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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

news.mit.edu

31–40 of 305 posts

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#31
post #27
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.

He literally invented the 'WWW'.

The question raised be the GP is whether the amount of originality deserves a Turing Award, given the other things (TCP/IP is even missing from his list) that either make the WWW possible or are similar to it.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#32
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 catalyzing the web’s rapid growth"

So no, not hypertext, not SGML, not MIME: URI, HTML (an application of SGML) and HTTP.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#33
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a dumb analogy. Bullying is one-sidedly bad, hence there being a bully-victim relationship which is non-consensual. Content owners have - in principle, legally backed - the right to distribute their content in any way they see fit, and content consumers have the option to refuse that content if the format it is presented in is un-acceptable to them, this is a consensual producer-consumer relationship. If you f…

Does this mean it's ok to sell food with poison in them because people have the option to just simply not eat them? A figure like TBL openly supporting something like DRM sends a message, and it's not a good one.

Another pointless analogy. Food with poison in it is illegal to sell. Supporting DRM sends a message that you do no agree with (and that I do not agree with), we can agree that it's not a good message but we are not without power in this: you and I can simply decide never to use that feature and not to support companies that use that feature.

Copyright law is here to stay, rights holders will try to use technology to be able to squeeze every last $ out of their legally backed position and consumers have the collective powers to give those rights holders the finger.

The fact that consumers as a group don't care enough is the main problem, see also: privacy and many other items like this.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#34
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

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

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#36

good for him, but whoever thought it was a good idea to make webpages other than a markup language for documents needs to be shot.

Do you realise that your comment, and HN itself, would not exist if no forms of interactivity were ever implemented on the web?

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#37
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even email is no longer really decentralized. Google and a few other email silos now make up the bulk.

This is why I use Fastmail, and encrypt my Google Drive data. It isn't any more secure as far as I can tell, but I'm tired of 2-3 companies holding all my easily accessible data in one place. Especially when they are openly using that data for advertising. These days I'll always take a paid service over a "free" one where I'm the product.

But that requires scrutiny as well. Just because you're paying does not mean that they are not profiting off of your data.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#38

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 believe the most useful invention of the 19th century was possibly the cotton gin :)

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#39
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.

A two-minute review of his Wikipedia page would answer your question (or ad-hominem attack). If you looking for inventions, he designed and built the first web browser and the first web server[1].

If you're criticising him for building on top of what others did, no man is an island. He did improve on what was already there. Why not read the details for yourself?[2].

In Tim's words: "I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and—ta-da!—the World Wide Web."

[1] https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#40
post #16
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.

diaspora probably was the most popular failed project which tried to achieve this. It did not really fail per se, but it's pretty clear by now that it will never reach impactful adoption.

I was rooting for those guys and I'm still following their releases, but I can't see it ever being accepted by the masses.
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