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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#151

Post by robotresearcher »

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.

A sidebar issue: all these rules apply to knighthoods from the UK crown only. And under these rules non-Brits may be knighted but do not use the title 'sir'. Thus Bill Gates KBE is not known as Sir Bill.

(edit: Today I learned that Kazuo Ishiguro is British. The statement below is completely wrong. I've managed to get his nationality wrong while enjoying his books for 20 years!)

So in the specific case of Kazuo Ishiguro, the sir does not apply. For Brits with family-first names, see the other answers.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#152

Post by spinlock »

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…

I personally think it's important to remember how the Internet worked with TBL invented the Web. Most importantly, everyone believed and implemented net neutrality. I think it's a very interesting thought experiment to imagine if we would even have the web had the University of Minnesota decided to drop all http packets to promote their competing gopher protocol.

The Web is the best example I can think of for why we still need net neutrality.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#153

Post by timtadh »

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.

Then again Steve Cook who proved the existence of the class NP-Complete was awarded the Turing Award only 11 years after his paper was published: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/cook_n991950.cfm

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#154

Post by cortesoft »

doomlaser wrote: post #148
peterkelly wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can read the original proposal here: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

That's a great read. I didn't realize Bill Atkinson's HyperCard preceded Tim Berners-Lee's proposal by a few years, or that Berners-Lee had referenced HyperCard directly in it. The applications of hypermedia were clearly in the ether in thay era, but that document certainly pulls a lot of the threads together.

Oh man, HyperCard was my childhood. I made SO MANY games in it.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#155

Post by DanBC »

robotresearcher wrote: post #151
nindalf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A sidebar issue: all these rules apply to knighthoods from the UK crown only. And under these rules non-Brits may be knighted but do not use the title 'sir'. Thus Bill Gates KBE is not known as Sir Bill. (edit: Today I learned that Kazuo Ishiguro is British. The statement below is completely wrong. I've managed to get his nationality wrong while enjoying his books for 20 years!) So in the specific case of Kazuo Ishig…

Kazuo Ishiguro is British. He's not called "Sir" because he has an OBE. He needs a GBE or DBE for the "Sir".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_British_Empire

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#156

Post by che_shirecat »

sjclemmy wrote: post #41
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-...

I had a similar realisation. What's the product in a social network? It's you.

Appreciate the realisation but this really is repeated ad nauseum and is not an original thought in the slightest

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#157

Post by easytiger »

icebraining wrote: post #29
amelius wrote: 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

We need more bosses like that

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#158

Post by gsnedders »

chriswarbo wrote: post #65
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.

> 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. The difficulty with decentralising is that these are the biggest challenge to centralised systems like Facebook; they're problems which are very nice to have ("oh no, we have a billion users!"). The biggest challenge for decentralised syste…

> an interesting example considering that RSS is a stripped-down subset of RDF, and is/was widely adopted

RSS 0.9 was RDF, as was 1.0. 0.91–0.92 (and the 0.93/0.94 drafts) and 2.0 had nothing to do with RDF.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#159

Post by XJOKOLAT »

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 should be decentralized too, then.

Who remembers RSS feeds? I miss those days. We should have some superior spin on that but for social networks.

Imagine Facebook, but your history/data were your own property. A friend would find you on Facebook, or Ello, or AnythingAnyWhereBook ... add your feed, and done. Then it is up to the Social Networks to make a superior product for you to enjoy your friends data and interaction.

Right now it's about the monopolisation of our data.

Zuckerberg. If you're reading. Your current model is bullshit.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#160

Post by TorKlingberg »

amelius wrote: 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?

The difference is a lot less strict in academia, which CERN is strongly connected to.
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