John Gould Quotes

Engineering is achieving function while avoiding failure.

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.

Corporations want stable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain systems.

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

Complex systems work until the day that they don’t work.

The answer lies in preventing these failures, not in looking for better ways to fix the people who are failing.

The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.

Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

One reason you should not use web applications to do your computing is that you lose control.

In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems.

Any design, whether it's for a ship or an airplane, must be done in anticipation of potential failures.

Everybody who goes through the business will make mistakes. The big question is how big will the mistakes be? How fast will they learn from the mistakes, and how quickly will they get the business in the correct direction?

I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.

Breaking into a system or exposing its weaknesses is a good thing because truth and knowledge must win out.

A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm.

For four years, I listened to stories of intelligence failures, and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system, but that the system is so arcane.

I love criticism. Equitable Life went down because management wouldn't brook criticism, but if you are in business, you have to hear what's going wrong.

Honesty is the fastest way to prevent a mistake from turning into a failure.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

The cloud computing model may be a wonderful system when it works, but it's a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare.

After the Challenger accident, NASA put in a lot of time to improve the safety of the space shuttle to fix the things that had gone wrong.

Failures happen in any system.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.