Slashdot Mirror
Sir Tim Berners-Lee Named Greatest Briton
mOoZik writes "BBC News is reporting that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has been named the Greatest Briton of 2004. Berners-Lee had this to say about the honor: 'I am very proud to be British, it is great fun to be British and this award is just an amazing honour.'"
What has he done for us LATELY?
That was classic intercourse!
Honor*
Oops, that's probably flamebait
Prost Frist, and, uh, stuff like that.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer
...welcome our new British internet-inventing overlords.
What? What do you mean "it was Al Gore"?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has been named the Greatest Briton of 2004
Prince Harry was taken out of the running for Greatest Briton recently for some reason...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Thats odd as one of the points Sir Tim Berners-Lee was making with all the British papers who were asking him how rich he would be if he had patented "his" idea, was it was not his idea, it was just using things already invented together, and tweaking it for sharing. He himself seems to acknowledge the simple principle that science and technology is a building process off the works of our forefathers in our fields.
He is very humble about it as he does not see it as a pure invention, the press on the other hand just can't be bothered to learn. The web needs an inventor. Did Edison invent the light bulb?
Something in the human condition needs this widget here was made by inventor Goosebury. Why I don't know, maybe we understand ideas better when we have a psychology to project the idea onto.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
At the same awards ceremony, Jane Tomlinson (who suffers with a terminal cancer) was awarded "Greatest British Campaigner". I think that is just a little bit more significant. She has raised £1,150,000 (~USD$2,170,970) for Cancer Research.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/ 4215561.stm
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
Perhaps he stole the idea from Al Gore?
Are you saying that bringing ideas together in a way not done before is not itself an idea?
Actio personalis moritur cum persona. (Dead men don't sue)
I don't think you understand that the world wide web is not the same thing as the internet.
WWW != NET
The guy spells 'honor' with a 'u'??
That's unamerican!
...and used the HTTP protocol!
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
Its supposed to be a controlled flight though. Riding on the back of a giant firecracker does not count.
"greatest Briton"?
Hmmm. I'm British. I wonder what my ranking is?
14,223,921st greatest Briton?
"Did Edison invent the light bulb?"
Yes, he did. And Alexander Graham Bell invented the Telephone. While other people had similar ideas, they are the people who pushed forward and got the job done so there fore, they are the inventors.
Ho HO! Indeed! And what a rollicking good time being human as well! Its a smashing good time up here at the top of the food-chain!
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Why the hell was that modded "interesting", if not that for someone on /. knows who Schopenhauer is - well, no proof even for that since it's a fortune citing - ?
I am quite astonished, honestly.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I think people need to believe that there are people who can achieve things without the rest of society; to reassure themselves that they could go it alone if they wanted to. People don't like to feel as if they depend on others.
Apparently the French landed there in the 1930s. They kept it quiet, never being a group to blow their own horn, and then the Americans wanted footage to "prove" they had gone to the moon, the French were all to happy to provide it (which was then doctored to include a US flag instead) due to their gratitude for America's contribution to WW2.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You're just like one of those freaking retards who think the internet is that cute little blue "e" icon down there.
You didn't intend to be flamebait ? That go the hell out there and get a cure for your ignorance.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Good Luck To The "Greatest Briton"
Want to understand SUNs Stance On GPL?
(Cite)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4 434963,00.html
... further downNow we know who blame for "www."
Long live no-www.com!
For FREE NO ADS! 1GB/20GB PHP MySQL With a Control Panel Hosting
It's not like it's pre-Christian Polynesia and you get to boink nubile exotic Island girls all day long and eat sweet tree-melons while basking on the beach.
You've obviously not been to Butlin's Holiday Camp in Bognor Regis then - mind you, there it's Essex girls and tinned pineapple.
Pip! pip!
AT&ROFLMAO
OK, I did some searching for the Neowin article on this, and can just as well post it here too. ;-)
It's a bunch of fun historical documents.
- Screenshot of Tim-Berner Lee's web browser/editor gizmo (apparently two apps in one suite, kinda like Mozilla?)
- Web page (from 1992) describing a very early version of HTML
- Description of the web (from 1992)*
- The original WWW proposal from 1989**
- History of the web
* = It tells you why the WWW was made... "Tim decided that high energy physics needed a networked hypertext system and CERN was an ideal site for the development of wide-area hypertext ideas"
** = excerpt: "Note that the only name I had for it at this time was "Mesh" -- I decided on "World Wide Web" when writing the code in 1990."
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Why the hell was that modded "interesting", if not that for someone on /. knows who Schopenhauer is - well, no proof even for that since it's a fortune citing - ?
I, for one, found it interesting that another slashdotter might allude to the silliness of national pride, since, after all, it is taking pride in other people's accomplishments. Personally, I keep my national pride to a miniumum, since I'm no more responsible for the great things America has done than the awful things. Same goes for racial pride. I am not responsible for the great things others have done, nor am I responsible for slavery just because I'm white. I think people should be as proud as their skin color as they are of their hair color. Likewise, there should be no shame.
No I am not. The people who think he stole part of the web concept from others use the word stole in the wrong way. And I framed my comment more to get a discussion going on actually what does invent mean.
I find the best inventors and scientists recognise the idea that we do stand on the ideas from society and our peers.
Newton's "standing on the back of giants..." quote and all.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
I agree completely. If you aren't going the pronounce the "h" then why use it at all?
And yet the true evolutionary success of the human race has been in social structures that create a memory larger than any individual and more complex and subtle in detail than could be dealt with by instinct. Because our ability to share, store and combine information we have progressed as a species. So I think as a society we subconsciously recognise the value of this web thing, though we may not appreciate the ideal potential it holds and we tend to use it for the base common denominator.
So an invention meant to let people share ideas, and communicate ideas, is celebrated as an invention of one person, who admits he built on the ideas of others and his idea would have happened without him, it was a natural progression of the ideas that had come before. I think from all the interviews I have read with Sir Tim, the most important thing I have got from him is his pride in his work on trying to keep the web based on open and free standards so that it will always have a large ideal potential.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
Schopenhauer was right, wouldn't you say? 'Life without pain has no meaning' ...
I'm surprised no-one from the States has said anything about the guy's teeth. From Austin Powers to the Simpsons' 'Big Book Of British Smiles', that's all we ever get to hear. British=Bad F*ckin' Teeth.
Listen, you shiny-gobbed sons of bitches, these are Darwinian survival aids. If we got into a fight and I bit you with these babies, you'd bleed to death in thirty seconds or get a dose of gangrene and end up taking your fingers home in a bag.
Right. I'm off to throw bricks at a dentist. What ho, my lily-white arse.
Woman: "King of the who?"
Arthur: "The Britons."
Woman: "Who are the Britons?"
Arthur: "Well, we all are. We are all Britons, and I am your king."
Woman: "I didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective."
Dennis: " You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship: a self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--"
From. Memory. Where do I collect my geek stripes?
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
So, what he is saying is, that in spite of all temptation to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman?
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I was at a friend's house over the holidays and I noticed that he had received the distinction of being the World's Greatest Dad! Top that, Sir Tim!
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
And what does an Essex girl use for protection? A bus shelter.
Boom! Boom!
Did he inhale?
When I ask someone who invented the Internet they say "Ummm, um. Bill Gates!" Seriously, most people do think Bill Gates/Microsoft invented the Internet. Few people outside the web developer community has ever heard his name, even though he's made one of the most important inventions of the century.
Huh? I've seen people miss out the L from HTML *, but never seen people missing out the H.
* despite all new operating systems in the last 10 years supporting filenames with more than 3 letters after the dot. It really puzzles me why people still do that. The same goes for text files.
Follow me
Actually it's making fun of Francophobia. But, well, whatever.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Because it's so often reinforced. Windows and other Microsoft products offer .ini, .txt, .doc, .url, and so on straight out of the box.. so it's a pattern users subconciously follow themselves. I admit, even though I'm a UNIX user, I use .txt! I can't think of many places I've seen .text or .document, if ever. Also, file types are defined in most operating system as being the 3 letter variants, with .html as a nice exception.
Tim Berners-Lee did not invent the Internet.
No. That's why Edison was forced to go into partnership with Joseph Swan who beat him to it, forming the Swan Edison United Electric Light Co. (Ediswan). After Edison bought Swan out he re-wrote history to take the credit, as he normally did with other people's inventions.
There's not much Edison himself did invent other than FUD and the invention-as-slavery, your-thoughts-belong-to-us conditions which prevail to this day in the IP clauses of large companies.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Everyone SHOULD know this. Unfortunatly people still thing edison invented the light bulb and was responsible in any way for the electricity we have today.
More and more of the smithsonians innacuracies.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Okay, so let's take a look at the original quote again:
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
This would seem to predict that people who have something to be proud of have no need of national pride. You would expect, then, that these people would be less inclined to it. Sir Tim Berners-Lee might disagree. So would a whole lot of other British and American heroes. So would the vast majority of the officers in the US military, who generally hold degrees in higher education. What happens instead is that these people view their accomplishments as part of the greatness of the their country, and rightly attribute their chances to do great things to it.
National pride is a social imperative that helps keep a country cohesive and working together. The United States would have had a much harder time getting through WWII without it. It generated the amazing cash flow to New York after 9/11. The examples go on and on.
My theory about you: in forsaking national pride, you seek to distance yourself from the "common man," because you view him as lazy and ignorant - especially them dern rednecks. (I mean, this is Slashdot. We can assume at least half the population here believes that. "Joe sixpack?" Heh.) Thus, it's a manifestation of your selfish pride.
What a swap: national pride for selfish pride.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Perhaps you miss the point. As I see it, a nation voted a geek as their greatest. Which country this was is irrelevent.
--- "We've always been at war with Eastasia."
Yes and I am glad to see the point well taken.
It seems our idea of invention has a myth-making sociological side affect. We want the great inventor, a pop star of ideas. We would rather have an Edison, Bell, Berners-Lee, than a society that greats together.
I sometimes wonder if the modern laws of IP come together, if we don't see the nation of Greece suing because all IP can be traced to Greek philosophies already published.
Pete Townsend once said "all musicians are thieves and magpies" implying they kept all the neat and shiny bits in other songs and horded them, churning them together and creating something new. But the same can really be said of all arts. I have never seen anything that you can call new, I think you can see some things that are visionary but even that vision incorporates the past, the now and arranges them to point to an ideal future.
I think my anger at the modern concept of IP rights is coming more and more from the realisation that we do not do this alone. The scientific method needs community and sharing, knowledge is meant to be communal. I like capitalism as a tool, but is the tool be wrongly applied in this modern age. Should we not be looking for other ways of creating capital than trying to own ideas. I know the down side is how do you encourage ideas in a capitalistic system without monetary incentive. But from a neutral perspective the hording of IP rights and controling of ideas is in my opinion beginning to actual create bad IP, ideas are muted and not becoming full.
This is becoming a ramble, I don't mind rambling but I am still learning, I hope to never stop and I like throwing out thoughts to see how others reply.
Thank you to everyone who replied in this discussion because there is just something clicking in my mind on the subject because of this little side discussion.
I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said: "I drank what?" - Chris Knight (Val Kilmer)- Real Genius
I am English, but I am not proud of it. Having considered the odds, I am aware that I am very lucky to have been born north of the poverty line at all, let alone to have escaped any of the countries that the Soviet Republic fucked up; some theocratic hellhole in the middle east; China, North Korea, etc etc. I'm relieved, glad, even, but not proud. :)
it wasn't Tony Blair?
Ask George.
Personally I think Liz Hurley ought to be declared "Greatest Briton"... (Or maybe Keira Knightley...or Kate Beckinsale...or Kate Winslet...or...)
Well, maybe Jordan, who really IS "Greatest Briton"...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Was it Al Gore?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"We were once so close to Heaven,
Peter came out and gave us
medals declaring us
the nicest of the damned"
("Road Movie to Berlin", They Might Be Giants)
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
This would seem to predict that people who have something to be proud of have no need of national pride.
...and selfish pride ;)
I make no such prediction. I am aware that my feelings about national pride are in the severe minority.
National pride is a social imperative that helps keep a country cohesive and working together. The United States would have had a much harder time getting through WWII without it. It generated the amazing cash flow to New York after 9/11. The examples go on and on.
Do you really need national pride to help other people?
My theory about you: in forsaking national pride, you seek to distance yourself from the "common man," because you view him as lazy and ignorant
I don't "seek" to distance myself from the common man. I think putting oneself on a pedestal is an unhealthy and dangerous thing. But you have to realize that some people are just better in some things than others. I lack social skills, physical strength and a number of other things. Does that mean I'm a bad person? I hope not. Should people treat me differently? Perhaps they might treat me accordingly. Should they treat me poorly? I don't think so. The same goes for intelligence.
Is it so wrong to recognize that you are smarter than some people? It doesn't mean you have to belittle people or treat them like idiots. Why must being better than anyone at anything and knowing it translate to being pompous? Sure, I get frustrated with stupidity and ignorance, but that doesn't mean I'm an ass about it. And please, don't picture me as some typical computer geek who thinks he knows it all. On the contrary, I'm an unsuccessful nobody... and not much of a computer geek.
As for laziness, as long as someone is self-reliant and not an unappreciative burden, I don't see a problem with laziness. It's only natural. I think people should be free to be lazy if they so choose.
especially them dern rednecks
I'm going to dig a hole here and share my feelings on this one, however misguided they may seem. I used to be active duty military and I was in a career field that was highly populated by said folk. The issue I had with the beer-swilling, tobacco-chewing, nascar-watching types was a culture clash. These folks were plenty intelligent in many matters, especially job related mechanics, which in many regards they were my superiror. But, regardless of who was better than who at what, we seemed to have some tension from misunderstanding one another as far as lifestyle and motives and such. So... do I get a little bitter and hostile around redneck types? Eventually, it seems. Do I judge them at first sight? I can't seem to help it. Do I treat them like they're subhuman? Absolutely not, because I've met amazing people of all nationalities, races and cultures. But still, I find it difficult not to stereotype, given the fair amount of homogenity in some cultures.
You'll note that I keep bringing up race and it's because I feel that national pride is akin to racial pride, which is why it is a source of some disgust for me. Nationalism may bring people together (like racial pride), but in the process, it also tends to draw lines in the sand.
What a swap: national pride for selfish pride.
How about national pride for global humanitarianism?
Anyway... feel free to shoot holes in my logic. I'm not above being wrong.
I've heard of this place called Nubia but can never find it on a map. (/me waves to Terry Pratchett.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
From: http://www.tuc.nrao.edu/~demerson/bose/bose.html
The same article also notes that he was the first to use a semiconductor diode, nearly fifty years prior to the invention of the transistor.
please change me. - sig
Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent the internet, he invented HTML.
http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeniik/history/meucc
So far, we've seen that:
- Bell did not invent the phone
- Marconi did not invent radio communications
- Edison did not invent the light bulb
- Tim Berniers-Lee never said he invented the Web
- Al Gore didn't invent the "intarnet thingee" or Gore-tex
It's not what you know that can hurt you, it's what you know that isn't so...You sterotyping berk! I half-inched my mates computer to have a butchers at this article and I think its bloomin marvellous!
I dunno about any proxy server - the link from my post leads to http://www.freespeech.com/archives/050804PrisonerA buse.jpg (spaces might be introduced to this link's anchor by Slashdot).
The best way to help England would be to hang Rumsfeld for war crimes. That way England and her sicko cronies wouldn't have to take all the blame for gleefully carrying out Rumsfelds torture policy.
--
make install -not war
"Thats odd as one of the points Sir Tim Berners-Lee was making with all the British papers who were asking him how rich he would be if he had patented "his" idea..."
Furthermore, from one of my favorite wired articles ever, comes one of the best quotes ever...
W: Do you wish you'd started the Web as a business?
TBL: If I'd started "Web Inc." it would have been just another proprietary system. You wouldn't have had this universality. For something like the Web to exist, it has to be based on public, nonproprietary standards.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
See above
Those damn redcoats taking credit for another American invention!
While Sir Tim is indeed British, imho it's ironic, nay tragic, that none of his seminal work was done in a British istitution. Shame, shame, shame. I wonder why?
Screenshot of Tim-Berner Lee's web browser/editor gizmo
Cool, it looks just like my desktop!
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Hey, don't get mad at me. Especially when I agree with you about Pvt. England, and you obviously didn't read the next sentence, including
"England and her sicko cronies" and "blame for gleefully carrying out Rumsfelds torture policy"
I know it's hard to find any subtlety in the Torture, Inc they've got buzzing along in Iraq. But don't fall for Rumsfeld's strategy of blaming only the demented England and her sick fuckbuddies, without holding Rumsfeld responsible for his torture corps. And don't waste your anger on people like me, who feel the same way, but can see where the real insane "soldier" perverts work: in the Pentagon and the White House.
--
make install -not war
I meant the World Wide Web.
If it weren't for Sir Berners-Lee and his world wide web, I'd have a fulfilling life. Instead, I'm posting to /.
JADBP
You know, it was about a month into my first web programming job when I realized that HTML is spectacularly ill-designed to do what we were trying to do with it - namely, to automate it (with scripts) rather than hand-code static pages. For example, try writing the code to auto-generate a selectbox. It's tricky, it takes about a half-hour, and it always feels like a hack.
Why is it so bad? Because there's no syntactic consistency in the interfaces to different commands, like SELECTBOX, TABLE, INPUT etc. On top of that, the browser implementations tend to suck. You have no idea how many web pages I've written that were composed almost entirely of FONT COLOR, because font color doesn't nest.
Five years later, they've created all kinds of new ultra-hyped languages, like XML, and web scripting is still just as broken as it ever was. So, I don't know if you were kidding when you said that HTML is "an awful markup language," but if you were referring to scripted implementations (which is 90% of the web these days), then you were absolutely right.
That's where the nubile folks come from.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Going back a few decades in history... In 1945, Vanaver Bush wrote about his vision of Memex
"Bush saw the ability to navigate the enormous data store as a more important development than the futuristic hardware. Here he describes building a path to connect information of interest:
When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined [...]
Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. "
Yes! Edison patented a light bulb in the US after Swan had patented his in Britain. The tungsten filament bulb we use these days is pretty much what Swan patented, Edison's Carbon Filament bulb was unreliable and never really took off. Unfortunately many USians let misguided patriotism get in the way of recorded fact.
Stephen
"Don't write down to your readers, the only people less intelligent than you can't read" - Sign on Newspaper Office Wall