have evidence for the first part of these ideas.

I started working on OpenBSD, and many earlier projects, because I have always felt that vendor systems were not designed for quality.

Commercial institutions, proud of their achievements, do not see that healthy living systems - clean air and water, healthy soil, stable climates - are integral to a functioning economy. As our living systems deteriorate, traditional forecasting and business economics become the equivalent of house rules on a sinking cruise ship.

We need to build change in to our systems and let these systems evolve as circumstances change. Change is inevitable, but we need to do a better job of dealing with it, because when we start building huge gleaming monoliths, I think we start getting into trouble.

We spend a lot of time training and retraining. It's heartbreaking because our education system has failed all of us. And again you go to China, even Mexico, Brazil the education systems are valued - ours are not in this country at K-12 level. It's amazing how that change has transpired in my lifetime.

In simple terms, we are aligning our business today with the way we believe future systems are going to be designed, acquired and maintained.

We cannot know the young child's personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed. From adolescence onward, however, the surest clue to personality is the hierarchy of interests, including the loves and loyalties of adult life.

I think that people need to become more educated about money. We need to stop creating systems that benefit only the most-cutthroat sharks.

Disco was brand new then and there were a few jocks that had monstrous sound systems but they wouldn't dare play this kind of music. They would never play a record where only two minutes of the song was all it was worth. They wouldn't buy those types of records.

By the end of 1978, we had 11 partners and six franchisees, we were operating in 22 cities, and we had about 6,000 clients. We had left Electronic Accounting Systems and were doing our own processing on our own computers.

Standardization of our educational systems is apt to stamp out individualism and defeat the very ends of education by leveling the product down rather than up.

There was a lot of risk taken in the Mercury and Apollo eras, and we don't take those risks anymore. We've designed the systems to eliminate risk, which makes it take forever and cost too much money.

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.

I bought one of the first Nintendo systems and brought that home, and we were playing 'Legend of Zelda' at the time, and it was addicting, and I was playing it for hours and hours and hours.

In 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed, we anticipated that Europe was going to have a very different bailout scheme than the U.S. because of their different political systems and different relationships between the central banks and the fiscal authorities.

If I should have a daughter, instead of 'Mom,' she's gonna call me 'Point B,' because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, 'Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.'

Electronic Accounting Systems processed my little payrolls like one big payroll. I did the selling, and the people I hired did most of the operations.

There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them, and, where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion.

Android is one of the most open systems I've ever seen. What makes Android great is it's literally designed from the ground up to be customised in a very powerful way.

In essence, capitalist systems are a mechanism by which economies may generate growth in knowledge - with much uncertainty in the process, owing to the incompleteness of knowledge.

In chess, we have styles - like in any other field. There are also fashions in the kinds of systems that people play. So I'm trying to know my opponent as much as possible.

Systems are complex, so controlling an attack and achieving a desired level of damage may be harder than using physical weapons.

My list of basic tools is a partial answer to the question about what has changed: Over the past few years, large numbers of programmers have come to depend on elaborate tools to interface code with systems facilities.

We do care about control and privacy. It's one of the reasons we are so focused on having our systems be open source, so you or someone technically savvy you know can verify what the software is doing.

I love a great melody and wonderful lyrics that speak from the heart, and my music has that and speaks about it; but there's just something that was really raw and energetic about the early House music. It's hard to describe. It's like you had to go to these parties where the stuff was being played on these huge sound systems to really feel it.

Orwell's '1984' convinced me, rightly or wrongly, that Marxism was only a quantum leap away from tyranny. By contrast, Huxley's 'Brave New World' suggested that the totalitarian systems of the future might be subservient and ingratiating.

I favor strategies that encourage industry to include some sort of key recovery capability in their systems which would also address user requirements for access.

The poor don't live in functional market economies as the rest of us do, but in political economies where corruption and broken systems extend from local government to moneylenders.

It's not that bad things never happen. But there's a pattern in which most people are calm, resourceful, altruistic, and they improvise emergency systems that work really well - whether it's getting the babies out of a collapsed hospital or putting together a community kitchen to feed everybody for the next few months.

There is no evidence that dogs have the kind of complex emotional lives and value systems that we do. It's one reason why we love them so much, in fact. They are neither "good" nor "bad." They don't hold grudges, act in petty ways, or seek revenge. They read our moods, but not our minds.

Well, the responsibility for maintaining a reliable transmission grid is one that's shared by an awful lot of players who have a role in the grid: Companies that either generate and transmit energy or just play the role of being the transmission systems or monitoring them.

I've seen descriptions of advanced TV systems in which a simulation of reality is computer-controlled; the TV viewer of the future will wear a special helmet. You'll no longer be an external spectator to fiction created by others, but an active participant in your own fantasies/dramas.

If you think about the market that we're in, and more broadly just the enterprise software market, the kind of transition that's happening right now from legacy systems to the cloud is literally, by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

There are a lot of different ways of building a prosperous society, and some of them use much less energy than others. And it is possible and more practical to talk about rebuilding systems to use much less energy than it is to think about trying to meet greater demands of energy through clean energy alone.

I want students to understand specific technologies, but the real goal is that they should be able to reason about how systems work and be intelligently skeptical about technology so that, when they're running the world in a few years, they'll do a good job.

While all democratic systems are works in progress, ours started rather late and therefore has a longer distance to cover. But democratic transformation for us is not mimicking some facets of Western governance. The focus has been on building institutions of democratic governance.

My opportunity to design school choice systems began in 2003 with a phone call from Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education. He knew of my work on the medical match and wondered if similar efforts might help reorganize the dysfunctional, congested system then used to match students to high schools.

Capitalist systems function less well without state protection of investors, lenders, and companies against monopoly, deception, and fraud.

Because I was suspicious of the traditional Christian church, I tended to tar them all with the same brush. That was a mistake, because there are righteous people working in a whole rainbow of belief systems - from Hasidic Jews to right-wing Bible Belters to charismatic Catholics.

I wish we could have state-of-the-art hospitals in every corner of the earth... but realistically, it's going to be a while before that can happen. But we can immunise every kid on earth, and we can prevent these diseases. It's only a matter of political will, a little bit of money and some systems to do it.

Architects have to become designers of eco-systems. Not just designers of beautiful facades or beautiful sculptures, but systems of economy and ecology, where we channel the flow not only of people, but also the flow of resources through our cities and buildings.

Hard systems are everything we're using right now - computers, phones, planes, the clothes you're wearing, the room you're in. Everything there involves 100% use of technology and expertise to make it, and nothing we make - including space exploration vehicles and so on - is complex. Everything we make is complicated. Nothing is self-renewing.

We expect the launches of Skylake, Microsoft's Windows 10 and new OEM systems will bring excitement to client computing in the second half of 2015.

Since Sunrun introduced solar as a service in 2007, it has become the preferred way for consumers to go solar in the nation's top solar markets. Sunrun has deployed more than $2 billion in solar systems and has raised more than $300 million in equity capital.

No matter how non-technical your life and work, you're going to have to interact with technology and technical people. If you know something about how devices and systems operate, it's a big advantage.

We produce motor drive electronics; we produce cargo systems for large narrow-body and wide-body airplanes and, more importantly, the emergency escape chute that goes on these planes.

I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.

Many still believe that conducting political and economic reforms at the same time is not an Asian way. But this is a fairy-tale. We broke that old stereotype by reforming our political, economic and social systems concurrently since 1990.

The human body is a miraculous self-healing machine, but those self-repair systems require a nutrient-dense diet.

I think there are specific times where film noir is a natural concomitant of the mood. When there's insecurity, collapse of financial systems - that's where film noir always hits fertile ground.

It is imperative for the health and safety of millions of workers that we ensure that breathing systems needed for protection are widely available, convenient and economical.

Closed systems run down and get more chaotic over time. Always get better by being 'open' to outside energy and templates of better ways to function.

Our congressional district is the fastest growing in the state. Nowhere is there a greater need for new and improved roads and transit systems that will spare us the hours we spend each day in traffic.

The United States has an unfair advantage, as most of the popular cloud services, search engines, computer and mobile operating systems or web browsers are made by U.S. companies. When the rest of the world uses the net, they are effectively using U.S.-based services, making them a legal target for U.S. intelligence.

Monorail tracks are prefabricated and can be erected relatively quickly: Simply dig a hole every 120 feet or so, plop down a column, and lift the track into place. Because the systems operate above traffic, collisions with errant motorists are never an issue. The trains are automated, saving millions in labor costs in the long run.

A couple of my teammates have the rare Ford F650 Super Truck, and they're kitted out with everything - even flat-screen TVs for movies and video-game systems in the back.

As we get more transparent with data sets about infrastructure and systems management, I have a feeling we'll see big changes in how we think about complexity and our relationship to our actions.

Asana and complementary services are bringing the evolved team brain to the entire world. In great companies like Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, people already add information to and extract insight from these systems much the same way our hands and brain exchange signals.

For something to collapse, not all systems have to shut down. In most cases, just one system is enough. For example, the human body is a system of systems. If just one system, such as the cardiovascular system, shuts down, death follows.

Today, if you look at financial systems around the globe, more than half the population of the world - out of six billion people, more than three billion - do not qualify to take out a loan from a bank. This is a shame.

But sequence comparisons simply can't account for the development of complex biochemical systems any more than Darwin's comparison of simple and complex eyes told him how vision worked.

This crisis exposed very significant problems in the financial systems of the United States and some other major economies. Innovation got too far out in front of the knowledge of risk.

Water is commonly regarded as the 'solvent of life,' since our bodies are 70% water. All other vertebrates, invertebrates, microbes, and plants are also primarily water. The organization of water within biological compartments is fundamental to life, and the aquaporins serve as the plumbing systems for cells.

The systems approach to biology will be the dominant theme in medicine.

Across the nation, the election protection movement attracts ordinary citizens who educate their neighbors about their voting systems and the private companies that built and run them.

The armored vehicle manufacturing base is not a light switch that can be turned on and off at will. If we mothball production of systems like the Abrams tank, it will take time and money to get this capability back.

People inside of belonging systems are very threatened by those who are not within that group. They are threatened by anyone who has found their citizenship in places they cannot control.

A carrier with a venereal disease can have many partners, but only those whose mental and physical immune systems are weak will be susceptible to it.

Companies like Husk Power Systems are working to impact positively not only the environment, but to ensure that someday everyone, including the poorest of the poor in rural India, will have access to clean and affordable electricity.

I don't really go into labels or an in-depth discussion of different value systems because for me, it's sort of the truth of the situation in D.C. Certainly, in my fictional depiction of it, there are decent, shameless people on both sides at every level.

Either systems are in balance or they are falling apart. If people are acting in what appears to be a twisted way, I want to know the reason for that.

Lots of ballplayers have their own personal music blasted by the sound systems in modern ball parks.

The amount of sensory material stored up or stored down in the brain's and the body's systems is inestimable. It's like a culture at the bottom of a jar, although it doesn't grow, I think, or help anything else to grow unless you find a way to reach it and touch it.

If you have children, you know you're responsible for somebody. You realize you are being imitated; your belief systems and priorities have a direct influence on these children, who are like flowers in a garden.

Americans trash the planet not because we're evil, but because the industrial systems we've devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works.

For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.

The government does things like insisting that all encryption programs should have a back door. But surely no one is stupid enough to think the terrorists are going to use encryption systems with a back door. The terrorists will simply hire a programmer to come up with a secure encryption scheme.

We call the fates of the Titanic and the Concordia - as well as those of the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia - 'accidents.' Foreseeing such undesirable events is what engineers are expected to do. However, design trade-offs leave technological systems open to failings once predicted, but later forgotten.

New technologies can be used for destructive purposes. The answer is to develop rapid-response systems for new dangers like a bioterrorist creating a new biological virus.

Just as the system of the sun, planets and comets is put in motion by the forces of gravity, and its parts persist in their motions, so the smaller systems of bodies also seem to be set in motion by other forces and their particles to be variously moved in relation to each other and, especially, by the electric force.

Thus, the forces and value systems that are most threatened by this shift are becoming the most coherent and are rising to the top as minority or plurality powers. But they do not represent either the shift, the change, or the future.

Information technology departments must spend enormous amounts of time and money worrying about integrating big computer systems with billions of pieces of customer data.

I started as a child, in this PBS series 'Voyage of the Mimi,' which led to driving down to New York for 'Afterschool Special' auditions, which led to moving to Los Angeles. I wanted to be an actor. But in L.A., I got into film technology, and I was building cheap editing systems and would edit my friend's acting reels.

Companies spend millions of dollars on firewalls, encryption, and secure access devices and it's money wasted because none of these measures address the weakest link in the security chain: the people who use, administer, operate and account for computer systems that contain protected information.

Our school systems have to realize that everybody doesn't learn the same way, and no one learns without some emotional support.

It turns out all molecular and biological systems have speeds of the atoms move inside them; the fastest possible speeds are determined by their molecular vibrations, and this speed is about a kilometre per second.

My hacking involved pretty much exploring computer systems and obtaining access to the source code of telecommunication systems and computer operating systems, because my goal was to learn all I can about security vulnerabilities within these systems.

We have taken the manatees out of the areas in the Caribbean and really elsewhere in the world, and this disruption to the system makes such systems vulnerable to changes as they come by, whether it's in terms of disease or terms or global warming for that matter.

Capitalism and political systems - like companies - must constantly evolve to stay vital.

Although more than 500 million maritime containers move around the world each year, accounting for 90 per cent of international trade, only 2 per cent are inspected. Strengthening customs and immigration systems is essential.

Phone phreaking is a type of hacking that allows you to explore the telephone network by exploiting the phone systems and phone company employees.

Snowden grants that NSA employees by and large believe in their mission and trust the agency to handle the secrets it takes from ordinary people - deliberately, in the case of bulk records collection, and 'incidentally,' when the content of American phone calls and e-mails are swept into NSA systems along with foreign targets.

Giant oak trees... have deep root systems that can extend two-and-one-half times their height. Such trees rarely are blown down regardless of how violent the storms may be.