Specifications Quotes

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.

I was always on time, I did my work to exact specifications, I spoke when spoken to.

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

Meeting specifications is not enough.

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

In programming, it’s often the buts in the specification that kill you.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hate generalizes; love specifies. Or: The movements of hatred are toward generalization; love's movements are toward specification.

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.

My overall knowledge of football specifications, the overall process that happens on game day with the footballs is very limited. I would say that during the course of the game, I honestly never - it probably has happened on an incomplete pass or something - but I've never touched a game ball. It's not something I have any familiarity with on that.

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.

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.

Anyone can write a specification, but if nobody implements it, what is it but a particularly dry form of science fiction.

Features have a specification cost, a design cost, and a development cost. There is a testing cost and a reliability cost. ... Features have a documentation cost. Every feature adds pages to the manual increasing training costs.

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.

I've learned about the inflation range situation. Obviously with our footballs being inflated to the 12.5-pound range, any deflation would then take us under that specification limit. Knowing that now, in the future we will certainly inflate the footballs above that low level to account for any possible change during the game.

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.

When there are conflicts of observation, when experiments cannot be replicated, scientists may then retreat to a study of the various specific observations so as to explain the conflict, in the course of which they would make use of the concept of observation, or of some specification of that concept.

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.

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

To treat programming scientifically, it must be possible to specify the required properties of programs precisely. Formality is certainly not an end in itself. The importance of formal specifications must ultimately rest in their utility -in whether or not they are used to improve the quality of software or to reduce the cost of producing and maintaining software.

That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where non-conformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection; where denunciation, without specification or backing, takes the place of evidence; where orthodoxy chokes freedom of dissent; where faith in the eventual supremacy of reason has become so timid that we dare not enter our convictions in the open lists, to win or lose.

I have come to believe that large print, thick and heavy paper, and wide margins and oversize leading is indicative of the expected intelligence of the reader. … Compare children's books and books on Web Duhsign or other X-in-21-days books. If the reading level of a specification is below college level, chances are the people behind it are morons and the result morose.

Thousands of engineers can design bridges, calculate strains and stresses, and draw up specifications for machines, but the great engineer is the man who can tell whether the bridge or the machine should be built at all, where it should be built, and when.

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

Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. 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.

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

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

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.

In fact, without a specification of a creature's goals, the very idea of intelligence is meaningless. A toadstool could be given a genius award for accomplishing with pinpoint precision and unerring reliability, the feat of sitting exactly where it is sitting. Nothing would prevent us from agreeing with the cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn that rocks are smarter than cats because rocks have the sense to go away when you kick them.

I have a sense that God is unfair and preferentially punishes his weak, his dumb, his fat, his lazy. I believe he takes more pleasure in his perfect creatures, and cheers them on like a brainless dad as they run roughshod over the rest of us. He gives us a need for love, and no way to get any. He gives us a desire to be liked, and personal attributes that make us utterly unlikable. Having placed his flawed and needy children in a world of exacting specifications, he deducts the difference between what we have and what we need from our hearts and our self-esteem and our mental health.

Isn't it true that whatever isn't determined by our genes must be determined by our environment? What else is there? There's Nature and there's Nurture. Is there also some X, some further contributor to what we are? There's Chance. Luck. This extra ingredient is important but doesn't have to come from the quantum bowels of our atoms or from some distant star. It is all around us in the causeless coin-flipping of our noisy world, automatically filling in the gaps of specification left unfixed by our genes, and unfixed by salient causes in our environment.

The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specification, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification.

I remember, as a young architect, people always talked about I. M. Pei's concrete. He had a particular specification no one else knew.

Kantian ethical theory distinguishes three levels: First, that of a fundamental principle (the categorical imperative, formulated in three main ways in Kant's Groundwork); second, a set of duties, not deduced from but derived from this principle, by way of its interpretation or specification, its application to the general conditions of human life - which Kant does in the Doctrine of virtue, the second main part of the Metaphysics of Morals; and then finally an act of judgment, through which these duties are applied to particular cases.

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. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

You become a serious programmer by going through a stage where you are fully aware of the degree to which you know the specification, meaning both the explicit and the tacit specification of your language and of your problem. "Hey, it works most of the time" is the very antithesis of a serious programmer, and certain languages can only support code like that.

Software is inherently complicated. If you say to somebody I want an airline reservation system, to really say what you want in terms of overbooking and fares, and different airlines communicating with each or schedule changes, it's immensely complex. And so you can't write a program that's any simpler than that full specification.

So in Jamaica it is the aim of everybody to talk English, act English and look English. And that last specification is where the greatest difficulties arise. It is not so difficult to put a coat of European culture over African culture, but it is next to impossible to lay a European face over an African face in the same generation.

I'm keeping everything on a human level, but essentially everything in our lives has to be on a human level. Any specification of something by art history doesn't make any sense. The point is, if you have a loving, adorable, supportive mother anywhere in the world and you tell her all of your dreams, all of your aspirations, and the reward you would like, and she understands you, then it's not worth doing.

To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

Everyone wants rather to be pleasing to women and that desire is not altogether, though it is very largely, a manifestation of vanity. But one cannot aim to be pleasing to women any more than one can aim to have taste, or beauty of expression, or happiness; for these things are not specific aims which one may learn to attain; they are descriptions of the adequacy of one's living. To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.

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.

Given that the label "immigrant literature" is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label.