QUOTES by Ellen Ullman
Find most favourite and famour Authors from A.A Milne to Zoe Kravitz.
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
I'm a pessimist. But I think I'd describe my pessimism as broken-hearted optimism.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
There's some intimacy in reading, some thoughtfulness that doesn't exist in machine experiences.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
'I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.' I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
Programmers seem to be changing the world. It would be a relief, for them and for all of us, if they knew something about it.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
Computer systems could not work without standards - an agreement among programs and systems about how they will exchange information.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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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The act of voting, to put it in computing terms, is a question of user interface.
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After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well?
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
Introduced in the 1960s, multitasking is an engineering strategy for making computers more efficient. Human beings are the slowest elements in a system.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
UNIX always presumes you know what you're doing. You're the human being, after all, and it is a mere operating system.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
I came of technical age with UNIX, where I learned with power-greedy pleasure that you could kill a system right out from under yourself with a single command.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected.
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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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
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.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
I hate the new word processors that want to tell you, as you're typing, that you made a mistake. I have to turn off all that crap. It's like, shut up - I'm thinking now. I will worry about that sort of error later. I'm a human being. I can still read this, even though it's wrong. You stupid machine, the fact that you can't is irrelevant to me.
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The web is just another stunning point in the two-hundred-thousand-year history of human beings on earth. The taming of fire; the discovery of penicillin; the publication of 'Jane Eyre' - add anything you like.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
Evolution, dismissed as a sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.
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People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.
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It has occurred to me that if people really knew how software got written, I'm not sure they'd give their money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again.
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I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.
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With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn't express, not really. It's a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That's what's hard about it.
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Some people hit a profession and just keep going deeper into it, making a life and making it more and more stable. That's not been my experience. I always want to try something new.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman
I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment.
Quote by -Ellen Ullman