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" Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious. "
Ellen Ullman
Digital
Almost
Technology
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" I fear for the world the Internet is creating. "
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Internet
World
Creating
" UNIX always presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system. "
Ellen Ullman
Always
Doing
You
" The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface. "
Ellen Ullman
Question
Act
Interface
" I don't consider myself a Jewish writer. "
Ellen Ullman
Jewish
Writer
Consider
" Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good. "
Ellen Ullman
Technology
Run
Technical
" It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature. "
Ellen Ullman
Thing
Living
Artist
" I don't like the idea that Facebook controls how people express themselves and changes it periodically according to whatever algorithms they use to figure out what they should do or the whim of some programmer or some CEO. That bothers me a great deal. "
Ellen Ullman
People
Great
Facebook
" What happens to people like myself, who have been involved with computing for a long time, is that you begin to see how many of the 'new' ideas are simply old ones coming back into view on the swing of the pendulum, with new and faster hardware to back it up. "
Ellen Ullman
People
View
Time
" Computer programming has always been a self-taught, maverick occupation. "
Ellen Ullman
Programming
Computer
Been
" Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we're changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization. "
Ellen Ullman
World
Live
Organization
" With every advance, you have to look over your shoulder and know what you're giving up - look over your shoulder and look at what falls away. "
Ellen Ullman
Know
You
Over
" What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it. "
Ellen Ullman
Knowledge
Break
Hope
" Introduced in the 1960s, multitasking is an engineering strategy for making computers more efficient. Human beings are the slowest elements in a system. "
Ellen Ullman
Human
Engineering
Strategy
" When knowledge passes into code, it changes state; like water turned to ice, it becomes a new thing, with new properties. We use it, but in a human sense, we no longer know it. "
Ellen Ullman
Know
Water
New
" Internet voting is surely coming. Though online ballots cannot be made secure, though the problems of voter authentication and privacy will remain unsolvable, I suspect we'll go ahead and do it anyway. "
Ellen Ullman
Internet
Problems
Voting
" Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses. "
Ellen Ullman
Ideas
Desert
Live
" Y2K is showing everyone what technical people have been dealing with for years: the complex, muddled, bug-bitten systems we all depend on, and their nasty tendency toward the occasional disaster. "
Ellen Ullman
Disaster
Depend
Been
" Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested. "
Ellen Ullman
Writing
My Life
People
" I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old. "
Ellen Ullman
See
Young
Work
" With all the attention given to the personal computer, it's hard to remember that other companion machine in the room - the printer. "
Ellen Ullman
Attention
Hard
Remember
" Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity. "
Ellen Ullman
Face
Anger
Discipline
" No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer. "
Ellen Ullman
Seriously
Numbers
Government
" Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code. "
Ellen Ullman
Code
Craft
Programming
" It is deep in our nature to make tools. "
Ellen Ullman
Deep
Make
Nature
" I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress,' computers are problematic, giving and taking away. "
Ellen Ullman
Progress
Giving
Computers
" I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly. "
Ellen Ullman
Business
Compromise
World
" The biggest problem is that people have stopped being critical about the role of the computer in their lives. These machines went from being feared as Big Brother surrogates to being thought of as metaphors for liberty and individual freedom. "
Ellen Ullman
Thought
Big
Brother
" I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment. "
Ellen Ullman
Twitter
Thoughts
Moment
" It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later, I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears - the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism - there was no reason to think I could escape it forever. "
Ellen Ullman
Think
Fall
Knowledge
" Writing is a very isolating occupation. "
Ellen Ullman
Writing
Very
Occupation