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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#161

Post by DanBC »

nojvek wrote: post #95
stan_rogers wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's Sir Tim(othy) . The "Sir" attaches to the given name, not the surname.

I've never quite figured out how sirs work. I know Knights were addressed with sirs and the Queen had something to do with it, but how does it work in a multicultural UK?

Debretts is probably the place to find this out.

Here's the rules for putting the letters after names: https://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/letters-...

The Joint Forms of address gives you some clues about the order of words before the name: https://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/joint-fo...

Note that most people don't know about this stuff, and don't really care about it.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#163

Post by vog »

skrebbel wrote: post #145
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…

> History creates lock-in, and history is really hard to move around. It doesn't need to be. For example, I moved my email between IMAP servers multiple times simply by dragging & dropping a swath of messages in Outlook. That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy is not a problem with the decentralized nature of email but simply with mediocre client implementations.

> That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy

Not sure what you mean.

It works as easy with Mutt. Open IMAP folder, select all, save to [other IMAP folder or local folder, as you wish].

Works reliable even with very large folders, you just have to wait a bit longer until it's finished.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#164

Post by nandhp »

skrebbel wrote: post #145
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…

> History creates lock-in, and history is really hard to move around. It doesn't need to be. For example, I moved my email between IMAP servers multiple times simply by dragging & dropping a swath of messages in Outlook. That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy is not a problem with the decentralized nature of email but simply with mediocre client implementations.

Thunderbird can also do this.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#165

Post by Normal_gaussian »

vog wrote: post #163
skrebbel wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> History creates lock-in, and history is really hard to move around. It doesn't need to be. For example, I moved my email between IMAP servers multiple times simply by dragging & dropping a swath of messages in Outlook. That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy is not a problem with the decentralized nature of email but simply with mediocre client implementations.

> That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy Not sure what you mean. It works as easy with Mutt. Open IMAP folder, select all, save to [other IMAP folder or local folder, as you wish]. Works reliable even with very large folders, you just have to wait a bit longer until it's finished.

Practically every email program can move email easily. It is somewhat trivial.

Recently we moved all our company mail with IMAPsync. Automated commandline tool. Awesome.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#167

Post by racl101 »

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.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#168

Post by chubot »

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 understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google.

It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and Android that makes boxes usable? That's an example of the principle of least power.

I recommend reading his book "Weaving the Web" [2] if you want to learn more about the story behind the web.

I'm very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also has a very generous personality.

People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don't see that much about TBL.

Ditto in the CS community. "HyperText" used to be a big research area but I guess TBL solved it and people don't talk about it anymore.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power

[2] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#169

Post by chubot »

hcs wrote: post #149
cr0sh wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)...

The word, at least, was coined [1] by Ted Nelson, published 1965. The idea goes back at least to Vennevar Bush's Memex proposal [2] in 1945. I haven't heard Kay mentioned as an early proponent of hypertext, I'd be interested to hear more if you can find it. [1] https://elmcip.net/node/7367 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

Yeah I hadn't heard Kay mentioned with hypertext either. I think he is profoundly mistaken about it too (or at least he was until very recently): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14035411

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#170

Post by NoGravitas »

TheShadowRunner wrote: post #123
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.

Have you heard about Mastodon? https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon It's like a decentralized version of Twitter, with federalization. Might need to find a instance that's not busy with signups though.

Mastodon is (mainly?) a new implementation of GNU Social. It federates with existing GNU Social servers (which, as StatusNet go back to like 2007 or so). I hear it's a good quality implementation, though.
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