231–240 of 305 posts
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I've never understood why people (particularly outside UK) care about some "sirs" at all. "Mr. Tim Berners-Lee" sounds just fine to me.
Why use a title at all if you're going to use the wrong one?
Mr Berners-Lee surely won't feel offended because the person addressing him isn't a [UK] royalist?
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Things which will likely all be forgotten. Name 10 billionaires from the 19th century. Now try naming 10 scientists. Go with the Turing Award if you want to be remembered.
Trick question. > Forbes magazine updates a complete global list of known U.S. dollar billionaires every year. John D. Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed U.S. dollar billionaire in 1916
If you want to play, note that I did not say USD anywhere in my comment. Not to mention that Forbes was founded in 1917, and so it clearly has no data collected to "confirm" an earlier billionaire. We can go back to the 14th century if you like (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Musa_I_of_Mali):
> During his reign Mali may have been the largest producer of gold in the world at a point of exceptional demand. One of the richest people in history, he is known to have been enormously wealthy; reported as being inconceivably rich by contemporaries, "There’s really no way to put an accurate number on his wealth" (Davidson 2015).
But thanks, I actually never knew that about USD billionaires.
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Not quite. You still (in my experience) need to go through obscure web-forms to avoid having gmail/hotmail black list your domain. And even then gmail is way too aggressive with its spam labeling. I've seen replies to an email thread be marked as spam by gmail when the sender is in the recipient's address book. Gmail considers anything beyond big corporate email providers as second class participants - and so does th…
I'll echo Simias. If you behave like a first-class citizen and follow all the current standards and protocols, then you'll be accepted as one. I've been running private mail services for decades, and by keeping pace with changing expectations I've never had a problem with deliverability.
We've been running on the same domain+IP for over a decade. Hotmail block us when we're whitelisted by the original sender and also responding to an email and also have corresponded before. We've never sent even a multi-person email never mind spam, always as a response to an enquiry, very low volume.
We're blocked apparently because Hotmail has an intermediate level warning on a sender domain on another IP address managed by the same ISP; we were un-blocked before but they now say they won't allow our email through - we have SPF but can't work DKIM with our shared status. The only silver lining is they actually responded inside a fortnight to tell us that they're going to continue blocking our [at most] once a week emails to our customers who happen to have hotmail/live/outlook addresses ...
To work around I made a live.com address to send through for customer who use MS email. ~4 days later they started blocking it from remote access ... something like not enough direct website logins for the amount of IMAP lookups (a single client checking every hour or so during work hours). Few log-ins seemed to fix it.
We can pay to have the spam service MS use whitelist us though, apparently.
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Why use a title at all if you're going to use the wrong one?
He's still a mister. It's whether you buy in to "this is a male adult" vs. "I must respect this person's title because HM The Queen bestowed it on them". Mr Berners-Lee surely won't feel offended because the person addressing him isn't a [UK] royalist?
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.
PCX, BMP (1985?) or TIFF (1986?) maybe? PBM and PGM I think are slightly earlier but I can't readily find dates for them.
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-...
This is why I'm a fan of the indie web ( https://indieweb.org/ ).
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.
It's hard to top antibiotics in terms of useful inventions.
(But I guess developing them into a useful product is itself an invention. Maybe there's no bright line between discovery and invention.)
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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…
I think a big missed opportunity for Google on social was the failure to cultivate Google Reader into an open social network (it already had social features), and build each aspect of it on an RSS/OPML-like structure.
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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.
"HyperCard was created by Bill Atkinson following an lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) trip."
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I think people understand the argument, they just don't fully agree with it. Personally, while I agree that we have ended up with a fairly poor universal VM, I find it to be a fascinating example of path dependency. Maybe we would be better off with one repository of hypertext and one well designed universal VM, but what path would we have taken to get there? The hypertext repository was so compelling that everyone i…
Well said. Kay's misunderstanding is that it could have been any different. He thinks that you can just design something nice from whole cloth and people will use it. That's why his designs aren't deployed. I've been looking at projects like OOVM and going back in history to Self and SmallTalk, and there's a reason that those things aren't deployed. Don't get me wrong -- they're certainly influential and valuable. Bu…
Because that's exactly what they did in Xerox Park, many times over.
>That's why his designs aren't deployed.
No comment.
>But he's basically confusing research and engineering, as if engineering wasn't even a thing, and you can just come up with stuff and have people use it because it's good.
Kay has many talks about the difference between invention and innovation (which are much better terms than ones you're using). In fact, his analysis of this difference is probably the most insightful and though-provoking technology talk I have ever seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
Of course, this subject makes a lot of developers highly uncomfortable, hence a lot of shallow, ignorant, knee-jerk dismissals. "Everything is incremental." "Everything is the only way it could be." "This is fine." And so on. Thing is, Kay worked at Xerox and Apple. He read a myriad of books and research papers on computing, which he constantly references in his talks and writings. He worked and continues to work with some of the most forward-thinking people in the field of computing. In late eighties he foresaw most of the current computing trends - which is verifiable via YouTube. Even without any context his talks display a considerable depth of thought. In short: unlike some people, he actually knows what he is talking about.
>The point is that it couldn't have been any different. It wasn't designed; it was evolved.
And that is why someone who designed it just received a Turing award. Makes perfect sense.
Edit: Regarding your other comment here.
>If the web is a genius for hypertext, but not for app delivery, then he should have just said so. That is not a very hard sentiment to express. "The Web was done by Amateurs" doesn't capture it.
He has several decades worth of talks and writing. If you haven't bothered to familiarize yourself with at least some of them to understand what he means it's your own fault.