I don't know the actual etymology for the idiom, but I would guess those people talking about teapots are on the right track
The saying makes the most sense if you are talking about two items which are fundamentally the same beyond just color, and where referencing the color is a witty way of highlighting just one of their many similarities.
I can guarantee you that Kettle Chips are not cooked in a kettle with a spout. And I assume that in the days where this saying comes from, most common people did not have a dedicated teapot, but instead had something far more multipurpose. You can imagine someone thinking that having one specially styled version of the item was superior to the other, and someone else laughing it off as ridiculous. And as another poster mentioned above, they both ended up covered in soot and dented with use.
So is it referencing two vessels with handles and a spout, or is it referencing two plain, largeish vessels with sides higher than a pan for the purpose of heating and simmering liquids?
Who knows. Maybe the kicker is that it works in either example.
I didn't want to go there but there it is. Mostly the "magic" is in the UI presented to the user and in the optional (but highly necessary) use of some form of cloud service, whether purchased as such or just simply running your own webserver.
Are you really that unimaginative or is it just about your ego needing to be right on/.?
I feel ridiculous having to explain the concept. But here you go:
iTunes is a specialized browser. All of that shit you see is just a web page, nothing more. In fact, it's a source of frustration to me that Apple forces us to view iTunes crap in a specialized app instead of letting us use a browser, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
Now apply the same "specialty browser" concept to blogging, microblogging, picture sharing, and news browsing all in one place. An easy to use interface that is your nerve center for social networking. Let's call it Me 2, to inject a little humor.
Except instead of being one single site like iTunes is, Me2 is capable of just p2p networking with other people who all have nodes of their own... and in this case, to make it more accessible to everyone, it will allow you to follow people who have Me2 compliant sites even if not running on Me2 itself.
Everything you want to do in Me2 is on your own computer, it interfaces and syncs with your songs, your pictures, your IM, your Address Book, your own blog and microblog. It provides feeds of these things to people that want to follow you, either on Me2 or through standard RSS on a standard browser. In turn, you follow others, also through RSS, except who needs an archaic term like RSS? You just follow shit you want to follow and boom, there it is in a neat little browseable dashboard complete with Coverflow (tm) and other nice eye candy. And hey, why not throw Ping in there while we're at it?
Me2 is based on open standards so adoption is fast and doesn't require a Mac. A browser will do. Surely Apple will sweeten the pot to make Me2 attractive for download on a PC, but still, you will be ok using a browser.
Having it run on your computer will make it possible to have small agents that alert you to things without needing a browser. It will also make it easier to maintain a strong grip on your privacy preferences and be able to treat different groups in your Address Book with different social networking settings and you can reveal some stuff to some groups and not others.
All of that is nothing more than CMS on steroids. Today, a geek can achieve that through some hard work on their own. The missing element is the mass adoption of some form of "portal" that allows you to go to one place to see all your updates (like you do with Facebook) instead of having to visit individual pages. But RSS readers are evolving into that very thing.
So will Facebook die? Count on it because of their shitting on privacy, and count on it because everyone will ultimately want to manage their own thing, set their own custom settings and themes, have widgets, etc.... and count on it because TFA is basically right, Facebook is a whimsical fashion that cannot last precisely because it suffers from being just the latest fad.
Will Me2 also become just a fad? Possibly, unless it evolves with people and technology. Which knowing Apple it would do.
Is Apple actually going to create Me2? Maybe not. They've missed the mark lots of times in the past. But the market is there, someone will do it, whether by intentional design or by eventual organic evolution.
It's as easy as it's already installed in your Apple OS or Google browser/OS tools. It's as easy as selecting people from your address book to whom you automatically subscribe to "rss-type" feeds which appear in your dashboard. It's as easy as making it support http so that anyone with a browser and a web server can accomplish the same thing but the software sold by Apple just makes it easy and default.
There's nothing easy about registering for Facebook for that matter, or changing your info once it's there.
In a post below, I address the ease-of-use factor, which is certainly why Facebook remains more popular today than personal CMS.
However, my terse reply above was aimed squarely at the AC Slashdot poster... someone who it's pretty safe to assume would be comfortable configuring a personal CMS anywhere from blogger to wordpress or drupal or even self-rolled (the person is on Slashdot after all)...
It's only a matter of time before someone releases a personal cms that is easier to use than facebook, requires no visiting of websites or ad-riddled pages, which networks you automatically with other friends using the same or similar competing cms, which allows you to microblog instead of relying on centralizes twitter and which also gives you, the user, your own customizable "web portal" news and friend updates aggregation dashboard of your own -- instead of relying on something like yahoo.com
This will come form both the OSS movement and from someone like Apple or Google.
I think in this case, when the ring is static, each individual object is a unique entity. Changes matter.
When the ring is in motion, each individual object becomes part of the whole. It is now one ring and we ignore changes occuring to the ring.
This is entirely sensible because when an animal is in motion, we don't care about the muscles rippling, or the feathers ruffling, or the fur shimmering, or the shadows from trees dancing on it. Our survival depends on being able to watch the animal itself as a single unit. So we are hard wired to ignore the micro changes to a single object.
When the ring moves, all the tiny objects join to become a single ring we must track. When it's not moving, we see they are separate objects.
Location is highly problematic not just because DNS is an unreliable indicator of location, and not just because location is really practically meaningless on the internet... but because even if it were reliable and meaningful, locations have a bad way of suffering from demand overload of resources (internet or otherwise) due to regional events (sporting events, holiday celebrations, natural disasters, weather patterns, etc).
I expect the future will bring even more distrubted/decentralized access by way of p2p connectivity and discovery. By then, using an ip or dns server to determine resource allocation will be totally silly.
The system needs to be self-adapting and enable a near-real-time load re-distribution based on optimizing demand vs measured latency every so often. New requests should habitually be routed to servers with the lowest activity.
FWIW, there are often times when I'd rather simply be refused access until a decent node is available as opposed to put up with a node that can't keep up. It's worse with Apple TV because once you start streaming, the clock is ticking.
It was mostly a rhetorical question. Knowing Apple, they would go by serial number instead. Or they could go by iTunes account.
The point being: presumed location is not a good way to load balance. Balance your load based on either random distribution, or better yet, planned distribution.
The easiest and cheapest way (not the best) to do this is simply give each new AppleTV owner an ID and assign them to a pool and make sure all your pools are ideally populated.
They are doing it wrong in the sense that this is only a historically decent way of determining location and distributing load accordingly.
As we move forward, we will become far less likely to rely on our ISPs for such things. Using google DNS or OpenDNS has become a much bigger deal than just a handful of geek elites and is becoming widespread.
Count on it gaining even more traction with the general public the more the ISPs try to shape our packets.
And finally, there's no reason to expect that we will be still using the same method to resolve addresses forever. More and more of the internet is moving toward distributed/decentralized/p2p service and the adoption of mobile devices will probably accellerate that process.
Sure, Akamai had a neat idea at first, but they need to work it out with services like OpenDNS for a more reliable, forward-looking solution.
Frankly, any process that makes assumptions is flawed. Sometimes it's necessary, but when the pitfalls become revealed, the correct response is NEVER "oh, but the assumptions are good, the people are just doing it wrong and violating the assumptions"... the correct response is "look like we have to change our assumptions. we have new information. let's find a better way to do this."
But it seems like the difficulty of reliably translating everything that's possible to create with Flash into an HTML 5 equivalent would be prohibitive. For simple things like showing movies, it's a no-brainer. But try to make a flash game into HTML 5 and things are going to get hairy. Basically, the developers that rely on Flash and love it will be upset because HTML5 will do things differently. And the people who don't know about Flash but like HTML 5 won't even want to bother with learning the auth environment UI.
But if they could pull it off, then why not. It would basically be the Dreamweaver for web animation.
Interesting that you say "retroactively" since from their perspective, there's no retroactive. It's just something you agreed to when you clicked the button upon install.
If there is any contract to be agreed to when purchasing or licensing a good, it should be signed and understood prior to exchanging money for the good.
I'm not saying that is the law, only that it should be the law. It should basically be illegal to enter into a contract using a mouse-click. All contracts should require person-person interaction with a full discussion of the contract. I don't care how inconvenient and silly it is. If it's worth having a signed contract then it worth spending the time to discuss and explain it. If your customer gets angry and leaves because you want to waste 20 minutes explaining this crap to him, that's your problem. Get rid of the license in that case.
If the seller fails to make the full nature of the contract clear to the purchaser prior to taking his money, then he should be liable to be sued for at least three times the price of the good being sold in addition to being on the hook for triple damages to the consumer should he get sued by the publisher plus agreeing to take the product back.
Once you do that, you'll see that no retail outlet is going to want to spend 20 minutes per customer per title they buy just to make sure the license conditions are understood and accepted and signed in triplicate. That should put an end to this nonsense.
And even better if you can convince the powers that be to install it on a dedicated and backed up machine for the purposes of maintaining a failsafe, centralized, repository of work with rollback histories, etc. You can be the hero of the day for implementing this system.
While I'm in favor of the same reform you are, your argument can easily be twisted to support the status quo. Congress can argue that they were convinced that extending copyright duration incentivized the sort of production that has established hollywood, the record labels, and book publishers; they can say the sheer riches these companies and individuals have amassed is proof that progress in these areas has been promoted and has succeeded. Some could argue that much of the arts we have today would not exist were there not such a huge monetary draw.
As for Mozart, I think a some might argue that he SHOULD have benefitted more than he did.
Our position is better defended by clarifying the benefit to society that well-adjusted copyright terms would offer, by illustrating the perverse cancerous growth of these publishing industries that has taken place under copyright's inflated terms, by demonstrating the productive stagnation in OTHER areas that has occurred as a result of descendants leeching off some author's famous work, or as a result of some poor artists who think they have made it when they release a hit record having grown up with no other goals or vision, and ultimately collapse into a life of mediocrity or poverty accelerated by artists' natural tendency for debauchery.
The question one must address is not simply whether we need to "promote the progress..." but WHY those words were written to begin with. Why did they want to promote progress? Surely it was not to create a whole new class of copyright barons and sharecropper artists who yearn to join the ranks of the barons and occasionally get there like court jesters. Surely it was not to promote it to the point that there is a stranglehold on creative works that prevents society from benefitting from them to their fullest. Because the point of promoting the progress is of course to bring a benefit to our society. To make things better across the board and allow us all the opportunity to benefit both as consumers and reusers of content AND creators.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know the actual etymology for the idiom, but I would guess those people talking about teapots are on the right track
The saying makes the most sense if you are talking about two items which are fundamentally the same beyond just color, and where referencing the color is a witty way of highlighting just one of their many similarities.
I can guarantee you that Kettle Chips are not cooked in a kettle with a spout. And I assume that in the days where this saying comes from, most common people did not have a dedicated teapot, but instead had something far more multipurpose. You can imagine someone thinking that having one specially styled version of the item was superior to the other, and someone else laughing it off as ridiculous. And as another poster mentioned above, they both ended up covered in soot and dented with use.
So is it referencing two vessels with handles and a spout, or is it referencing two plain, largeish vessels with sides higher than a pan for the purpose of heating and simmering liquids?
Who knows. Maybe the kicker is that it works in either example.
Lol. Basically.
I didn't want to go there but there it is. Mostly the "magic" is in the UI presented to the user and in the optional (but highly necessary) use of some form of cloud service, whether purchased as such or just simply running your own webserver.
Are you really that unimaginative or is it just about your ego needing to be right on /.?
I feel ridiculous having to explain the concept. But here you go:
iTunes is a specialized browser. All of that shit you see is just a web page, nothing more. In fact, it's a source of frustration to me that Apple forces us to view iTunes crap in a specialized app instead of letting us use a browser, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
Now apply the same "specialty browser" concept to blogging, microblogging, picture sharing, and news browsing all in one place. An easy to use interface that is your nerve center for social networking. Let's call it Me 2, to inject a little humor.
Except instead of being one single site like iTunes is, Me2 is capable of just p2p networking with other people who all have nodes of their own... and in this case, to make it more accessible to everyone, it will allow you to follow people who have Me2 compliant sites even if not running on Me2 itself.
Everything you want to do in Me2 is on your own computer, it interfaces and syncs with your songs, your pictures, your IM, your Address Book, your own blog and microblog. It provides feeds of these things to people that want to follow you, either on Me2 or through standard RSS on a standard browser. In turn, you follow others, also through RSS, except who needs an archaic term like RSS? You just follow shit you want to follow and boom, there it is in a neat little browseable dashboard complete with Coverflow (tm) and other nice eye candy. And hey, why not throw Ping in there while we're at it?
Me2 is based on open standards so adoption is fast and doesn't require a Mac. A browser will do. Surely Apple will sweeten the pot to make Me2 attractive for download on a PC, but still, you will be ok using a browser.
Having it run on your computer will make it possible to have small agents that alert you to things without needing a browser. It will also make it easier to maintain a strong grip on your privacy preferences and be able to treat different groups in your Address Book with different social networking settings and you can reveal some stuff to some groups and not others.
All of that is nothing more than CMS on steroids. Today, a geek can achieve that through some hard work on their own. The missing element is the mass adoption of some form of "portal" that allows you to go to one place to see all your updates (like you do with Facebook) instead of having to visit individual pages. But RSS readers are evolving into that very thing.
So will Facebook die? Count on it because of their shitting on privacy, and count on it because everyone will ultimately want to manage their own thing, set their own custom settings and themes, have widgets, etc.... and count on it because TFA is basically right, Facebook is a whimsical fashion that cannot last precisely because it suffers from being just the latest fad.
Will Me2 also become just a fad? Possibly, unless it evolves with people and technology. Which knowing Apple it would do.
Is Apple actually going to create Me2? Maybe not. They've missed the mark lots of times in the past. But the market is there, someone will do it, whether by intentional design or by eventual organic evolution.
It's as easy as it's already installed in your Apple OS or Google browser/OS tools. It's as easy as selecting people from your address book to whom you automatically subscribe to "rss-type" feeds which appear in your dashboard. It's as easy as making it support http so that anyone with a browser and a web server can accomplish the same thing but the software sold by Apple just makes it easy and default.
There's nothing easy about registering for Facebook for that matter, or changing your info once it's there.
In a post below, I address the ease-of-use factor, which is certainly why Facebook remains more popular today than personal CMS.
However, my terse reply above was aimed squarely at the AC Slashdot poster... someone who it's pretty safe to assume would be comfortable configuring a personal CMS anywhere from blogger to wordpress or drupal or even self-rolled (the person is on Slashdot after all)...
It's only a matter of time before someone releases a personal cms that is easier to use than facebook, requires no visiting of websites or ad-riddled pages, which networks you automatically with other friends using the same or similar competing cms, which allows you to microblog instead of relying on centralizes twitter and which also gives you, the user, your own customizable "web portal" news and friend updates aggregation dashboard of your own -- instead of relying on something like yahoo.com
This will come form both the OSS movement and from someone like Apple or Google.
Facebook as-is, is doomed. So is Twitter.
A personal CMS does the same.
I think in this case, when the ring is static, each individual object is a unique entity. Changes matter.
When the ring is in motion, each individual object becomes part of the whole. It is now one ring and we ignore changes occuring to the ring.
This is entirely sensible because when an animal is in motion, we don't care about the muscles rippling, or the feathers ruffling, or the fur shimmering, or the shadows from trees dancing on it. Our survival depends on being able to watch the animal itself as a single unit. So we are hard wired to ignore the micro changes to a single object.
When the ring moves, all the tiny objects join to become a single ring we must track. When it's not moving, we see they are separate objects.
We are 100% in agreement.
Location is highly problematic not just because DNS is an unreliable indicator of location, and not just because location is really practically meaningless on the internet... but because even if it were reliable and meaningful, locations have a bad way of suffering from demand overload of resources (internet or otherwise) due to regional events (sporting events, holiday celebrations, natural disasters, weather patterns, etc).
I expect the future will bring even more distrubted/decentralized access by way of p2p connectivity and discovery. By then, using an ip or dns server to determine resource allocation will be totally silly.
The system needs to be self-adapting and enable a near-real-time load re-distribution based on optimizing demand vs measured latency every so often. New requests should habitually be routed to servers with the lowest activity.
FWIW, there are often times when I'd rather simply be refused access until a decent node is available as opposed to put up with a node that can't keep up. It's worse with Apple TV because once you start streaming, the clock is ticking.
It was mostly a rhetorical question. Knowing Apple, they would go by serial number instead. Or they could go by iTunes account.
The point being: presumed location is not a good way to load balance. Balance your load based on either random distribution, or better yet, planned distribution.
The easiest and cheapest way (not the best) to do this is simply give each new AppleTV owner an ID and assign them to a pool and make sure all your pools are ideally populated.
Why not just assign each Apple TV mac address to a download pool?
They are doing it wrong in the sense that this is only a historically decent way of determining location and distributing load accordingly.
As we move forward, we will become far less likely to rely on our ISPs for such things. Using google DNS or OpenDNS has become a much bigger deal than just a handful of geek elites and is becoming widespread.
Count on it gaining even more traction with the general public the more the ISPs try to shape our packets.
And finally, there's no reason to expect that we will be still using the same method to resolve addresses forever. More and more of the internet is moving toward distributed/decentralized/p2p service and the adoption of mobile devices will probably accellerate that process.
Sure, Akamai had a neat idea at first, but they need to work it out with services like OpenDNS for a more reliable, forward-looking solution.
Frankly, any process that makes assumptions is flawed. Sometimes it's necessary, but when the pitfalls become revealed, the correct response is NEVER "oh, but the assumptions are good, the people are just doing it wrong and violating the assumptions"... the correct response is "look like we have to change our assumptions. we have new information. let's find a better way to do this."
Where's the idiocracy tag when you need it?
Yes, that thought crossed my mind as well.
But it seems like the difficulty of reliably translating everything that's possible to create with Flash into an HTML 5 equivalent would be prohibitive. For simple things like showing movies, it's a no-brainer. But try to make a flash game into HTML 5 and things are going to get hairy. Basically, the developers that rely on Flash and love it will be upset because HTML5 will do things differently. And the people who don't know about Flash but like HTML 5 won't even want to bother with learning the auth environment UI.
But if they could pull it off, then why not. It would basically be the Dreamweaver for web animation.
No, I wanted a converter, as a user. So that I don't need to have flash installed.
As a developer, I don't give a crap. I don't bother with Flash period.
It's all moot anyway because it was more of a joke than a serious question. Of course Adobe won't release a Flash2HTML5 converter.
Where can I get the opposite?
If the user doesn't have Flash, it translate the content and plays HTML 5 content.
Seems to me THAT'S what would actually bring value to the consumer.
Interesting that you say "retroactively" since from their perspective, there's no retroactive. It's just something you agreed to when you clicked the button upon install.
If there is any contract to be agreed to when purchasing or licensing a good, it should be signed and understood prior to exchanging money for the good.
I'm not saying that is the law, only that it should be the law. It should basically be illegal to enter into a contract using a mouse-click. All contracts should require person-person interaction with a full discussion of the contract. I don't care how inconvenient and silly it is. If it's worth having a signed contract then it worth spending the time to discuss and explain it. If your customer gets angry and leaves because you want to waste 20 minutes explaining this crap to him, that's your problem. Get rid of the license in that case.
If the seller fails to make the full nature of the contract clear to the purchaser prior to taking his money, then he should be liable to be sued for at least three times the price of the good being sold in addition to being on the hook for triple damages to the consumer should he get sued by the publisher plus agreeing to take the product back.
Once you do that, you'll see that no retail outlet is going to want to spend 20 minutes per customer per title they buy just to make sure the license conditions are understood and accepted and signed in triplicate. That should put an end to this nonsense.
Flamebait????
This guy is right on the money. It's not necessarily provable fact, and it's a broad brush, but there's much wisdom and merit within his hypothesis.
I'm with TheKidWho on this one ---another +5
well said #765543!
It looks like Wired and several other periodicals may end up getting brought into court on this case to provide testimony.
This is turning into a big story for the media.
Amen. This is the best solution.
And even better if you can convince the powers that be to install it on a dedicated and backed up machine for the purposes of maintaining a failsafe, centralized, repository of work with rollback histories, etc. You can be the hero of the day for implementing this system.
MeetTheNewBoss should be a tag on here already
Funny thing about a cataclysmic asteroid impact is that you're sure not to miss a single iota of it
brilliant!
While I'm in favor of the same reform you are, your argument can easily be twisted to support the status quo. Congress can argue that they were convinced that extending copyright duration incentivized the sort of production that has established hollywood, the record labels, and book publishers; they can say the sheer riches these companies and individuals have amassed is proof that progress in these areas has been promoted and has succeeded. Some could argue that much of the arts we have today would not exist were there not such a huge monetary draw.
As for Mozart, I think a some might argue that he SHOULD have benefitted more than he did.
Our position is better defended by clarifying the benefit to society that well-adjusted copyright terms would offer, by illustrating the perverse cancerous growth of these publishing industries that has taken place under copyright's inflated terms, by demonstrating the productive stagnation in OTHER areas that has occurred as a result of descendants leeching off some author's famous work, or as a result of some poor artists who think they have made it when they release a hit record having grown up with no other goals or vision, and ultimately collapse into a life of mediocrity or poverty accelerated by artists' natural tendency for debauchery.
The question one must address is not simply whether we need to "promote the progress..." but WHY those words were written to begin with. Why did they want to promote progress? Surely it was not to create a whole new class of copyright barons and sharecropper artists who yearn to join the ranks of the barons and occasionally get there like court jesters. Surely it was not to promote it to the point that there is a stranglehold on creative works that prevents society from benefitting from them to their fullest. Because the point of promoting the progress is of course to bring a benefit to our society. To make things better across the board and allow us all the opportunity to benefit both as consumers and reusers of content AND creators.