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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#111

Post by klez »

jyriand wrote: post #60

Offtopic. I was wondering what happened to guy who invented email. I kind of remember reading that he was living in poor conditions. Did a search on "inventor of email" and found a controversy about some guy who claims to be inventor of email(Shiva Ayyadurai). That's not the guy I was looking for. Instead I was thinking of Roy Tomlinson, as I found his name in an article called: "Ray Tomlinson's 'story' about inventi…

> I was wondering what happened to guy who invented email

I'm afraid he died last year.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#114

Post by cjbprime »

nindalf wrote: post #104
cjbprime wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I'm following you -- yes, the Queen knighted him. How does the multicultural part come in? (Women receive the same award but it's called a Damehood and their prefix is Dame.)

If Kazuo Ishiguro is knighted, should he be addressed as Sir Kazuo or Sir Ishiguro? The point being that people of Japanese descent might place their first names after their last names.

This question doesn't seem very relevant to knighthoods. Whatever would be appropriate to call someone as their given name, rather than family name, would go after "Sir". It's not very complicated.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#115

Post by jacquesm »

pinko wrote: post #99
peter303 wrote: post #86

I remember doing internet research before there was the web. For example in the late 1980s I studied California earthquakes. The USGS had a public ftp site where they put daily epicenter map images (jpeg?) and text databases of epicenters. I wrote automated scripts to download new stuff. I remember there even internet search engines at the time. People wrote automated scipts to look for public ftp ports and compiledb…

Yes, Archie[1]. Wonderful resource until it was superseded. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine

Extremely high signal:noise ratio.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#116

Post by throwaway2016a »

I've met him on a few occasions. I used to be active in Semantic Web and I'd run into him at the Cambridge Semantic Web Meetup -- Massachusetts, USA not England).

He seems like a generaly good guy with some real forward thinking and I like many for the ideas he has. I'm happy for him.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#117

Post by freehunter »

danielpatrick wrote: post #42
Kenji wrote: 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.

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 that's the size of every email I've ever gotten.

If I move from Gmail to Outlook, I can still email my friends but I can't go back and search our old conversations unless I export everything from Gmail to Outlook. If I switch from Facebook to Instagram, I can still message my friends but I can't see all of the pictures I posted on Facebook unless I export the pictures from Facebook to Instagram, but even then there are a lot of features of Facebook that I can't export data from because they just don't exist on Instagram.

History creates lock-in, and history is really hard to move around.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#118

Post by Nadya »

nindalf wrote: post #104
cjbprime wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I'm following you -- yes, the Queen knighted him. How does the multicultural part come in? (Women receive the same award but it's called a Damehood and their prefix is Dame.)

If Kazuo Ishiguro is knighted, should he be addressed as Sir Kazuo or Sir Ishiguro? The point being that people of Japanese descent might place their first names after their last names.

Sir Kazuo. With some exceptions - Japanese people "normalize" their names to English name order of Given Name, Family Name when writing or speaking in English. Some choose not to, usually out of national pride, but it is most common to normalize the name to the target language.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name#Japanese_names_i...

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#119

Post by matthewmacleod »

jacquesm wrote: post #53
peterkelly wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you realise that your comment, and HN itself, would not exist if no forms of interactivity were ever implemented on the web?

HN could be done without anything other than what the OP suggested. It would work a little bit different (there would be a few more refreshes, for instance, on voting) but for the most part you would hardly know the difference.

Yeah, I mean it could be but wasn't.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#120

Post by jrochkind1 »

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…

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-trying-to-be-facebook of importing the data.

I think it's the ability to communicate that's harder to move around, and why there's such facebook lockin. Your social network and ability to communicate with them in a public/group fashion.

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