Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:OMFG Reagan was right? (Score 2) 861

no, he wasn't. because until one of these systems gets to 100% (and by 100%, I mean 100%) then any strategist would tell you the natural reaction would simply be to lob more nukes. it actually results in INCREASED proliferation of nuclear weapons, and makes the world a less safe place.

and if one of them does get to 100%, they'll do what the russians threatened to do over the most recent european missile defence shield — just build missiles that the systems can't get a fix on: http://rense.com/general69/tiddosdzdd27makes.htm

Patents

Submission + - Who cares if Samsung copied Apple (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: "The Harvard Business Review is running an article that's questioning the very premise of the Apple v Samsung case. From the article: "It isn't the first time Apple has been involved in a high-stakes "copying" court case. If you go back to the mid-1990s, there was their famous "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft. Apple's case there was eerily similar to the one they're running today: "we innovated in creating the graphical user interface; Microsoft copied us; if our competitors simply copy us, it's impossible for us to keep innovating." Apple ended up losing the case. But it's what happened next that's really fascinating. Apple didn't stop innovating at all.""

Comment here we go again (Score 5, Insightful) 713

the quintessential disrupted producer, complaining about how the world is not conforming to the way they want it to be, or worse yet, the way the world "should" be.

I'm sure the exact same essay was written somewhere upon the development of the phonograph. "but how will we get paid if they can play back our music a thousand times once it has been recorded?" probably the same argument, too, by playhouse actors when recording movies came along.

the artists/actors might not like it, but the development of technology drives down the price, massively opens the market up, and, if they're smart, allows them to make more money than their predecessors could ever have dreamed of.

writing letters complaining about how people are not paying enough to you is just so 1842.

The Internet

Submission + - Harvard Business Review comes out against SOPA (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: "The Harvard Business Review has come out with an article extremely critical of SOPA. As opposed to a battle of "content" vs "technology", they are characterizing it as a battle of "giants" vs "innovators". From the article: "If you take a look at many of the largest backers of SOPA and PIPA — the Business of Software Alliance, Comcast, Electronic Arts, Ford, L'Oreal, Scholastic, Sony, Disney — you'll see that they represent a wide range of businesses. Some are technology companies, some are content companies, some are historic innovators, and some are not. But one characteristic is the same across all of SOPA's supporters — they all have an interest in preserving the status quo. If there is meaningful innovation by startups in content creation and delivery, the supporters of SOPA and PIPA are poised to lose.""
Apple

Submission + - Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator's Dilemma (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: With yesterday's release of the Steve Jobs biography, a raft of interesting information has come to light — including Jobs' favorite books. There's one book there listed as "profoundly moving" Jobs — the Innovator's Dilemma by innovation Professor Clayton Christensen. The Dilemma explains how in the pursuit of profit, good managers leave their companies open to disruption. There's a fascinating article over at the Harvard Business Review that explains how disruption works, and how Jobs managed to solve the dilemma by focusing Apple on products rather than profit.
Google

Submission + - Jobs wanted to destroy Android (google.com) 5

hype7 writes: "It's clear that Steve Jobs didn't pull any punches from the interviews for his forthcoming biography. In the latest release from the book, hosted over at AP: "Isaacson wrote that Jobs was livid in January 2010 when HTC introduced an Android phone that boasted many of the popular features of the iPhone. Apple sued, and Jobs told Isaacson in an expletive-laced rant that Google's actions amounted to "grand theft."
In a subsequent meeting with Schmidt at a Palo Alto, Calif., cafe, Jobs told Schmidt that he wasn't interested in settling the lawsuit, the book says.
"I don't want your money. If you offer me $5 billion, I won't want it. I've got plenty of money. I want you to stop using our ideas in Android, that's all I want." The meeting, Isaacson wrote, resolved nothing.""

Comment Re:Indeed, and for a LONG TIME. (Score 3, Insightful) 692

This is patently false.

Techcrunch: Yes, others have done voice controls before — even Apple has had them baked into iOS for a few years. But most, including Apple’s previous attempt, have been awful. Others, like Google’s voice services built into Android, are decent. Siri is great.

In the coming weeks and months, we’re going to hear: “both fill-in-the-blank-Android-phone and the iPhone 4S have voice control functionality”. But that’s like saying both Citizen Kane and BioDome are films. True on paper. Decidedly less true when you have to actually experience them.

You really have to use it yourself to see just how great Siri actually is. Using it for the past week, I’ve done everything from getting directions, to sending emails, to sending text messages, to looking up information on WolframAlpha, to getting restaurant recommendations on Yelp, to taking notes, to setting reminders, to setting calendar appointments, to setting alarms, to searching the web. The amount of times Siri hasn’t been able to understand and execute my request is astonishingly low. I’ll say something that I’m sure Siri won’t be able to understand, and it gets it.

Apple

Submission + - Apple's Siri is as revolutionary as the Mac (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: "The Harvard Business Review is running an article on Siri, the speech recognition technology inside the new iPhone. They make the case that Siri's use of artificial intelligence and speech recognition is going to change the way we interact with machines. From the article: "the desktop metaphor — that the Mac introduced all those years ago — has long been stretched past breaking point. Novice users often don't know where to begin. The touch paradigm introduced in the iPhone began to change that: it removed the intermediary of the mouse and the cursor. But even still, unnecessary complexity remains...

Siri is going to be the first step in fixing it.""

DRM

Submission + - Spotify to bait and switch? (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: "The Harvard Business Review, of all places, is running a story suggesting that Spotify may have to rely on a bait & switch strategy — or might have one forced upon it by the record labels. From the article: "Spotify gets all its content from the same place everyone else does –" the same industry that has forced price increases on other online services once they have become successful. That appears to be at least partly what happened with Netflix last week. At least in the case of the existing a la carte music services, if you don't like the new price, you don't have to buy the new track. In Spotify's world, if you don't like the new price, there goes your music library. Or, if Spotify tries to stand up for its users, the labels can just pull the songs and those songs simply disappear.""
Music

Submission + - RIAA/MPAA: the greatest threat to tech innovation (hbr.org)

TAGmclaren writes: The Harvard Business Review is running an article stating that it's not India or China that are the greatest threat to technological innovation happening in America. Rather, it's the "big content" players, particularly the movie and music industry. From the article: "the Big Content players do not understand technology, and never have. Rather than see it as an opportunity to reach new audiences, technology has always been a threat to them. Example after example abounds of this attitude; whether it was the VCR which was "to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone" as famed movie industry lobbyist Jack Valenti put it at a congressional hearing, or MP3 technology, which they tried to sue out of existence."
Movies

Submission + - Big content killing innovation (hbr.org)

TAGmclaren writes: America is at risk of losing its place as the leading place to innovate — not because of China or India, but rather because of the big content industries like the music and movie industry. So says the Harvard Business Review. It's interesting to see a big business publication come down on the technology side. From the article: "despite making their living relying on it, the Big Content players do not understand technology, and never have. Rather than see it as an opportunity to reach new audiences, technology has always been a threat to them. "
Businesses

Submission + - Big Content is strangling American innovation (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: "Harvard Business Review is running an article close to many slashdotter's hearts: the problems with "Big Content". They make the argument that all the measures that the movie and music industry are putting in place to protect their business models actually threatens to undermine the innovation engine that the US has built up in the tech space. Very interesting reading."

Slashdot Top Deals

"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai

Working...