The biggest myth of all: Windows is easy to learn and use.
Oh, yeah? Tell me, Windows loyalists, did you ever get Outlook Express to understand the concept of multiple email accounts and different stationary/spam filters for each? Figure out how to stop Windows from dumping icons all over the screen? Get rid of the MS Network and Network Neighborhood because you never use it? Get Windows to recognise your new graphics card without a struggle? Stop Real Player from firing up at startup and immediately demanding your whole machine's resources? Completely remove software you uninstall, without having to go in and manually delete folders? Confess to you where it hides ALL the cookies and let you clean them ALL out? Not show the taskbar?
Yes, I'm sure everybody's done some of what's on this list... but you weren't born knowing how? Right? You had to...guess what?...READ some DOCUMENTATION to learn how to make it do what you want! After all, if Windows is just SO-O-O-O silly easy, why were manuals written about it "for Dummies" flying off the bookstore shelves from 1985 to 1995 or so? Why would people need things simplified to the "Dummies" level if it were as simple as could be, already?
Linux comes with it's own "for Dummies" docs, free. Man pages, info pages, html docbooks, et cettera ad infinitum. Just have a gander through/usr/share/doc and you learn everything in Linux just like the "for Dummies" books in Windows!
The site is apparently Slashdotted into oblivion, but this sounds a lot like a similar article I saw a few months ago. OK, maybe there are people who can't get by without Windows. Some people can't surf the web without the AOL blue box, either. Some people cannot walk without crutches. Do they speak for all of us who can walk?
I get by without using Windows at all. So does my entire household. Thousands of other people all over the world get by just fine without using Windows at all. Before there was a Windows, (1985, just twenty short years ago, people, not that long to remember if you try!), EVERYBODY who used a computer AT ALL got along fine without any Windows. Tell me, folks, if Windows is so necessary to the function of a computer, how do you think computers were ever invented before Bill Gates was born? (They were too! Google Charles Babbage!)
Speaking as one who has used Macintosh, Windows, and Linux, we have three machines in this household running Linux 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Collectively together, we program, design graphics, chat in Yahoo, surf the web, play Flash animations, watch Real Player movies, play games, manage office documents and business records, and use modern devices such as laser printers, USB keychain drives, and CD/DVD burners. All on Linux. All the time. And I must say, even I (geekiest of the lot) find little reason to resort to a command line anymore.
I'm just dying to know what arcane task needs *just Windows* to be executed anymore. Unless it's specifically coded to stop dead and balk if it doesn't find Windows running and it won't co-operate with WINE and a feasible alternative program doesn't exist... ever seen the ad for the company that will *custom-make* a special Linux version of any Windows program you come to them with? I've seen it running in the Google ads on this very site!
Games...yes, we had a box of Windows-only games I bought back when I was dumb enough to settle for that. True, they will not run in Linux. Instead, thousands of games are now being made for Linux, which you can DOWNLOAD FOR FREE instead of shelling out $40-60 dollars for them. At that rate, we can play a new game every week, now, instead of playing one game all month until we're sick of it because we feel like fools if we don't get our money's worth out of it. The box of Windows games ended up going 50-cents apiece at a yard sale. The people getting them shrugged and made noises about how they were keeping Windows 95/98 running at home because they weren't about to shell out for the upgrade. So I offer them a home-burned Knoppix CD and just say "Try this when you get sick of the games."
But hey, I'm standing by for the usual howls and screams and flames of indignation I usually get when I say this kind of thing in this kind of thread. How dare I speak the truth! Especially where a paid-M$-shill has an account.
Sorry, I'm no HTML genius, but I have a blog, and I'm sorry to say that *it's* designed better than your site. Your site needs some personality, some pizazz, some features. You need a web designer.
How much farther can geeks beat a joke into the ground? The Microsoft Borg joke wasn't funny to begin with, yet slashdot keeps flogging it to death for some reason. Our of all the topic icons on slashdot, only Microsoft gets the crappy, derogatory icon. Why is that? There's no good reason you guys can't use the MS logo just like for all the others. It's also funny how many Microsoft ads there are on slashdot. You guys hate them so much, yet have no problem taking their advertising dollars. Nice hypocrisy there.
Yep, the world's just one big ol' crock o' doo-doo, ain't it? Makes you just wanna put on Roger Whittaker's "Make The World Go Away" and sob into a tea-towel...
It doesn't pay to put the pin back in the grenade.
*Ahem*, when everybody's done screaming "The Comfy Chair!?!?!" in varying hammy dramatic tones, let us pause and consider: This is being done to solve a very severe problem. Anybody at all can use the name Linux for any purpose at all, and not even have anything to do with software! If you've had the experience of searching for a Linux-related frob, only to have a porn-page pop up titled: "Hot College Linux Girls", you get my drift. Free stuff will stay free...and this will ensure that nobody can use corporate clout to take our free name away from us. I think.
An' be careful lobbin' them grenades around these penguins! They'se timid creatures that spook easy!
you'd set off alarms as chips would be in the casino which were not in the database.
One presumes they'd have a method for recognizing chips from other casinos as well. Being a veteran of a few well-oiled downtown crawls myself, I can attest that your pockets are likely to accumulate all manner of chips, tokens, tickets, and coins from one stop to another.
everybody here wants to hammer them for trying to protect what they have.
I wouldn't dream of holding it against Apple for protecting what they have. Let them build their products so they are tamper-proof! That isn't what this is. This is the sharing of free knowledge (I figured out how to do something, here's how:). This is the kind of knowledge we Linux geeks talk about when we say, "Information wants to be free".
Imagine that you maintain a fence. One day, you discover a hole in it. Your solution is to stand by the hole and shoot everybody who comes by and points and tells others that there's a hole in the fence.
I love Apple from way back, though I prefer Linux. At least with a Mac product, I can tell that I'd actually GET SOMETHING for my money. But the occasional move like this is going to work against Apple in the long run. It smells too much like litigation first, engineering last. We've seen many a tech company fall down that slippery slope before.
As for me, if Apple has some idle lawyers standing around, how about siccing them on those "Free Ipod" ads? Those things are doing 100 times damage to Apple's reputation than any arcane geek's exploit could.
Folks, don't be too hard on yourselves if the challenge of figuring out an appropriate sentence makes your brain go fuzzy: we are, after all, dealing with a new class of criminal in the information age.
Information crimes are new, in that a person is capable of doing it to the entire human race at the same time. Never before has one jerk had such global reach.
So don't compare one spam deletion to one murder. Compare hundreds of millions of spam deletions to one murder.
Now add in the extra carpal tunnel syndrome that happened just because of him. Think of the blood pressure of people aggravated by the nuissance. Think of the servers and gateways that crashed because of him. Think of all the trojans and viruses that rode piggy-back on the spam he sent, with or without his knowing.
I say when your victim pool involves your entire species, when people in every nation on Earth got the displeasure of dealing with your handiwork, that your punishment be more stiffly considered than on the grounds of how severe the crime was to the individual victim.
And unlike MS, it does not have deep enough pockets to fight off all its challengers.
Why would it need to? Linux is owned by each user of Linux. Yes, a Red Hat or two might go down. But trying to vanquish the Linux community with lawsuits will be like trying to exterminate dandelions.
Crimes like piracy of Windows ?. Patent policing ?. More SCO like allegations
Gee, you speak with some intelligence and make a lot of common sense. You cite real world events to prove your point and relay on a firm arguement to make your case instead of childish name-calling. How did you find your way to Slashdot? Are you lost?
This will be the last we have to hear about this. This would be my equivalent of seeing Adolf Hitler stoop to pat a dog on the head on his way to watching the new execution chambers, and the stories ring out all week on the front headlines "Hitler compassionate towards animals!", "The dog's side of the story!", "An interview with the touched child who owns the dog.", "What the dog plans to do in the future.", "What the fleas on the dog think about it.", "Hitler also said to be quite fond of wolves." , "The impact of the life-changing act of kindness, now from the perspective of the tapeworms inside the dog."
Fact is, seven million is what's in the tissue after Bill Gates blows his nose.
But I don't think we'll ever find something that is just "perfect"
And also well said. As for me, I've gotten a slightly different view of programming languages. Instead of dreaming of a perfect all-purpose language, I've learned to focus on the one that's perfect for the job at hand. Including breaking programs down into individual functions and using different languages to handle different parts of the program. Which language is perfect? Only all of them taken together at once!
Thank you! Glad to see both Paul Graham and Lisp getting credit, here!
And to the other replys: Parenthesis, parenthesis, parenthesis is all I ever hear people complaining about Lisp talk about. Name ONE other flaw of Lisp, please? Now think of any other programming languages with just *one* flaw? I *love* parenthesis, they're (and (round) (look like (they're hugging the code))) . Makes me all warm and fuzzy! Too many sharp corners on {}, [], and <> .
But first, *I*, at least, will apologize for pissing everybody off so much. This ain't my usual reception! I really didn't see where all the nasty attitude in the responses was coming from: scanning the remainder of the discussion, many other Slashdotters were expressing similar disgust at the idea of somebody calling for censorship for taste reasons. OTHER people managed to say, "Get this guy! Who's gonna decide what's good and bad, hmm?" and not get called names about it. But 'hookay, whatever holy idol some people have evidentally made of whatsis-hyphenship, I'm sorry to have unwittingly pissed on it.
Now then, here's where I was coming from: define difference between internet and world wide web:
Which I take to mean "web is to internet as window manager is to desktop environment". Yeah, but show me a case of the latter that works without the former!
Next, some prior history of computer-based communications before what we mostly refer to as "The World-Wide Web" (tm):
"Around the same time another change was happening in the SGML community. Bell Atlantic Engineers, in 1987, introduced an online service that featured graphic representations of office documents, in color, exchanged over the Internet. They had two options: employ a simplified generic SGML DTD as their exchange format or use the editorial-based IMI format. They picked the wrong option perhaps one of the top five worst decisions ever made! Another product, designed for optical media publishing, called Guide from Owl, Ltd. introduced a simple four-tag SGML DTD that could be used to interpret any document into their retrieval program. Although neither of these first simplified SGML applications survived, some students at CERN were paying attention, wrote their own simplified tag set, the hyper text markup language, developed a browser and gave it away! It caught on and the worldwide web was born." http://www.media4theworld.com/Papers/Symbolic_logi c_4.htm
At this point, considering that, at the very worst, I've been following a different version of the story from the one other people follow, I say everybody who flamed me about this owes me a beer.
Now, if the claim was "Mr. Berners-Lee was the first to publish a page on the internet using HTML formatting on what later became the World-Wide Web (tm)", I could go, "Ooooooh, THAT first web page!" I mean, of *course* he was the first to use the HTML language he was writing, if for nothing else than to check for bugs! Incidentally, HTML wasn't even HIS first foray into electronic document formatting - that would be Enquire, and when he worked on *that*, he didn't even know the term "hypertext" existed...kind of like how Linus Torvalds unwittingly supplied the GNU movement with the free kernel they needed without ever hearing of GNU. That would explain where my repressed memories of reading documents in something called "hypertext" (which, at the time, I associated with "hypercard") on an 80's-era Mac came from. In any case, to me it's all Ford vs Chevy, Coke vs Pepsi. XML, SHTML, HML, potatoe, pahtahto. ASCII text with funny dinguses in it to tell a program how to display the regular text. A means for graphic representations of office documents, in color, to be exchanged over the Internet. Of which HTML is merely a subset.
As for "The Web"(tm) as opposed to any old web, I guess back when I was a zitty kid with friends named Poindexter, Eugene, and Huey, and we looked at a bunch of teletypes connected together and called it a "web network", turns out that that wasn't such a common expression. What, didn't *anybody* else here subscribe to Telex?
To heck with this. I don't care who started what, anymore. And I *hate* HTML!
No, the claim at the top of the article to which this enlightened thread is appended thereto plainly says exactly what I said it says, no more, no less, in the same English you're talking in now. Even the Wiki article proferred by the other enriched genius identified a slew of other contributers. To say one person "invented the web", by themselves, with no outside contributions, is the same logical absurdity as to credit one individual with inventing government, cooking, or running. But clearly, I've given you words far too long for your vocabulary to have not been exhausted by now, so I'll just have to sign off with "up yours, too, moron!" and hope you weren't too taxed to get this far.
Now to address any OTHER arguments from other Slashdotters:
Yeah, Tim Berners-Lee started HTML. HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language". This was NOT the first time anybody thought of feeding marked text through a program to make it format a certain way for the purposes of facilitating communication. Vannevar Bush did that in 1945. Nor was it the first time the idea was implemented - there's SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language, circa 1970's/1980's. Let's also give a nod to Tex, by Donald Knuth circa 1986, not to mention Unix's troff.
There's a ton more where this came from. I may know most of everything, but I'm not about to keep it all in my head at once, and I'll be durned if I'll go scurrying around looking up the rest of it just cuz some upstart snip hurls a derogatory hack at me, in reaction to my comparing "I published the first web page!" with "I created the internet!" Yeah, sure, and Bill Gates ported BASIC over to his tinker-toy box and WROTE THE FIRST PROGRAM!!! Which is not to compare him to Bill Gates (I save that insult for lower life forms...), but to Al Gore (who DID help facilitate some laws that year that spread the internet a little bit wider.)
But test me further, I'm sure I'll remember some more...
And Sonny, next time save it for the script kiddies. Some of us were "old-timers" before you ever heard of computers. Most especially you can stick your public graffiti (Wiki, Everything I&II, etc.) where the sun don't shine when it comes to citing it as an authorative source; anybody can write it. Granted, you can change the definition of what a "web page" is to include the latest technology, your choice of proprietary system, etc, and claim to have been "first". By the same logic, SCO owns Linux, everybody who's ever created a.gif file owes Unisys a settlement, and Microsoft invented the GUI. But a web page is JUST files on a server. A web site is JUST a server with files that's accessible to other computers via some kind of wire. It gets tricky, here, because the old acoustic modems weren't "wires" as such, at one point, they were rubber cups you set the old-fashioned kind of phone reciever in. And don't get me started on RFC 1149 (proposed in 1990)!
And if ignorance were light bulbs, you'd be General Electric.
some of the most intellectually stimulating and factually sound websites I've found do not show up anywhere near the top of a Google search
True, of course. But I notice the first channel I flip to when I channel-surf is rarely the show I want to watch. Often, I must scrutinize the guide and select the one show which best fits my current viewing needs. 99.99999% of everthing on television is boring, stupid garbage, but I'll put up with the garbage before I'll have somebody making up my mind for me what to watch.
Ditto search engines. Personally, I vary my searches between multiple search engines. What one ignores, the other will feature. But God forbid anybody should come along with my best interests at heart and rearrange the web according to their ideal. Cuz you know who'd fight to get that responsibility? That's right, the Prom King and Queen, and it's nothing but Walmart and the Mall and Top Ten and Brittany Spears viruses after that!
Yeesh, nothing like some Ivory Tower Toff going Huff and Puff about what He Thinks the global communications network should be like. His claim to have "created the first website" strikes a familiar chord - was he waiting right behind Al Gore? Or was that the motivation for Al Gore to create the internet? As a programmer would say, "Race condition!"
Uh, yeah, sure, we'll scrape everything but cricket scores and your favorite girly site off the net right away, Mr. Hyphenated-Last-Name.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, yeah? Tell me, Windows loyalists, did you ever get Outlook Express to understand the concept of multiple email accounts and different stationary/spam filters for each? Figure out how to stop Windows from dumping icons all over the screen? Get rid of the MS Network and Network Neighborhood because you never use it? Get Windows to recognise your new graphics card without a struggle? Stop Real Player from firing up at startup and immediately demanding your whole machine's resources? Completely remove software you uninstall, without having to go in and manually delete folders? Confess to you where it hides ALL the cookies and let you clean them ALL out? Not show the taskbar?
Yes, I'm sure everybody's done some of what's on this list... but you weren't born knowing how? Right? You had to...guess what?...READ some DOCUMENTATION to learn how to make it do what you want! After all, if Windows is just SO-O-O-O silly easy, why were manuals written about it "for Dummies" flying off the bookstore shelves from 1985 to 1995 or so? Why would people need things simplified to the "Dummies" level if it were as simple as could be, already?
Linux comes with it's own "for Dummies" docs, free. Man pages, info pages, html docbooks, et cettera ad infinitum. Just have a gander through /usr/share/doc and you learn everything in Linux just like the "for Dummies" books in Windows!
I get by without using Windows at all. So does my entire household. Thousands of other people all over the world get by just fine without using Windows at all. Before there was a Windows, (1985, just twenty short years ago, people, not that long to remember if you try!), EVERYBODY who used a computer AT ALL got along fine without any Windows. Tell me, folks, if Windows is so necessary to the function of a computer, how do you think computers were ever invented before Bill Gates was born? (They were too! Google Charles Babbage!)
Speaking as one who has used Macintosh, Windows, and Linux, we have three machines in this household running Linux 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Collectively together, we program, design graphics, chat in Yahoo, surf the web, play Flash animations, watch Real Player movies, play games, manage office documents and business records, and use modern devices such as laser printers, USB keychain drives, and CD/DVD burners. All on Linux. All the time. And I must say, even I (geekiest of the lot) find little reason to resort to a command line anymore.
I'm just dying to know what arcane task needs *just Windows* to be executed anymore. Unless it's specifically coded to stop dead and balk if it doesn't find Windows running and it won't co-operate with WINE and a feasible alternative program doesn't exist... ever seen the ad for the company that will *custom-make* a special Linux version of any Windows program you come to them with? I've seen it running in the Google ads on this very site!
Games...yes, we had a box of Windows-only games I bought back when I was dumb enough to settle for that. True, they will not run in Linux. Instead, thousands of games are now being made for Linux, which you can DOWNLOAD FOR FREE instead of shelling out $40-60 dollars for them. At that rate, we can play a new game every week, now, instead of playing one game all month until we're sick of it because we feel like fools if we don't get our money's worth out of it. The box of Windows games ended up going 50-cents apiece at a yard sale. The people getting them shrugged and made noises about how they were keeping Windows 95/98 running at home because they weren't about to shell out for the upgrade. So I offer them a home-burned Knoppix CD and just say "Try this when you get sick of the games."
But hey, I'm standing by for the usual howls and screams and flames of indignation I usually get when I say this kind of thing in this kind of thread. How dare I speak the truth! Especially where a paid-M$-shill has an account.
Good luck!
It is certainly percieved to be so, but there's this little device: http://cranialcavity.net/archives/000053.html /. tech news missed this? Or did they?
I wonder how
Wintendo!
Smirking, crouching, and fleeing...
Yep, the world's just one big ol' crock o' doo-doo, ain't it? Makes you just wanna put on Roger Whittaker's "Make The World Go Away" and sob into a tea-towel...
*Ahem*, when everybody's done screaming "The Comfy Chair!?!?!" in varying hammy dramatic tones, let us pause and consider: This is being done to solve a very severe problem. Anybody at all can use the name Linux for any purpose at all, and not even have anything to do with software! If you've had the experience of searching for a Linux-related frob, only to have a porn-page pop up titled: "Hot College Linux Girls", you get my drift. Free stuff will stay free...and this will ensure that nobody can use corporate clout to take our free name away from us. I think.
An' be careful lobbin' them grenades around these penguins! They'se timid creatures that spook easy!
One presumes they'd have a method for recognizing chips from other casinos as well. Being a veteran of a few well-oiled downtown crawls myself, I can attest that your pockets are likely to accumulate all manner of chips, tokens, tickets, and coins from one stop to another.
I wouldn't dream of holding it against Apple for protecting what they have. Let them build their products so they are tamper-proof! That isn't what this is. This is the sharing of free knowledge (I figured out how to do something, here's how:). This is the kind of knowledge we Linux geeks talk about when we say, "Information wants to be free".
Imagine that you maintain a fence. One day, you discover a hole in it. Your solution is to stand by the hole and shoot everybody who comes by and points and tells others that there's a hole in the fence.
I love Apple from way back, though I prefer Linux. At least with a Mac product, I can tell that I'd actually GET SOMETHING for my money. But the occasional move like this is going to work against Apple in the long run. It smells too much like litigation first, engineering last. We've seen many a tech company fall down that slippery slope before.
As for me, if Apple has some idle lawyers standing around, how about siccing them on those "Free Ipod" ads? Those things are doing 100 times damage to Apple's reputation than any arcane geek's exploit could.
to ban all commercial sports...
Information crimes are new, in that a person is capable of doing it to the entire human race at the same time. Never before has one jerk had such global reach.
So don't compare one spam deletion to one murder. Compare hundreds of millions of spam deletions to one murder.
Now add in the extra carpal tunnel syndrome that happened just because of him. Think of the blood pressure of people aggravated by the nuissance. Think of the servers and gateways that crashed because of him. Think of all the trojans and viruses that rode piggy-back on the spam he sent, with or without his knowing.
I say when your victim pool involves your entire species, when people in every nation on Earth got the displeasure of dealing with your handiwork, that your punishment be more stiffly considered than on the grounds of how severe the crime was to the individual victim.
Where's a Russian with a club when you need one?
Why would it need to? Linux is owned by each user of Linux. Yes, a Red Hat or two might go down. But trying to vanquish the Linux community with lawsuits will be like trying to exterminate dandelions.
I just commented to my wife, "Microsoft is trying to patent numbers now." Her response: "I hope Bill Gates doesn't have any children."
Gee, you speak with some intelligence and make a lot of common sense. You cite real world events to prove your point and relay on a firm arguement to make your case instead of childish name-calling. How did you find your way to Slashdot? Are you lost?
Fact is, seven million is what's in the tissue after Bill Gates blows his nose.
And also well said. As for me, I've gotten a slightly different view of programming languages. Instead of dreaming of a perfect all-purpose language, I've learned to focus on the one that's perfect for the job at hand. Including breaking programs down into individual functions and using different languages to handle different parts of the program. Which language is perfect? Only all of them taken together at once!
And to the other replys: Parenthesis, parenthesis, parenthesis is all I ever hear people complaining about Lisp talk about. Name ONE other flaw of Lisp, please? Now think of any other programming languages with just *one* flaw? I *love* parenthesis, they're (and (round) (look like (they're hugging the code))) . Makes me all warm and fuzzy! Too many sharp corners on {}, [], and <> .
I'll say it for you: "Yes, it should happen!" I might as well, I have to keep up my scandalous reputation.
Now then, here's where I was coming from: define difference between internet and world wide web:
"The World Wide Web, or simply Web, is a way of accessing information over the medium of the Internet. It is an information-sharing model that is built on top of the Internet."/ Web_vs_Internet.asp
http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002
Which I take to mean "web is to internet as window manager is to desktop environment". Yeah, but show me a case of the latter that works without the former!
Next, some prior history of computer-based communications before what we mostly refer to as "The World-Wide Web" (tm):
"Around the same time another change was happening in the SGML community. Bell Atlantic Engineers, in 1987, introduced an online service that featured graphic representations of office documents, in color, exchanged over the Internet. They had two options: employ a simplified generic SGML DTD as their exchange format or use the editorial-based IMI format. They picked the wrong option perhaps one of the top five worst decisions ever made! Another product, designed for optical media publishing, called Guide from Owl, Ltd. introduced a simple four-tag SGML DTD that could be used to interpret any document into their retrieval program. Although neither of these first simplified SGML applications survived, some students at CERN were paying attention, wrote their own simplified tag set, the hyper text markup language, developed a browser and gave it away! It caught on and the worldwide web was born."i c_4.htm
http://www.media4theworld.com/Papers/Symbolic_log
At this point, considering that, at the very worst, I've been following a different version of the story from the one other people follow, I say everybody who flamed me about this owes me a beer.
Now, if the claim was "Mr. Berners-Lee was the first to publish a page on the internet using HTML formatting on what later became the World-Wide Web (tm)", I could go, "Ooooooh, THAT first web page!" I mean, of *course* he was the first to use the HTML language he was writing, if for nothing else than to check for bugs! Incidentally, HTML wasn't even HIS first foray into electronic document formatting - that would be Enquire, and when he worked on *that*, he didn't even know the term "hypertext" existed...kind of like how Linus Torvalds unwittingly supplied the GNU movement with the free kernel they needed without ever hearing of GNU. That would explain where my repressed memories of reading documents in something called "hypertext" (which, at the time, I associated with "hypercard") on an 80's-era Mac came from. In any case, to me it's all Ford vs Chevy, Coke vs Pepsi. XML, SHTML, HML, potatoe, pahtahto. ASCII text with funny dinguses in it to tell a program how to display the regular text. A means for graphic representations of office documents, in color, to be exchanged over the Internet. Of which HTML is merely a subset.
As for "The Web"(tm) as opposed to any old web, I guess back when I was a zitty kid with friends named Poindexter, Eugene, and Huey, and we looked at a bunch of teletypes connected together and called it a "web network", turns out that that wasn't such a common expression. What, didn't *anybody* else here subscribe to Telex?
To heck with this. I don't care who started what, anymore. And I *hate* HTML!
No, the claim at the top of the article to which this enlightened thread is appended thereto plainly says exactly what I said it says, no more, no less, in the same English you're talking in now. Even the Wiki article proferred by the other enriched genius identified a slew of other contributers. To say one person "invented the web", by themselves, with no outside contributions, is the same logical absurdity as to credit one individual with inventing government, cooking, or running. But clearly, I've given you words far too long for your vocabulary to have not been exhausted by now, so I'll just have to sign off with "up yours, too, moron!" and hope you weren't too taxed to get this far.
Yeah, Tim Berners-Lee started HTML. HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language". This was NOT the first time anybody thought of feeding marked text through a program to make it format a certain way for the purposes of facilitating communication. Vannevar Bush did that in 1945. Nor was it the first time the idea was implemented - there's SGML Standard Generalized Markup Language, circa 1970's/1980's. Let's also give a nod to Tex, by Donald Knuth circa 1986, not to mention Unix's troff.
There's a ton more where this came from. I may know most of everything, but I'm not about to keep it all in my head at once, and I'll be durned if I'll go scurrying around looking up the rest of it just cuz some upstart snip hurls a derogatory hack at me, in reaction to my comparing "I published the first web page!" with "I created the internet!" Yeah, sure, and Bill Gates ported BASIC over to his tinker-toy box and WROTE THE FIRST PROGRAM!!! Which is not to compare him to Bill Gates (I save that insult for lower life forms...), but to Al Gore (who DID help facilitate some laws that year that spread the internet a little bit wider.)
But test me further, I'm sure I'll remember some more...
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml
here:
http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/19991215.html
and here:
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_program.html?progr
Note that this jargon file entry refers to internet users as "old-timers" a mere two years later in 1993:t hat-never-ended.html
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-
And Sonny, next time save it for the script kiddies. Some of us were "old-timers" before you ever heard of computers. Most especially you can stick your public graffiti (Wiki, Everything I&II, etc.) where the sun don't shine when it comes to citing it as an authorative source; anybody can write it. Granted, you can change the definition of what a "web page" is to include the latest technology, your choice of proprietary system, etc, and claim to have been "first". By the same logic, SCO owns Linux, everybody who's ever created a .gif file owes Unisys a settlement, and Microsoft invented the GUI. But a web page is JUST files on a server. A web site is JUST a server with files that's accessible to other computers via some kind of wire. It gets tricky, here, because the old acoustic modems weren't "wires" as such, at one point, they were rubber cups you set the old-fashioned kind of phone reciever in. And don't get me started on RFC 1149 (proposed in 1990)!
And if ignorance were light bulbs, you'd be General Electric.
True, of course. But I notice the first channel I flip to when I channel-surf is rarely the show I want to watch. Often, I must scrutinize the guide and select the one show which best fits my current viewing needs. 99.99999% of everthing on television is boring, stupid garbage, but I'll put up with the garbage before I'll have somebody making up my mind for me what to watch.
Ditto search engines. Personally, I vary my searches between multiple search engines. What one ignores, the other will feature. But God forbid anybody should come along with my best interests at heart and rearrange the web according to their ideal. Cuz you know who'd fight to get that responsibility? That's right, the Prom King and Queen, and it's nothing but Walmart and the Mall and Top Ten and Brittany Spears viruses after that!
Uh, yeah, sure, we'll scrape everything but cricket scores and your favorite girly site off the net right away, Mr. Hyphenated-Last-Name.