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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#181

Post by madiathomas »

chubot wrote: post #168
madiathomas wrote: post #14

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives. EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

I always felt that Tim Berners-Lee was not respected enough in both the computer science and programming communities. I felt it especially after working for over a decade at Google, which literally built its entire business on TBL's architectural concepts. For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don't…

Looks like if you want to be famous, you have to be loud. Maybe that explains why he has been vocal against walled gardens lately.

Thanks for the recommendation. Let me check it out. Let me search for it. WWW is very important to my life.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#182

Post by rocky1138 »

Kenji wrote: post #4
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...

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.

What about GNU Social? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_social

I run a GNU Social site. It works well. It's a bit slow and the themes are out-of-date, but if it had more of a following I'm sure we could turn it around.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#183

Post by [deleted] »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #120
freehunter wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have. Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's the size of my inbox, but because…

I don't see what would make basic facebook history hard to move around. Facebook of course already offers a "Download a copy of your Facebook data" function. Future-facebook could import it, or the most fundamental/basic parts of it, probably -- the problem is not the data itself, but the connections in it to other users, it's not that valuable without it. I suspect there isn't much interest from users in things-tryi…

[deleted]

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#185

Post by Rexxar »

madiathomas wrote: post #14

This goes to show how hard winning Turing award is. One would have expected someone who invented the most useful invention of the 20th century to have won this award long time ago. Maybe I am just overvaluing www because of the impact it had on people's lives. EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.

Transistors are much more important IMHO.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#186

Post by btschaegg »

Kenji wrote: post #4
jacquesm wrote: post #3

Key quote (for me) from the interview: "A social network is disempowering because you put a lot of energy into it, all your personal data out there, and tell it who your friends are. You can only use that information inside the silo of that particular social network." source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604052/webs-inventor-tim-...

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.

This this this.

I really like the idea that Eben Moglen seems to pitch in every of his recent talks when talking about FreedomBox:

A decentralized network of cheap "plug-computers" that run Facebook-like functionality on the hardware of the users. And yet, while FreedomBox is a great project and does many things right, it omits the one crucial aspect of this: the decentralized social network.

Let's hope Solid or something similar takes over the social networking world eventually and we can get rid of all the megacorporations hoarding our data.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#187

Post by septimus111 »

kbart wrote: post #80
septimus111 wrote: post #62

I greatly admire the guy but does TBL OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS really need another award or title? All that money and publicity could be directed towards promising junior researchers who need it!

Turing Award is the highest IT award (hence "the Nobel Prize of computing") given for a lifetime's work. If some junior scientists would do something as groundbreaking, I'm sure they will receive this award too (after some time maybe; web wasn't invented yesterday either).

I guess I like the Fields medal model better - it's awarded only to people younger than 40 to encourage future achievements.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#188

Post by septimus111 »

racl101 wrote: post #167
septimus111 wrote: post #62

I greatly admire the guy but does TBL OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS really need another award or title? All that money and publicity could be directed towards promising junior researchers who need it!

Tim Berners Lee did amazing work from which everybody, you, me and any billion dollar company founder like Zuckerberg has benefited many times over. He deserves all the recognition and awards he gets and more. He deserves this award and he shouldn't have to give up to any up-and-comers. Let them figure it out. They're already standing on the shoulders of this giant. That's Tim's contribution.

Well yeah, his contributions are immeasurable, my argument is more about the social utility of placing the money there.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#189

Post by hueving »

freehunter wrote: post #117
danielpatrick wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a matter of fact, this is what Sir Berners Lee is working on right now at MIT. https://solid.mit.edu/ The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service. Ex: Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with peop…

But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have. Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's the size of my inbox, but because…

Gmail supports the imap and pop3 protocols, which allow all history to be trivially imported somewhere else.

That's the importance of open protocols.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#190

Post by madamelic »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #120
freehunter wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But half the point of a social network isn't the ability to communicate, but rather the history you've built there. Likewise, half the value of email isn't the ability to send a message to anyone, but the history of emails you have. Sure email isn't a data storage method, but in reality? Yeah, email is a data storage method. That's why Gmail gives me 25GB for free. Not because that's the size of my inbox, but because…

I don't see what would make basic facebook history hard to move around. Facebook of course already offers a "Download a copy of your Facebook data" function. Future-facebook could import it, or the most fundamental/basic parts of it, probably -- the problem is not the data itself, but the connections in it to other users, it's not that valuable without it. I suspect there isn't much interest from users in things-tryi…

>I suspect there isn't much interest from users in things-trying-to-be-facebook of importing the data.

And the legalities of that.

FB did a major legal smackdown on someone trying to do that.

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