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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

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Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

a thought/concept doesn't need to be original to a wider group and can still be profound for the individual. see "just about any subject".

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#302
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Another analogy I use is complaining about the human body. Like "who designed this thing there there trachea and esophagus are so close together?!? What an idiot!!!" Or "why are all these people mentally ill and otherwise non-functional members of society? Who designed this crap?" Okay, so what's wrong with discussing the limitations of the human body and the ways to improve it then? Yes, the web evolved instead of…

It's great to discuss ways to improve things, but that is different than suggesting that the whole thing is rotten to the core and needs a re-work from the ground up. The productive way to do this is to identify specific deficiencies and propose targeted incremental improvements to address them. This is what all the people involved in various standards and implementations on the web have been doing for years. This is working, progress is just slow and difficult, as it is with most things that are worth doing.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is absolutely true. I guess I'm avoiding people who explicitly use my data for profit, in favour of those whose profit model doesn't require it. The trust is that Fastmail et al. are successful enough, and honest enough to not use it.

Ultimately I'd love to host everything myself. But, at present, I don't have the technical knowledge to trust myself to secure everything.

On top of that, on an even more emotional level, the principle of myself being the product doesn't sit right with me.

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#304

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.

No I think you're spot on. It's easy to see the web as an obvious invention with hindsight, but just imagine a world where tcp/ip is the only protocol available to you. I could easily imagine a world in which someone thought to create an across-the-wire binary specification rather than a really simple text protocol. The genius of http and html is that they are very simple. I remember right after the dot-com bubble crashed a bunch of people basically said the web was dead and that we should be passing binaries back-and-forth. Inventing something simple and useful that the average person can easily pick up is the work of a genius (and yes, the average person can write html, my mom doesn't understand how the internet even works, but she writes html for her job).

Re: Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see what would make basic facebook history hard to move around. Facebook of course already offers a "Download a copy of your Facebook data" function. Future-facebook could import it, or the most fundamental/basic parts of it, probably -- the problem is not the data itself, but the connections in it to other users, it's not that valuable without it. I suspect there isn't much interest from users in things-tryi…

>I suspect there isn't much interest from users in things-trying-to-be-facebook of importing the data. And the legalities of that. FB did a major legal smackdown on someone trying to do that.

Curious for a link to that. Facebook lets you download your own data. But if you upload that data somewhere else, they're going to sue someone?
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