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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#131

Post by klez »

jacquesm wrote: post #127
sametmax wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with your conclusions, I nevertheless don't think we should endorse a bad status quo. When Firefox came around (as Phoenix), it didn't endorse ActiveX, making a lot of sites unusable. It chose fair standards. What would have happened if they decided that they were too small and that Microsoft was so big that ActiveX would be inevitable anyway ? Note that eventually the DRM won't affect me. I'm tech saav…

Have a read: https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/03/drm-in-html5-is-a-v... See if that changes your mind.

You were not responding to me, but sorry, it didn't.

> Moreover, a case could be made that EME will make it easier for content distributors to experiment with—and perhaps eventually switch to—DRM-free distribution.

I can't see how the author made this leap.

> It doesn't matter if browsers implement "W3C EME" or "non-W3C EME" if the technology and its capabilities are identical.

It matters as a matter of principle. It would have sent a message. Maybe this would have made the W3C irrelevant, but if it did, so be it, at least they would have gone without compromising.

I see you already discussed with sametmax about this, so I won't go further.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#133

Post by krptos »

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…

> history is really hard to move around

Is it? I think there's a way to get around that, if the protocol defines standards for verbs.

Of course, it's difficult and can grow wild, yet very much possible.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#134

Post by justin66 »

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.

> 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.

Claude Shannon never won it.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#135

Post by malcolmgreaves »

seejay wrote: post #59
seejay wrote: post #22

Holly crap! Congratulations woman!!!

I don't understand the minus points here. Did I piss a bunch of people off? I genuinely loved OPs comment here (gave it an upvote). So instead of saying "woman" here If I just "assumed" he is a man and said congratulations "man" or "bro" would I get plus points?

Just drop off the woman (or man) part and you are fine. What's weird, as a native speaker, is your use of woman in this context. It's just odd: it's unnecessary and it adds gender where it isn't appropriate.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#136

Post by maxxxxx »

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.

That's the nice thing they did in the 90s and before. They created standards like FTP, HTTP, Gopher and whatever and people could build upon these standards. Now we are back to everything being proprietary,

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#137

Post by cr0sh »

logicallee wrote: post #12

For anyone who doesn't know, the www is a a "hypertext" project where documents can contain links to each other. By clicking these links, a wide variety of content is exposed. For example, consider how much easier it is to use Wikipedia than to have to look up references in the index (page numbers by word occurrence) of a printed book. You can just click on a link and follow it. In all, most people spend most of thei…

TBL created the web, certainly - but hypertext prior to the web goes far back as an idea (at least as far back as Alan Kay - also an ACM Turing Award winner, IIRC)...

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#138

Post by seejay »

alainv wrote: post #124
seejay wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you very much! in that case I'd be ok with the down votes. But the first reply I got here from someone I assume who is in charge of HN was "OP is a man" so I can't help but wonder what's really going on in the minds of these down voters.

1) Your comment added nothing, but then this wasn't a high-value thread anyway. 2) Any pronoun in that case would be superfluous. "Holy crap! Congratulations!" would be far more intuitive to native english speakers. Choosing to add a gendered pronoun without knowing the correct gender is just... odd. That's exactly the type of situation most would avoid where possible: you omit gendered pronouns unless you know.

I agree with both your points, completely. Thank you very much!

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#139

Post by 27182818284 »

justin66 wrote: post #134
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.

> 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. Claude Shannon never won it.

That's an interesting point. I interpret the prize's criteria "for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community" to be less in Claude's space and more in the applied space. Scrolling down through the list of past winners, I've implemented several of the work of winners and am using the WWW right now to communicate this.

On the other hand, I think I use Claude's work in the same sense that I use Kirchhoff's laws everyday.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#140

Post by jedberg »

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…

jpeg wasn't invented until 1991, so probably not. :) Most likely they were GIFs.
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