Physicists analyze systems. Web scientists, however, can create the systems.
To write a kernel without a data structure and have it be as consistent and graceful as UNIX would have been a much, much harder challenge.
At MIT, mostly what I did was documentation. I sort of read things. Wrote some descriptions of various aspects of the file system. Did not really do very much programming at all. At least on Multics.
We must accept human error as inevitable - and design around that fact.
The mantra of any good security engineer is: "Security is a not a product, but a process." It's more than designing strong cryptography into a system; it's designing the entire system such that all security measures, including cryptography, work together.
Hard systems are everything we're using right now - computers, phones, planes, the clothes you're wearing, the room you're in. Everything there involves 100% use of technology and expertise to make it, and nothing we make - including space exploration vehicles and so on - is complex. Everything we make is complicated. Nothing is self-renewing.
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write.
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.
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.
There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.
I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.
Workflow and usability are not afterthoughts; they impact the core of any project and dictate how it should be engineered.
In simple terms, we are aligning our business today with the way we believe future systems are going to be designed, acquired and maintained.
No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?
Each system will depend on resources available, not from the bottom up or top down. In other words, if you put 500 passengers in an airplane that's designed to carry 100, it won't get off the ground. So all decisions are made based upon the physical equipment you're working with, or the environmental resources available. They're not made by Fresco or any other person. They're arrived at by studies and research.
Women are both talented and innovative thinkers and tend to use computer science as a tool to solve larger problems.
If I designed a computer with 200 chips, I tried to design it with 150. And then I would try to design it with 100. I just tried to find every trick I could in life to design things real tiny.
DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.
In my daily work, I work on very large, complex, distributed systems built out of many Python modules and packages. The focus is very similar to what you find, for example, in Java and, in general, in systems programming languages.
The engineer is the key figure in the material progress of the world. It is his engineering that makes a reality of the potential value of science by translating scientific knowledge into tools, resources, energy and labor to bring them to the service of man ... To make contribution of this kind the engineer requires the imagination to visualize the needs of society and to appreciate what is possible as well as the technological and broad social age understanding to bring his vision to reality
Conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design.
I have been a systems engineer, systems administrator, a senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, a solutions consultant and a telecommunications information systems officer.
To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things-products, packaging, and systems-from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.
If you're not thinking about the way systemic bias can be propagated through the criminal justice system or predictive policing, then it's very likely that, if you're designing a system based on historical data, you're going to be perpetuating those biases.
