Slashdot Mirror
ACM to Honor TCP/IP Creators with Turing Award
bth writes "The New York Times reports that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn will receive the ACM Turing Award. According to the ACM website: The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn the winners of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols." Commentary from Groklaw also available.
... if they were starting out now, slashdotters would be cursing their names because its clear that they were trying to foist a proprietary standard over the completely open, free-software friendly, OSI infrastructure, probably with a view to "Embrace and Extend"
Now a real question : If Baran and Davies had been granted a patent on packet switching networks in 1964, what would the internet look like now?
The Turing award is slowly starting to recognize people who have designed, built, and deployed systems. Up until recently, it had been given solely to people in theory.
The design of TCP/IP was not original, had flaws and violated several principles for communication protocol design. That's why we don'T see IPV6 used these days.
It's a serious insult to compare this to Einsteins innovations. This just strengthens the view that computer science is a pseudo science like social sciences in the scientific community.
Although I agree that ornamentation usually gets more attention than substance, Henry Ford is not, IMO, a good example.
." - Will Rogers (I think)
He, more than any other single person, is the reason why I can own my own car.
Perhaps more importantly, and counterintuitive, he made cars cheaply in part by paying his workers more.
"Henry Ford has made more money by paying more and charging less . .
I don't know what kind of a buddy Ford would have been, but I think it's unreasonable to think that he didn't change the automobile industry.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Maybe that's why google has 10X the number of hits for than with Kahns name. Bob did the vast majority of the work on TCP/IP and is still a scientist, Vint is the Madonna of the modern internet. Capable, but truly adept at shameless self promotion.
Bob Matcalf (who invented ethernet) called Vint "Darth Cerf".
Need Mercedes parts ?
For a man that was so instrumental in creating the underlying technology the Internet is based on, he sure has come a long way since then.
He works for MCI, the only US network that refuses to terminate spammers, spamware peddlers and bulletproof hosting facilities. Vint Cerf is claiming they can't do that, because of 1st Amendment issues. For someone as smart as him, he sure can be clueless; 1st Amendment does not apply to anyone but the US Government.
This is what Steve Linford of spamhaus.org wrote on SPAM-L yesterday about Vint Cerf's role, among other things, in all this:
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Heh. I do recall some time back reading of a Turing-machine emulator that was programmed to do a number of simple tasks, and one was responding to a few simple IP packets. It did have a problem that the speed was far too slow to be usable in a real network. It was really just a "proof of concept". But why else would you build a Turing machine?
;-)
It was also limited by the failure to implement an infinite tape.
I don't remember where I read this; it's been a while. I know that a number of different people have written Turing-machine emulators. Right now, google gets over 14,000 matches for "Turing-machine emulator", so there's lots out there to read. A quick check found several that include programs to do various odd tasks, none very useful. This is irrelevant, of course, since the Turing machine exists primarily for its mathematical properties, not for any practical purpose.
And for geek jokes.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.