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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

21–30 of 305 posts

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#21
When I was an MIT student I worked one summer at CSAIL. The office I was in had only a single occupancy bathroom. One afternoon I went to use it and just as I got there I saw that TBL was exiting. Once I went in and sat down, I noticed that the seat was warm!

Highlight of my life right there, having my butt warmed by the residual heat of the inventor of the www's butt.

Ahem, in any case, congrats to him! Definitely well deserved.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#23
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I wish we had something more decentralised, like e-mail, but for social networks. Like, a standardized social network protocol that most people use (popularity is important here). There is nothing special about what social networks like Facebook do, the biggest challenge is probably serving so many requests and storing lots of data with high availability.

Even email is no longer really decentralized. Google and a few other email silos now make up the bulk.

At least it's still mainly interoperable with 3rd party solutions through open standards. I host my own email and as long as you adhere to the guidelines (use DKIM, make sure your IP range isn't part of some blacklist, triple check your postfix config etc...) you don't feel like a 2nd class netitizen.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullying in schools will happen anyway. Should we create a standard so that it's done properly, in a way everybody can reproduce ?

That's a dumb analogy. Bullying is one-sidedly bad, hence there being a bully-victim relationship which is non-consensual. Content owners have - in principle, legally backed - the right to distribute their content in any way they see fit, and content consumers have the option to refuse that content if the format it is presented in is un-acceptable to them, this is a consensual producer-consumer relationship. If you f…

Does this mean it's ok to sell food with poison in them because people have the option to just simply not eat them?

A figure like TBL openly supporting something like DRM sends a message, and it's not a good one.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#29
post #17

Question: did TBL invent the WWW as part of a job-related project while at CERN, or did he invent it as a personal side-project using time/resources of his employer?

According to Wikipedia and himself, he wrote up a proposal and was encouraged by his boss to implement it as an "unofficial" project: https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html#Influences

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#30
post #27
post #25

What about the WWW did he invent? Not hypertext, not SGML, not even MIME headers. There were even other competing hypertext systems like Hypercard and Gopher. TBL is extremely overrated.

He literally invented the 'WWW'.

Nothing about it was original or invented.
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