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" 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. "

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" Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life. "

Ellen Ullman

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" It will not work to keep asking men to change. Many have no real objective to do so. There's no reward for them. Why should they change? They're doing well inside the halls of coding. "

" 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. "

" The ability to 'multitask,' to switch rapidly among many competing focuses of attention, has become the hallmark of a successful citizen of the 21st century. "

" I was a girl who came into the clubhouse, into the treehouse, with the sign on the door saying, 'No girls allowed,' and the reception was not always a good one. "

" If you've ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it's just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it's not. "

" After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well? "

" I hate to see capable, smart people out of work - young or old. "

" Genetics is where we come from. It's deeply natural to want to know. "

" The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does. "

" The human mind, as it turns out, is messy. "

" Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious. "

" I'm a pessimist. But I think I'd describe my pessimism as broken-hearted optimism. "

" Productivity has always been the justification for the prepackaging of programming knowledge. But it is worth asking about the sort of productivity gains that come from the simplifications of click-and-drag. "

" When I am writing, and occasionally achieve single focus and presence, I finally feel that is where I'm supposed to be. Everything else is kind of anxiety. "

" So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values. "

" I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient. "

" Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background. "

" Computer programming has always been a self-taught, maverick occupation. "

" I think that focusing all experiences through the lens of the Internet is an example of not being able to see history through the eyes of others, to be so enamored of one's present time that one cannot see that the world was once elsewise and was not about you. "

" 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. "

" Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity. "

" When you lose your Visa card, you get a new card with a new number, and any new charges with the old number are blocked. Why can't we do the same with Social Security numbers? "

" The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization. "

" The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it. "

" Watching a program run is not as revealing as reading its code. "

" Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good. "

" You can only get a beginner's mind once. "

" What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it. "

" I don't consider myself a Jewish writer. "