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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#291

Post by hueving »

Nadya wrote: post #107
qplex wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how would you verify that YourFacebookFriend is YourFacebookFriend on some other service?

This is a solved problem, but not one that would catch on. See: PGP If my friend can sign a message using the same key on both services - and I already trust that key is them - I can be almost certain it is them. Regardless of the service. This is one of the first use cases for keybase.io - verifying identities across a few main social sites. (E: For clarification, Keybase makes it easier to find these proofs. It isn…

>This is a solved problem, but not one that would catch on. See: PGP

It's only 'solved' if you don't care about usability. PGP quickly becomes a nightmare when you consider the day-to-day things 'normal' computer users will go through (private key stolen, password to private key forgotten, phishing attacks to sign replacement keys for friends, etc).

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#292

Post by gsnedders »

bahjoite wrote: post #32
protist wrote: post #25

What about the WWW did he invent? Not hypertext, not SGML, not even MIME headers. There were even other competing hypertext systems like Hypercard and Gopher. TBL is extremely overrated.

From the article:- "conceived of the web in 1989 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) as a way to allow scientists around the world to share information with each other on the internet. He introduced a naming scheme (URIs), a communications protocol (HTTP), and a language for creating webpages (HTML). His open-source approach to coding the first browser and server is often credited with helping ca…

HTML wasn't an application of SGML: its syntax was clearly influenced by SGML, but it wasn't actually SGML. It didn't become an SGML application until a few people convinced the working group to make it so for HTML 2.0 (there was no HTML 1.0 standard: the earlier drafts I'm aware of defined how to construct an SGML document from an HTML one and explicitly stated it was not expected an SGML parser would be used, which I'd take to imply that HTML was not an SGML application).

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#293

Post by triplesecs »

losvedir wrote: post #21

When I was an MIT student I worked one summer at CSAIL. The office I was in had only a single occupancy bathroom. One afternoon I went to use it and just as I got there I saw that TBL was exiting. Once I went in and sat down, I noticed that the seat was warm ! Highlight of my life right there, having my butt warmed by the residual heat of the inventor of the www's butt. Ahem, in any case, congrats to him! Definitely…

You should have licked the seat, so a part of him could become forever a part of you.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#294

Post by Gracana »

tcdent wrote: post #242
jacquesm wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like indieweb but I'm not on board with their 'design first' slogan. I think to be most effective such a thing should be 'content first'.

Content, in terms of quality; and subsequently curation/censorship? Otherwise, content falls into a specific set of mediums (text, images, video, sound), all of which are assumed on a modern platform and aren't worth reconsidering. Design and presentation, however, has infinite possibility.

How do you get curation and censorship out of a bunch of people publishing things separately on their own websites?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#295

Post by Cyph0n »

iiv wrote: post #272
Cyph0n wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I'd argue that (for example) Warren Buffet will be forgotten long before the invention of the transistor will.

But what about the inventor of the transistor? I already don't know that name. (But on the other hand, I don't know many names)

I meant the inventors of course. They shared a Nobel prize: Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain.

Anyways, it was just an example.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#296

Post by pseudalopex »

OJFord wrote: post #283
pseudalopex wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does local custom work both ways? I think most Americans would consider "Mister" perfectly courteous.

I'm not sure what you mean by working both ways, I'm saying as the speaker one respects the subject's title, even if not 'recognised' natively. For example, I'm not Catholic, but I would of course refer to Pope Francis; not 'Mr Francis', or anything involving his birth (as opposed to regnal) name.

I think the norm is the current surroundings, not wherever the subject is from. Dr. Smith is Smith-sensei in Japan. The New York Times is known for its use of courtesy titles, and it calls knights "Mr.".

Pope is a high office, and Francis is his chosen name. It would be rude of you to call him by his birth name; it would be rude of him to insist you call him "Your Holiness", although you probably should if you're visiting the Vatican.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#297

Post by gkya »

hutzlibu wrote: post #247
gkya wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torvalds didn't add anything to CS. He just wrote a Unix-like kernel. The kernel took off and the project grew to include thousands of devs and became the biggest OSS project ever, but still, it's a kernel, not much different in essence from any old Unix kernel. Git? Again, popular project, nothing new. It was even started contemporaneously with Mercurial, which is essentially equal to it, and both are no new inventi…

"IDK but having created a popular project should not be equal to a big innovation in the field." So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"? I don't think it makes sense to compare those 2 things and value one higher than the other. Of what use are innovations, if you can't use them in a "popular project"?

> So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"?

No. But Linux is not more well-made than, say, the kernel of any modern BSD, or that of illumos, etc. Git is not technically superior to Mercurial et al. Torvalds' success is certainly a big, admirable one, but it's a different kind of success than that of Berners-Lee.

Also, while it's the most popular kernel, it's not like we'd not have anything we do have today if it didn't exist, it's in essence an ordinary kernel that came out in the right time. It's those who made the distros and reverse-engineered the drivers and ported/packaged thousands of programs who made Linux a big thing.

WWW, on the other hand, is an invention. It's something that did not exist, and it transformed the world like nothing else.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#298

Post by gkya »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #265
gkya wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torvalds didn't add anything to CS. He just wrote a Unix-like kernel. The kernel took off and the project grew to include thousands of devs and became the biggest OSS project ever, but still, it's a kernel, not much different in essence from any old Unix kernel. Git? Again, popular project, nothing new. It was even started contemporaneously with Mercurial, which is essentially equal to it, and both are no new inventi…

They didn't contribute to the science. They made very important contributions to the implementation of the science. Stallman also made very important contributions to the political/legal landscape.

I certainly do not overlook that, but is that the type of contribution that brings a Turing? I mean scientific equipment companies are of utmost importance to any science lab, but they don't get nobels, do they? Linux is at the heart of infrastructure today, but it basically is a Unix like kernel. By that logic the author of cURL should get a Turing award too.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#299

Post by tcdent »

Gracana wrote: post #294
tcdent wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Content, in terms of quality; and subsequently curation/censorship? Otherwise, content falls into a specific set of mediums (text, images, video, sound), all of which are assumed on a modern platform and aren't worth reconsidering. Design and presentation, however, has infinite possibility.

How do you get curation and censorship out of a bunch of people publishing things separately on their own websites?

That's my point. Why should content be the first priority if it's qualifications are not open to discussion?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#300

Post by hutzlibu »

gkya wrote: post #297
hutzlibu wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"IDK but having created a popular project should not be equal to a big innovation in the field." So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"? I don't think it makes sense to compare those 2 things and value one higher than the other. Of what use are innovations, if you can't use them in a "popular project"?

> So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"? No. But Linux is not more well-made than, say, the kernel of any modern BSD, or that of illumos, etc. Git is not technically superior to Mercurial et al. Torvalds' success is certainly a big, admirable one, but it's a different kind of success than that of Berners-Lee. Also, while it's the most popular kernel, it's not like we'd not have anything we do…

"but it's a different kind of success"

That was my point ;) Otherwise we agree ...

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