It does guarantee that Apple has the lowest RETAIL price. However if B&N is selling it at a 40% margin, then yes B&N has the lowest purchase price and Apple's earning less. But basically what Apple did was tell publishers that you can set what ever price you want in iBook store, BUT if someone else can sell it for cheaper (*cough* Amazon *cough*), then we will adjust the price lower and you will still fork over the books and 30%. With that Apple guaranteed that it has the most reasonable prices on the market from the shared publishers at least and that there would be no artificial price hiking in their store only.
Now... if the publishers thought that ok, we CAN sell the ebooks for a higher price, but we have to do so everywhere, then it was up to them to go and revoke Amazons price advantages and force Amazon to price the books the same way as they were on Apple's store. THAT was not Apple's doing, but the publishers. And that's probably why Apple isn't covering the publishers. Apple opened the window for a wider e-book market due to iPad as a successful device and a good enough competitor to Kindle. What the publishers did with the prices on the open market was up to them and the customers (i.e. supply and demand). Apple only guaranteed that they'd not be hurt by selling higher when they allowed the free price point setting.
So if there is a collusion case, it's against the publishers and I don't mind the DOJ winning that one. The more likely reality is that the truth is somewhere in between. Amazon had the publishers by the balls and Apple removed the iron grip allowing the publishers room to maneuver. Apple's not at fault here, they just wanted a piece of the pie without getting the bitter end.
I think the price hike here is due to Mass Effect 3 launch earlier in the year and hasn't been corrected back yet. Basically they're riding the franchise though it'll probably not work too well due to the huge amount of pissed off people over the ending (me included).
Said Ghost Story is $14.99 on iTunes. The other books from Jim Butcher (am reading the Furies series) are usually $9.99. Most books tend to be $5.99-$8.99 depending on age. Usually new releases are $12.99-$14.99. Wether a book comes out at the same time as the hardcover version is up to the publisher. I know some publish them in unison (I've gotten 2-3 books in the past 6 months on launch date through iBookstore) one example being GRRM's "A dance with dragons". Some add a delay of 1-3 or more months to promote the hardcover purchasing before it sells in e-book format.
In most cases the price of the iTunes book is at or cheaper than the paper version (the price fork expands as a function of time from launch being usually 0 at launch or slightly lower for e-book). I do agree that a print book has real cost attached to every book (printing+shipping+warehouse costs+shelf space cost) as well as the common costs (author's fee, editing, promoting etc). However I'm willing to pay a certain premium for getting the book NOW. I don't live in the US so when the US authors (or even authors elsewhere, who usually launch far and wide in US first) publish a new book I cannot pick it up the same day. I won't have overnight shipment from Amazon either. Usually it's 10-28 days for standard international shipping so I have to buy full series for it to make sense and if I hate the series I've lost money. With iTunes books I can get the sample (around 50 pages of the book, usually good enough to make up my mind if I want to read it) and then as I reach the end of the sample just purchase it with one click and a few seconds later continue reading. I can continue an epic saga in my bed if I finish one of the books at 2 AM I can just tap the next book and start reading it without even a single minute passing. That comfort is also worth something so I'm not overly sad about the e-books current pricing. Of course I wouldn't mind paying less, but I think $9-$13 per book is a reasonable price and usually price is determined by supply and demand. As long as there's demand they keep selling it.
I guess it depends on what kind of tweaking. As I claimed I do have a MacBook that got dented close to the DVD drive (actually right next to the HDD). The dent is a few mm to the inside, about 1cm width and full body height. However it hasn't stopped the HDD or made the case in any way less usable. Same region force that caused this dent would have probably shattered the plastic and damaged the HDD. If you manage to twist the unibody, then I can believe you, but I'd guess the force needed to twist it would have destroyed also a plastic version (as those are made from interlinked parts, not a solid body so the axial and lateral forces would apply a lot more stress on the joints and not be distributed quite uniformly. It's thanks to the Unibody that you can pick up a MacBook Air from the thin corner without any wobble or issues at all. No non-unibody ultra slim could keep doing that for years without losing some of the integrity.
With regard to heating I don't feel it. I mean I have done scientific computing on it exercising the CPU at 100% for hours and the regions that heat up are above the keyboard, to the left etc. The regions where you rest your hands on don't come into contact with it. And the fact that it's a huge heatsink effectively allow for better distribution of the heat with close to zero fan needs (I don't think I hear my laptops fan other than in the most extreme situations and it really has to be a quiet room).
The only real downside that I have is the sharp edge so that if you don't keep your hands on it according to the ergonomic instructions (and really, who does) you will feel the sharp edge. I hope they will fix that in the next generation of MacBooks, but until then the good part is that as it's pure aluminum you can just take a file and file it away if it bothers you:D There are vids on the net about people doing just that.
I think you misunderstood me:D I was pointing out that always comparing CPU GHz etc between devices doesn't tell you the full story. It's the interplay between hardware and software as well as the overall usability (heating + battery lifetime + weight) that make up a lot bigger portion of the pro-side for Apple. And yes, the MacBook's aren't the big underdogs these days, they're quite decently configured although probably the i7 with 256GB SSD isn't really a budget option. But even the budget i5 + spinning disk versions behave exceptionally well (though maybe you don't want it as a compile machine).
This is the standard claim that is thrown against Apple. It's not the glowing bitten Apple you're buying with that extra dough. What you are getting is a lot more things:
* Robust case that works the exact same way also 3 years after active use and possible multiple falls. The screen still closes tightly and soundlessly. I've had my MacBook Pro fall somehow and dent one edge near the CD drive and I've never noticed it. A comparable blow to cause aluminum to dent like this would have shattered a plastic laptop.
* Ease of use. And that's something most people forget to price really. If your life turns around Linux kernels and command line and you don't have lawn to mow or family to spend quality time with, then you might not understand how much that is worth. Software management is hassle free (drag and drop for 90% of stuff, App Store for the rest that keeps and does all the updates for you).
* Easy support from Apple as already outlined in many posts that makes sure any issue that pops up for the ordinary user is solved and their experience is a great one. Forget here the geeks that squeak when the latest nightly doesn't build from ports or what not. Noone cares about that really as it affects a negligible amount of people in the real world (albeit quite a lot of people on slashdot).
* The speed... Forget the need to compare drive spin speeds and CPU MHz and what not. What really matters is the speed at which your computer operates when you do stuff. And while Mac's are usually "underpowered" in comparison to many PC's it's due to perfectly clear reasons and lack of need for anything higher. You don't gain much by slamming the highest end CPU in there and then being unable to sustain it for 8h as well as the heating that you have to take care of. What really matters is that the macs with OS X combination is really snappy in most situations. If you go for an Air that is all SSD with passive cooling you get nice speed with no noise what so ever.
* The trackpad. I mean seriously that's one major thing that either has to be seriously patented out or I cannot fathom why others don't use it yet. The huge trackpad is very nice to the feel under the finger and the multi touch gestures are something you grow into so tightly that when you have to use a non-mac laptop for what ever reason you feel suddenly as if someone had amputated your arm.
* OS X... There are so many things why OS X is far superior to Windows (and Linux doesn't even come close for the standard non-geek user). Most of all for the common things people do and should do. One biggest highlight is the native backup system Time Machine. You add either a USB disk or if you bought Time Capsule for the wifi the disk from there and it's about 1-2 clicks to turn the system on. After that you forget about it (that's what 99.99% of standard users do, forget about backups) and you never notice it at all. At least not until your hard drive fails (something I've experienced once and used once when I upgraded the disk to SSD as well as have seen some other people experience so it's not just stories and ads, but real life experience). You then just get the new HDD, boot the machine up (usually the HDD from Apple contains the OS boot environment for recovery or you use your boot usb key or what not) and select recovery from Time Capsule. You then leave for a few hours and you return to an EXACT working laptop pre-disk loss. All your settings, command history, tunes and tweaks, e-mail filters, junk mail learning base, everything (including custom ports and what not of non-OS X stuff) is exactly as you had at the time of last backup. No fuss, you just sit down and continue working as if nothing happened.
* After market value. A lot of people won't buy a Mac out of the shop due to pricing issues, but a 1-2 year used Mac is usually in pristine condition so if you want to upgrade you'll find a decent deal on the aftermarket reducing your entry price for the next laptop. Add to it a custom memory pack and buy an SSD from so
The only unsupported OS with current OS X Lion is the PowerBook and iBook series which were the last models to run Power PC G4/G3 CPU's. So ANY Intel based Mac since 2005 is still fully functional under OS X Lion. And during that time we've gone through 3 releases of OS X with the 4th coming this summer which again will very likely support everything since 2005. Oh and the Power series CPU's were last supported in OS X Leopard, all the way to 2009 and probably you still got updates for Leopard quite a while after that. The usual EOL product support is 3 years with possibly 2 more until you stop supporting a product alltogether. Apple's done that with 2005 - 2010 supporting still G3/G4 based laptops and desktops. So I fail to see how Apple might render your current purchase unusable within a 3 year window.
It also can't be due to hardware requirements to run that it would be impractical. Snow Leopard was basically a reworked Leopard with all legacy code removed (and all the dual-hardware support at the time). It cost only $29 and was basically reworked under the hood with little difference in outwards looks, but it did free about 1GB of disk space with an upgrade and the laptop ran way faster afterwards on the same hardware. Lion did increase slightly the requirements, but was still quite nifty and usable (probably about the same region as OS X Leopard). So over the three last releases we've seen either speed improvement on same hardware or about the same requirements. Of course 8GB RAM and SSD make the laptop blazing fast, but that doesn't mean the 2GB + spinning disks is unusable.
I think it would take a lot less, but as this is the first attempt by a private company they are going to do it safe. The first two days are spent mostly on learning and testing the maneuvering of the dragon, then they will pass within 1.5 miles of ISS and attempt a series of maneuvers to prove that they are capable enough and only after that are they allowed to move to 3m and be pulled in by the ISS robotic arm. So it would probably happen a lot faster once they have proven themselves, the software etc, but the first time out they're taking their sweet time to test stuff the first few days. Well that's at least what I picked up from the webcast event today before and after the launch.
I said I was going to short at $33/35 range meaning the strike price will be that. I too assume it'll drop to the $20 range soon enough and that will mean a hefty profit on the options. If you assume a put price of $2-3 at underlying price of $35 for a strike of $33 it means that your break even at expiry is $30-31. If it drops to $20 you've made about 6-7x profit from initial investment. That was my point:)
Oh and if you're interested. FB starts trading options on 29th according to my broker. That's the time to take the shorts.
Well I've earned a lot form Amazon shorts:) I still cannot fathom why people keep buying it up at those crazy valuations when every time they miss earnings they drop 10+% and then slowly it climbs back only to be shot down again. The last two earnings I've taken a short just before earnings and sold after earnings making a ton of profit. They have contracting earnings and the P/E is expanding, not shrinking. It's a long time debate on what exactly keeps the price up and to be fair, even the Wall Street analytics can't quite fathom it. And I think this isn't sustainable. Amazon has been pampering investors with promises (like the Kindle Fire etc), however those aren't coming true. Their Fire sells indeed, but it's not really bringing in the profits. So AMZN is another great short, especially for earnings as they tend to rally into earnings and drop after earnings and drop a lot.
I'm going to be betting on it the moment facebook option trading opens up and I can short the life out of it. I'd have loved to short at $40+ that it was trading at on Friday as I was pretty sure it's going to go down. Most IPO's underprice themselves slightly and there's euphoria in the just-after-IPO trading that usually sees a good 20-50% upside and a good downswing in the same day of the IPO. This never happened (it opened at $42, hit $45 in a few minutes and was $38-40 range bound the rest of the day meaning that the IPO was priced pretty much at the maximum that investors are willing to go at. Therefore any hope for upwards movement now comes from positive surprises and better than expected earnings. However considering the valuation at 100x trailing 12m earnings the valuation already assumes exponential earnings growth. Therefore as someone already put it... only way is down. Once options come online I'm going to short at $30/$35 range for 6-9 months depending on the option price and I'm fairly certain I'm going to make a ton as I doubt FB can run 2-3 consecutive quarters with exponential earnings growth and once that doesn't happen the valuation will go through a heavy correction (likely to around 20-40x earnings) which is likely to mean a 40-60% downwards shift to around $20 territory. Might not happen with one earnings result or two, but I doubt they'll keep the euphoria for more than that. But for FB itself and the investors that cashed out with the IPO it was perfectly priced:P
No, I mean 500Mbit/s:) If you're getting only 50Mbit/s, then you're not using the N standard and good hardware:) And to be fair, the major speed boost came with the latest generation of time capsule, we never got over 100Mbit/s previously.
I guess it wasn't as fast this time, but in any case it's well over 100Mbit/s and there may have been some clouding of my memories with the 500Mbit/s, but it's in hundreds in any case:)
I'm not "remote", I'm just not in the server room. When I'm remote, I use RDC from home to my office desktop and then make the X11 connection on that.
I think under remote I meant not physically connected. It doesn't really matter too much if you're 10m - 10km away assuming the amount of switches and backbone are reasonable so it's only your endpoint connection we're talking about.
I think there is something seriously wrong with your wifi network then. It's quite common that a crappy router can cause loads of issues and make wifi look a lot inferior to cable. However we've got in the office a number of Time Capsule's (latest gen) that support both 2.4Ghz and 5GHz and we've tested them to easily show speeds around 500Mbit/s to external servers over wifi. The cable connection gives 700-900Mbit/s and I think is more limited by the far end. Working on wifi or cable doesn't really impact remote desktops or VNC connections (and I agree with other posters on X11 death need). The part of VNC is actually quite software dependent as I discovered when I first tried out Jolly's fast VNC. I've yet to find another client software on any platform that comes even close in the responsiveness. It's even faster and more responsive than RDP connections and allows for remote management with near-zero latency (at least it doesn't bother me even when working for hours over remote).
However I agree that it may have looked bleak. With the first gen time capsules and Chicken of VNC and similar software it was quite unusable to use wifi for remote admin, but these days with good wifi hardware and great software I don't really feel that the physical cable adds too much. We've also got around 10 laptops all doing backups to the capsules over the air and don't see any serious degradation. And I'm someone who uses a cable both in the office and at home, but I guess I can live with a dongle and to be fair I'd rather have the DVD removed as well and replaced with second disk / larger battery as in the 2 years since I moved back from Air to Pro I've used the drive a whole 2-3 times and those cases could have been avoided without real discomfort.
We cross the streams all the time. That's how we get collisions:P If you look closely at the LHC status pages you can even see what the crossing angle is:P
Not really. Big profit margin means you manage your cost of production extremely well as well as sell it at a good price. A lot of people just dumbly put it all down to marketing while Apple is the king of operational optimization and low cost production. And before you cry slave labor or what other nonsense their main low cost comes from pre-purchasing stockpiles of components well in advance. Basically they give a manufacturer the billions needed to build a new factory and have sole right for anything made there for the first N years at pre-determined price. The manufacturer has 0 risk in building the factory and a sure customer for N years so they go for it happily. The competition however is screwed as they can only buy dribbles from that plant at high cost or got to produce it elsewhere for much higher cost therefore reducing their profit margin a lot.
And that's not something others can easily do because they don't have such a huge cash horde as Apple has (110B in cash and marketable equities). Throwing 5-10B against a new technology is no problem for Apple yet it's more than most companies can manage at any point in time without taking a loan that will again eat into their profit margin over years.
Um, no. Tim quite clearly said on the call that he thinks it equivalent to merging a toaster and a refridgerator. Sure you can do it, but it just isn't right. So he claimed Apple isn't going to that party even though others might.
Also, iPhone came out on June 29th, 2007. The N810 in October of 2007 and looked pretty similar. You can't tell me the N810 was in reaction to the release of the iPhone. There had to be a good deal of parallel development time there..
Steve demonstrated the iPhone in early January 2007. At the time FCC required a long validation period and they didn't want the phone leaked so they announced it and only then filed for compliance and right to sell. So add a whole 6 months to the difference and a total of 10, which is quite copyable...
Main trouble with wind energy is that it's not reliable. So you always have to have a backup. The only regions that can reliably use wind energy are coastal regions that have prevailing winds that exist all year round, not just seasonally when you don't need the extra energy anyway. But I agree with other commenter as well. Optimizing the power usage is a big chunk of money as well that will pay off in the long run.
I love OS X and for one particular reason. Namely you get essentially full Unix system with shells and stuff AND a perfectly working graphical environment. Now you may possibly start to claim that Linux can do that. However having had Linux on the side since 1996 (some office comps still use Linux for various reasons and we've gone through around 6 different distros and various versions over time) I can tell you that it couldn't be further from truth.
The one thing about OS X is that it just works and adding stuff is truly simple. You can either go to Mac App Store and get it from there in just a few clicks if the developer has added it or you download a DMG from the net, double click it to mount and drag the app to Applications or wherever you want. Only very few applications have installers that you have to run through, but they are mostly 2-3 click ones. This ease of use is far simpler than even Windows and Linux comes nowhere even close no matter how hard you try to find such a simple method. Especially if you want something from outside the default distro and have to start haggling the dependency versions...
The second part that for me is absolutely uncanny is the ease and invisibility of Time Machine. We have two Time Capsules in the office (concrete walls with iron in it as it's a soviet era physics lab so we've distributed the area to make sure everyone gets a decent signal). Whoever gets to the office and opens the laptop automatically has backups every hour or so without noticing anything as it runs in the background over the wifi. The first time setup was basically selecting the time capsule in time machine preferences and entering the access password. And I've gone through one 100% loss disk failure myself (used laptop in a bus for 4h and drive gave up due to bumpy road, now prefer SSD's) and some other colleagues have had disks swapped for various reasons. The basic way it works is that you bring your upgraded/fixed laptop to the office, boot it up and select that you want to restore from time machine. After a few hours the laptop boots up and everything is exactly as it was (every single setting, shell histories, MySQL histories, everything). You just continue to work as if nothing happened.
So ever since I've used OS X (since around 2005) I've been able to spend a lot more time actually working, not having to worry at all about the OS at any time. And I do use the Unix component a lot as I write code that analyzes huge amounts of data in one of the CERN experiments as well as manage a 1PB / 1200 core compute cluster at our datacenter.
So overall the answer to your question about what I can do on OS X that I can't do on Linux is probably to get a pleasant working experience and more work hours spent on working. Yes I can set up Linux to a semi decent backup and I can get it to work in graphical interface and get software installed, but it won't be seamlessly integrated into the rest of the workflow and it for sure won't be as fast and easy. Heck before conversion to Mac I had my Linux laptop configured with experimental swsusp and automated scripts for wifi detection and what not to get it to work seamlessly everywhere, but it never really worked that well. I know this has significantly improved, but Linux is still lightyears away from getting to where OS X is today in allowing comfortable easy use. And I prefer to apply my intellect doing the actual work, not to hacking and customizing my laptop.
I think this has actually been shown a few times through tests that the publishers are too stuck in their old models. I can't be bothered to google for it, but I think Steam did a test of how much discounts impact actual end-to-end profit. I think the magical region is around 5-10 USD possibly a bit higher for brand new AAA games. You basically have two options, you either charge hard and sell few or you charge less and sell many. There will always be some % of people, who will pirate the game for what ever reason, but if you put a price of $50 to a person or a price of $9.99 the latter will give a lot more purchase decisions. Add to it a decent demo / try before you buy option and you've got a pretty decent working model. If the game is crap, then yes the $50 per pop will give you a quicker ROI, but if the game is decent (what you'd hope of an AAA game), then more people will buy the game and you'll still earn back the money.
The idiot publishers need to forget the old model and start to think more. Right now they concentrate on consoles for which you probably need to go to the shop and buy the physical DVD. Having that means printing, stocking, distribution costs which are actually per unit driving the price. Now if the shop price is minimum $20+ for everything besides the game itself, then indeed you'd end up with $30 as minimum or so if you want to give the game for $10. And then they don't want to give the online version for say $12.99 or so which probably would be the fair value if the actual game cost is $9.99. If you drop consoles alltogether and distribute to mobile and PC devices through online means and only give offline copies to backend people who can't download shit (for higher price for the inconvenience), then games would get cheaper and piracy would drop. I for one will never buy a brand new game for >$20, it's just not worth it. The only game I've bought above that is HL2 and Portal2 because those I already knew from advance that they'll be quality products with replay value. Everything else is pretty much unknown and I'd rather pirate it to try it out and I'm not willing to give $50 usd (or for my case €50 just because I live in EU) for something that I max enjoy 10h. $10-20 and I'll buy (I've spent around 400+ EUR on Steam on games so I do buy games). And setting regions is even more shooting themselves in the foot. I wanted ME3 for example, but you can't have it here officially. Do they really think I'll wait if downloading it took me all of 5 minutes to set up? Do they think I'll buy it after I've played it through (maybe, if it's good as I did buy ME and ME2, but they'll have to enable it on Steam which doesn't seem like something in their plans).
Often not all the buttons work, or the analog controls either. And well, it's a mess to hook those things up just to play something, especially if you're going to have a several-hour gaming session because then you have to add a charger into the mix, too. And what if you get a phonecall in the middle of gaming? You have to tear everything off only to have to plug it all back in afterwards.
That's why you use a dock, a tablet and wireless controllers (with loading docks so you don't need to check batteries). Yes, those are not there yet, but if you consider the hardware of the latest iPad I can't see why you'd want to build a dedicated platform that provides about the same kind of computing capacity. The iPad for mobile use has already a quad core chip that does both the graphics and the computing and does it well. Consider the resolution that stuff runs on and how smoothly it does (just go and look at the infinity blade dungeons demo during the intro) tells you that as dedicated hardware goes it's nicely on par. If Apple or some third party publisher were to come out with the addons that are needed you'd have a viable console replacement that doubles also as your everyday tablet. win-win.
Hmm... I just bought GTA3 for the iPad. It's running the exact same graphics as the original game, the controller does take some getting used to, then again I played it on a PC, not the console version so probably the console people would adjust more easily. The full game is there, all the missions, all the sidequests and interim plays. The whole map, cars everything. I have yet to find some part missing and guess what, at $4.99 I didn't even contemplate long about it. I've already played it for hours in row with no bigger impact on the iPad battery than had I been browsing so anywhere I go I have now a good 8-10h of GTA time available if I want.
And well, GTA3 was actually from my opinion the best GTA there ever was (too much hassle with GTA4, going to gym, eating etc). And if you look at Infinity Blade Dungeons that they showed off during the iPad intro last week, then this easily gives you better graphics than Torchlight or similar games. Heck I'd not be surprised if Diablo 3 and that game are comparable. The only question is will these guys provide enough gameplay time for it. I've already played Dungeons 2 on iPad and it's damn neat RPG to play for hours and hours.
So forget about Angry Birds, it's not the only game on the new platform and the hardware that these devices feature these days is pretty solid (I mean it's tough to find a screen that runs 2048x1536 and the graphics card needed to run that resolution in good 3D is not cheap either). So as it spreads more, we'll probably see more full scale games being ported to the mobile market and once the content is equivalent you just don't need the consoles anymore... For the points why, scroll up a bit for my other comment...
Think about it for a moment. Apple has the iPad 3 running the full resolution 2048x1536 in blazing 3D. That means the iPad can definitely handle the graphics that you'd ask from a gaming console. So all you need to do is devise a dock so that you walk to your living room, plug in the tablet and pick up your wireless controller and voila you're playing console quality games.
Heck, why keep it at a tablet level even, Apple has Apple TV, a small box that a lot of people already use for loads of video content. An upgrade on that device that provides you everything you could possibly want through the cloud (all content, including video, music and games) is a natural replacement to the game consoles. The only component that they need to work through is the controller. At a basic level anyone with an iPhone/iPod touch could probably use that as the controller (loads of accelerometers, touch screen that can mimic any gaming pad if it doesn't need to display the game itself). And dedicated controllers for hard core gamers. The juice is already there, it's not that tough to pack high end 3D graphics capable hardware into a small footprint. Most of iPad size is taken by the screen and the battery.
I think what the reference slideshow presented quite well is that the mobile part has already killed a number of the lower end gaming regions and is quite in a good position to target the final platform as well. A number of quotes taken from game industry figures seem to reference also the platfrom per-se as something getting destroyed by the mobile devices, not the content. So why would someone want to buy a multi hundred USD gaming console if they can spend the same money on a new iPad, get the same games (talking about near future, not present) and also being able to use said iPad for loads of other things while it's not in use as a console. Remember, it already has AirPlay so you can easily send your video game experience to the large screen in the living room, the only missing component is the comfy controller...
If someone wants to attribute bird chirping to anyone, then they should attribute it to the birds not some magical entity. If it actually came to the claim going to GOD, then I'd like to see concrete proof from the copyright holder (and actually the existence of it...). And I doubt anyone can claim representation rights for birds therefore it's not copyrightable per se and should remain free to use. If someone can copyright bird song, then the legislation leading to it should be dumped immediately and the proposers of it made to reform it or if they don't comply simply shot.
Not entirely true. Molecules are combinations of atoms meaning that you cannot be certain this one wasn't produced mere seconds before it was "photographed". Then again, noone considers a picture of a newborn baby nude as child porn so again, why no picture.
Oh and even atoms cannot be considered as something that was made at the big bang. There's nuclear fusion and fission happening all the time. At best the underlying quarks may or may not have been originally created or they may have come into existence during flavor changing currents (i.e. weak interaction as in W or Z exchange).
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It does guarantee that Apple has the lowest RETAIL price. However if B&N is selling it at a 40% margin, then yes B&N has the lowest purchase price and Apple's earning less. But basically what Apple did was tell publishers that you can set what ever price you want in iBook store, BUT if someone else can sell it for cheaper (*cough* Amazon *cough*), then we will adjust the price lower and you will still fork over the books and 30%. With that Apple guaranteed that it has the most reasonable prices on the market from the shared publishers at least and that there would be no artificial price hiking in their store only.
Now ... if the publishers thought that ok, we CAN sell the ebooks for a higher price, but we have to do so everywhere, then it was up to them to go and revoke Amazons price advantages and force Amazon to price the books the same way as they were on Apple's store. THAT was not Apple's doing, but the publishers. And that's probably why Apple isn't covering the publishers. Apple opened the window for a wider e-book market due to iPad as a successful device and a good enough competitor to Kindle. What the publishers did with the prices on the open market was up to them and the customers (i.e. supply and demand). Apple only guaranteed that they'd not be hurt by selling higher when they allowed the free price point setting.
So if there is a collusion case, it's against the publishers and I don't mind the DOJ winning that one. The more likely reality is that the truth is somewhere in between. Amazon had the publishers by the balls and Apple removed the iron grip allowing the publishers room to maneuver. Apple's not at fault here, they just wanted a piece of the pie without getting the bitter end.
I think the price hike here is due to Mass Effect 3 launch earlier in the year and hasn't been corrected back yet. Basically they're riding the franchise though it'll probably not work too well due to the huge amount of pissed off people over the ending (me included).
Said Ghost Story is $14.99 on iTunes. The other books from Jim Butcher (am reading the Furies series) are usually $9.99. Most books tend to be $5.99-$8.99 depending on age. Usually new releases are $12.99-$14.99. Wether a book comes out at the same time as the hardcover version is up to the publisher. I know some publish them in unison (I've gotten 2-3 books in the past 6 months on launch date through iBookstore) one example being GRRM's "A dance with dragons". Some add a delay of 1-3 or more months to promote the hardcover purchasing before it sells in e-book format.
In most cases the price of the iTunes book is at or cheaper than the paper version (the price fork expands as a function of time from launch being usually 0 at launch or slightly lower for e-book). I do agree that a print book has real cost attached to every book (printing+shipping+warehouse costs+shelf space cost) as well as the common costs (author's fee, editing, promoting etc). However I'm willing to pay a certain premium for getting the book NOW. I don't live in the US so when the US authors (or even authors elsewhere, who usually launch far and wide in US first) publish a new book I cannot pick it up the same day. I won't have overnight shipment from Amazon either. Usually it's 10-28 days for standard international shipping so I have to buy full series for it to make sense and if I hate the series I've lost money. With iTunes books I can get the sample (around 50 pages of the book, usually good enough to make up my mind if I want to read it) and then as I reach the end of the sample just purchase it with one click and a few seconds later continue reading. I can continue an epic saga in my bed if I finish one of the books at 2 AM I can just tap the next book and start reading it without even a single minute passing. That comfort is also worth something so I'm not overly sad about the e-books current pricing. Of course I wouldn't mind paying less, but I think $9-$13 per book is a reasonable price and usually price is determined by supply and demand. As long as there's demand they keep selling it.
I guess it depends on what kind of tweaking. As I claimed I do have a MacBook that got dented close to the DVD drive (actually right next to the HDD). The dent is a few mm to the inside, about 1cm width and full body height. However it hasn't stopped the HDD or made the case in any way less usable. Same region force that caused this dent would have probably shattered the plastic and damaged the HDD. If you manage to twist the unibody, then I can believe you, but I'd guess the force needed to twist it would have destroyed also a plastic version (as those are made from interlinked parts, not a solid body so the axial and lateral forces would apply a lot more stress on the joints and not be distributed quite uniformly. It's thanks to the Unibody that you can pick up a MacBook Air from the thin corner without any wobble or issues at all. No non-unibody ultra slim could keep doing that for years without losing some of the integrity.
With regard to heating I don't feel it. I mean I have done scientific computing on it exercising the CPU at 100% for hours and the regions that heat up are above the keyboard, to the left etc. The regions where you rest your hands on don't come into contact with it. And the fact that it's a huge heatsink effectively allow for better distribution of the heat with close to zero fan needs (I don't think I hear my laptops fan other than in the most extreme situations and it really has to be a quiet room).
The only real downside that I have is the sharp edge so that if you don't keep your hands on it according to the ergonomic instructions (and really, who does) you will feel the sharp edge. I hope they will fix that in the next generation of MacBooks, but until then the good part is that as it's pure aluminum you can just take a file and file it away if it bothers you :D There are vids on the net about people doing just that.
I think you misunderstood me :D I was pointing out that always comparing CPU GHz etc between devices doesn't tell you the full story. It's the interplay between hardware and software as well as the overall usability (heating + battery lifetime + weight) that make up a lot bigger portion of the pro-side for Apple. And yes, the MacBook's aren't the big underdogs these days, they're quite decently configured although probably the i7 with 256GB SSD isn't really a budget option. But even the budget i5 + spinning disk versions behave exceptionally well (though maybe you don't want it as a compile machine).
This is the standard claim that is thrown against Apple. It's not the glowing bitten Apple you're buying with that extra dough. What you are getting is a lot more things:
* Robust case that works the exact same way also 3 years after active use and possible multiple falls. The screen still closes tightly and soundlessly. I've had my MacBook Pro fall somehow and dent one edge near the CD drive and I've never noticed it. A comparable blow to cause aluminum to dent like this would have shattered a plastic laptop.
* Ease of use. And that's something most people forget to price really. If your life turns around Linux kernels and command line and you don't have lawn to mow or family to spend quality time with, then you might not understand how much that is worth. Software management is hassle free (drag and drop for 90% of stuff, App Store for the rest that keeps and does all the updates for you).
* Easy support from Apple as already outlined in many posts that makes sure any issue that pops up for the ordinary user is solved and their experience is a great one. Forget here the geeks that squeak when the latest nightly doesn't build from ports or what not. Noone cares about that really as it affects a negligible amount of people in the real world (albeit quite a lot of people on slashdot).
* The speed... Forget the need to compare drive spin speeds and CPU MHz and what not. What really matters is the speed at which your computer operates when you do stuff. And while Mac's are usually "underpowered" in comparison to many PC's it's due to perfectly clear reasons and lack of need for anything higher. You don't gain much by slamming the highest end CPU in there and then being unable to sustain it for 8h as well as the heating that you have to take care of. What really matters is that the macs with OS X combination is really snappy in most situations. If you go for an Air that is all SSD with passive cooling you get nice speed with no noise what so ever.
* The trackpad. I mean seriously that's one major thing that either has to be seriously patented out or I cannot fathom why others don't use it yet. The huge trackpad is very nice to the feel under the finger and the multi touch gestures are something you grow into so tightly that when you have to use a non-mac laptop for what ever reason you feel suddenly as if someone had amputated your arm.
* OS X ... There are so many things why OS X is far superior to Windows (and Linux doesn't even come close for the standard non-geek user). Most of all for the common things people do and should do. One biggest highlight is the native backup system Time Machine. You add either a USB disk or if you bought Time Capsule for the wifi the disk from there and it's about 1-2 clicks to turn the system on. After that you forget about it (that's what 99.99% of standard users do, forget about backups) and you never notice it at all. At least not until your hard drive fails (something I've experienced once and used once when I upgraded the disk to SSD as well as have seen some other people experience so it's not just stories and ads, but real life experience). You then just get the new HDD, boot the machine up (usually the HDD from Apple contains the OS boot environment for recovery or you use your boot usb key or what not) and select recovery from Time Capsule. You then leave for a few hours and you return to an EXACT working laptop pre-disk loss. All your settings, command history, tunes and tweaks, e-mail filters, junk mail learning base, everything (including custom ports and what not of non-OS X stuff) is exactly as you had at the time of last backup. No fuss, you just sit down and continue working as if nothing happened.
* After market value. A lot of people won't buy a Mac out of the shop due to pricing issues, but a 1-2 year used Mac is usually in pristine condition so if you want to upgrade you'll find a decent deal on the aftermarket reducing your entry price for the next laptop. Add to it a custom memory pack and buy an SSD from so
The only unsupported OS with current OS X Lion is the PowerBook and iBook series which were the last models to run Power PC G4/G3 CPU's. So ANY Intel based Mac since 2005 is still fully functional under OS X Lion. And during that time we've gone through 3 releases of OS X with the 4th coming this summer which again will very likely support everything since 2005. Oh and the Power series CPU's were last supported in OS X Leopard, all the way to 2009 and probably you still got updates for Leopard quite a while after that. The usual EOL product support is 3 years with possibly 2 more until you stop supporting a product alltogether. Apple's done that with 2005 - 2010 supporting still G3/G4 based laptops and desktops. So I fail to see how Apple might render your current purchase unusable within a 3 year window.
It also can't be due to hardware requirements to run that it would be impractical. Snow Leopard was basically a reworked Leopard with all legacy code removed (and all the dual-hardware support at the time). It cost only $29 and was basically reworked under the hood with little difference in outwards looks, but it did free about 1GB of disk space with an upgrade and the laptop ran way faster afterwards on the same hardware. Lion did increase slightly the requirements, but was still quite nifty and usable (probably about the same region as OS X Leopard). So over the three last releases we've seen either speed improvement on same hardware or about the same requirements. Of course 8GB RAM and SSD make the laptop blazing fast, but that doesn't mean the 2GB + spinning disks is unusable.
I think it would take a lot less, but as this is the first attempt by a private company they are going to do it safe. The first two days are spent mostly on learning and testing the maneuvering of the dragon, then they will pass within 1.5 miles of ISS and attempt a series of maneuvers to prove that they are capable enough and only after that are they allowed to move to 3m and be pulled in by the ISS robotic arm. So it would probably happen a lot faster once they have proven themselves, the software etc, but the first time out they're taking their sweet time to test stuff the first few days. Well that's at least what I picked up from the webcast event today before and after the launch.
I said I was going to short at $33/35 range meaning the strike price will be that. I too assume it'll drop to the $20 range soon enough and that will mean a hefty profit on the options. If you assume a put price of $2-3 at underlying price of $35 for a strike of $33 it means that your break even at expiry is $30-31. If it drops to $20 you've made about 6-7x profit from initial investment. That was my point :)
Oh and if you're interested. FB starts trading options on 29th according to my broker. That's the time to take the shorts.
Well I've earned a lot form Amazon shorts :) I still cannot fathom why people keep buying it up at those crazy valuations when every time they miss earnings they drop 10+% and then slowly it climbs back only to be shot down again. The last two earnings I've taken a short just before earnings and sold after earnings making a ton of profit. They have contracting earnings and the P/E is expanding, not shrinking. It's a long time debate on what exactly keeps the price up and to be fair, even the Wall Street analytics can't quite fathom it. And I think this isn't sustainable. Amazon has been pampering investors with promises (like the Kindle Fire etc), however those aren't coming true. Their Fire sells indeed, but it's not really bringing in the profits. So AMZN is another great short, especially for earnings as they tend to rally into earnings and drop after earnings and drop a lot.
I'm going to be betting on it the moment facebook option trading opens up and I can short the life out of it. I'd have loved to short at $40+ that it was trading at on Friday as I was pretty sure it's going to go down. Most IPO's underprice themselves slightly and there's euphoria in the just-after-IPO trading that usually sees a good 20-50% upside and a good downswing in the same day of the IPO. This never happened (it opened at $42, hit $45 in a few minutes and was $38-40 range bound the rest of the day meaning that the IPO was priced pretty much at the maximum that investors are willing to go at. Therefore any hope for upwards movement now comes from positive surprises and better than expected earnings. However considering the valuation at 100x trailing 12m earnings the valuation already assumes exponential earnings growth. Therefore as someone already put it ... only way is down. Once options come online I'm going to short at $30/$35 range for 6-9 months depending on the option price and I'm fairly certain I'm going to make a ton as I doubt FB can run 2-3 consecutive quarters with exponential earnings growth and once that doesn't happen the valuation will go through a heavy correction (likely to around 20-40x earnings) which is likely to mean a 40-60% downwards shift to around $20 territory. Might not happen with one earnings result or two, but I doubt they'll keep the euphoria for more than that. But for FB itself and the investors that cashed out with the IPO it was perfectly priced :P
I think you mean 50Mbit/s :)
No, I mean 500Mbit/s :) If you're getting only 50Mbit/s, then you're not using the N standard and good hardware :) And to be fair, the major speed boost came with the latest generation of time capsule, we never got over 100Mbit/s previously.
The result while performing backup over wifi at the same time: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1952406137.png
And while I wasn't doing backup (historic entry when I tested things): http://speedtest.net/result/1539505358.png
I guess it wasn't as fast this time, but in any case it's well over 100Mbit/s and there may have been some clouding of my memories with the 500Mbit/s, but it's in hundreds in any case :)
I'm not "remote", I'm just not in the server room. When I'm remote, I use RDC from home to my office desktop and then make the X11 connection on that.
I think under remote I meant not physically connected. It doesn't really matter too much if you're 10m - 10km away assuming the amount of switches and backbone are reasonable so it's only your endpoint connection we're talking about.
I think there is something seriously wrong with your wifi network then. It's quite common that a crappy router can cause loads of issues and make wifi look a lot inferior to cable. However we've got in the office a number of Time Capsule's (latest gen) that support both 2.4Ghz and 5GHz and we've tested them to easily show speeds around 500Mbit/s to external servers over wifi. The cable connection gives 700-900Mbit/s and I think is more limited by the far end. Working on wifi or cable doesn't really impact remote desktops or VNC connections (and I agree with other posters on X11 death need). The part of VNC is actually quite software dependent as I discovered when I first tried out Jolly's fast VNC. I've yet to find another client software on any platform that comes even close in the responsiveness. It's even faster and more responsive than RDP connections and allows for remote management with near-zero latency (at least it doesn't bother me even when working for hours over remote).
However I agree that it may have looked bleak. With the first gen time capsules and Chicken of VNC and similar software it was quite unusable to use wifi for remote admin, but these days with good wifi hardware and great software I don't really feel that the physical cable adds too much. We've also got around 10 laptops all doing backups to the capsules over the air and don't see any serious degradation. And I'm someone who uses a cable both in the office and at home, but I guess I can live with a dongle and to be fair I'd rather have the DVD removed as well and replaced with second disk / larger battery as in the 2 years since I moved back from Air to Pro I've used the drive a whole 2-3 times and those cases could have been avoided without real discomfort.
We cross the streams all the time. That's how we get collisions :P If you look closely at the LHC status pages you can even see what the crossing angle is :P
Not really. Big profit margin means you manage your cost of production extremely well as well as sell it at a good price. A lot of people just dumbly put it all down to marketing while Apple is the king of operational optimization and low cost production. And before you cry slave labor or what other nonsense their main low cost comes from pre-purchasing stockpiles of components well in advance. Basically they give a manufacturer the billions needed to build a new factory and have sole right for anything made there for the first N years at pre-determined price. The manufacturer has 0 risk in building the factory and a sure customer for N years so they go for it happily. The competition however is screwed as they can only buy dribbles from that plant at high cost or got to produce it elsewhere for much higher cost therefore reducing their profit margin a lot.
And that's not something others can easily do because they don't have such a huge cash horde as Apple has (110B in cash and marketable equities). Throwing 5-10B against a new technology is no problem for Apple yet it's more than most companies can manage at any point in time without taking a loan that will again eat into their profit margin over years.
soon enough, you'll have a macbook air that has a magnetically attachable keyboard element and doubles as ipad.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Advantage_X7500
Um, no. Tim quite clearly said on the call that he thinks it equivalent to merging a toaster and a refridgerator. Sure you can do it, but it just isn't right. So he claimed Apple isn't going to that party even though others might.
Also, iPhone came out on June 29th, 2007. The N810 in October of 2007 and looked pretty similar. You can't tell me the N810 was in reaction to the release of the iPhone. There had to be a good deal of parallel development time there. .
Steve demonstrated the iPhone in early January 2007. At the time FCC required a long validation period and they didn't want the phone leaked so they announced it and only then filed for compliance and right to sell. So add a whole 6 months to the difference and a total of 10, which is quite copyable...
Main trouble with wind energy is that it's not reliable. So you always have to have a backup. The only regions that can reliably use wind energy are coastal regions that have prevailing winds that exist all year round, not just seasonally when you don't need the extra energy anyway. But I agree with other commenter as well. Optimizing the power usage is a big chunk of money as well that will pay off in the long run.
I love OS X and for one particular reason. Namely you get essentially full Unix system with shells and stuff AND a perfectly working graphical environment. Now you may possibly start to claim that Linux can do that. However having had Linux on the side since 1996 (some office comps still use Linux for various reasons and we've gone through around 6 different distros and various versions over time) I can tell you that it couldn't be further from truth.
The one thing about OS X is that it just works and adding stuff is truly simple. You can either go to Mac App Store and get it from there in just a few clicks if the developer has added it or you download a DMG from the net, double click it to mount and drag the app to Applications or wherever you want. Only very few applications have installers that you have to run through, but they are mostly 2-3 click ones. This ease of use is far simpler than even Windows and Linux comes nowhere even close no matter how hard you try to find such a simple method. Especially if you want something from outside the default distro and have to start haggling the dependency versions...
The second part that for me is absolutely uncanny is the ease and invisibility of Time Machine. We have two Time Capsules in the office (concrete walls with iron in it as it's a soviet era physics lab so we've distributed the area to make sure everyone gets a decent signal). Whoever gets to the office and opens the laptop automatically has backups every hour or so without noticing anything as it runs in the background over the wifi. The first time setup was basically selecting the time capsule in time machine preferences and entering the access password. And I've gone through one 100% loss disk failure myself (used laptop in a bus for 4h and drive gave up due to bumpy road, now prefer SSD's) and some other colleagues have had disks swapped for various reasons. The basic way it works is that you bring your upgraded/fixed laptop to the office, boot it up and select that you want to restore from time machine. After a few hours the laptop boots up and everything is exactly as it was (every single setting, shell histories, MySQL histories, everything). You just continue to work as if nothing happened.
So ever since I've used OS X (since around 2005) I've been able to spend a lot more time actually working, not having to worry at all about the OS at any time. And I do use the Unix component a lot as I write code that analyzes huge amounts of data in one of the CERN experiments as well as manage a 1PB / 1200 core compute cluster at our datacenter.
So overall the answer to your question about what I can do on OS X that I can't do on Linux is probably to get a pleasant working experience and more work hours spent on working. Yes I can set up Linux to a semi decent backup and I can get it to work in graphical interface and get software installed, but it won't be seamlessly integrated into the rest of the workflow and it for sure won't be as fast and easy. Heck before conversion to Mac I had my Linux laptop configured with experimental swsusp and automated scripts for wifi detection and what not to get it to work seamlessly everywhere, but it never really worked that well. I know this has significantly improved, but Linux is still lightyears away from getting to where OS X is today in allowing comfortable easy use. And I prefer to apply my intellect doing the actual work, not to hacking and customizing my laptop.
I think this has actually been shown a few times through tests that the publishers are too stuck in their old models. I can't be bothered to google for it, but I think Steam did a test of how much discounts impact actual end-to-end profit. I think the magical region is around 5-10 USD possibly a bit higher for brand new AAA games. You basically have two options, you either charge hard and sell few or you charge less and sell many. There will always be some % of people, who will pirate the game for what ever reason, but if you put a price of $50 to a person or a price of $9.99 the latter will give a lot more purchase decisions. Add to it a decent demo / try before you buy option and you've got a pretty decent working model. If the game is crap, then yes the $50 per pop will give you a quicker ROI, but if the game is decent (what you'd hope of an AAA game), then more people will buy the game and you'll still earn back the money.
The idiot publishers need to forget the old model and start to think more. Right now they concentrate on consoles for which you probably need to go to the shop and buy the physical DVD. Having that means printing, stocking, distribution costs which are actually per unit driving the price. Now if the shop price is minimum $20+ for everything besides the game itself, then indeed you'd end up with $30 as minimum or so if you want to give the game for $10. And then they don't want to give the online version for say $12.99 or so which probably would be the fair value if the actual game cost is $9.99. If you drop consoles alltogether and distribute to mobile and PC devices through online means and only give offline copies to backend people who can't download shit (for higher price for the inconvenience), then games would get cheaper and piracy would drop. I for one will never buy a brand new game for >$20, it's just not worth it. The only game I've bought above that is HL2 and Portal2 because those I already knew from advance that they'll be quality products with replay value. Everything else is pretty much unknown and I'd rather pirate it to try it out and I'm not willing to give $50 usd (or for my case €50 just because I live in EU) for something that I max enjoy 10h. $10-20 and I'll buy (I've spent around 400+ EUR on Steam on games so I do buy games). And setting regions is even more shooting themselves in the foot. I wanted ME3 for example, but you can't have it here officially. Do they really think I'll wait if downloading it took me all of 5 minutes to set up? Do they think I'll buy it after I've played it through (maybe, if it's good as I did buy ME and ME2, but they'll have to enable it on Steam which doesn't seem like something in their plans).
Often not all the buttons work, or the analog controls either. And well, it's a mess to hook those things up just to play something, especially if you're going to have a several-hour gaming session because then you have to add a charger into the mix, too. And what if you get a phonecall in the middle of gaming? You have to tear everything off only to have to plug it all back in afterwards.
That's why you use a dock, a tablet and wireless controllers (with loading docks so you don't need to check batteries). Yes, those are not there yet, but if you consider the hardware of the latest iPad I can't see why you'd want to build a dedicated platform that provides about the same kind of computing capacity. The iPad for mobile use has already a quad core chip that does both the graphics and the computing and does it well. Consider the resolution that stuff runs on and how smoothly it does (just go and look at the infinity blade dungeons demo during the intro) tells you that as dedicated hardware goes it's nicely on par. If Apple or some third party publisher were to come out with the addons that are needed you'd have a viable console replacement that doubles also as your everyday tablet. win-win.
Hmm... I just bought GTA3 for the iPad. It's running the exact same graphics as the original game, the controller does take some getting used to, then again I played it on a PC, not the console version so probably the console people would adjust more easily. The full game is there, all the missions, all the sidequests and interim plays. The whole map, cars everything. I have yet to find some part missing and guess what, at $4.99 I didn't even contemplate long about it. I've already played it for hours in row with no bigger impact on the iPad battery than had I been browsing so anywhere I go I have now a good 8-10h of GTA time available if I want.
And well, GTA3 was actually from my opinion the best GTA there ever was (too much hassle with GTA4, going to gym, eating etc). And if you look at Infinity Blade Dungeons that they showed off during the iPad intro last week, then this easily gives you better graphics than Torchlight or similar games. Heck I'd not be surprised if Diablo 3 and that game are comparable. The only question is will these guys provide enough gameplay time for it. I've already played Dungeons 2 on iPad and it's damn neat RPG to play for hours and hours.
So forget about Angry Birds, it's not the only game on the new platform and the hardware that these devices feature these days is pretty solid (I mean it's tough to find a screen that runs 2048x1536 and the graphics card needed to run that resolution in good 3D is not cheap either). So as it spreads more, we'll probably see more full scale games being ported to the mobile market and once the content is equivalent you just don't need the consoles anymore... For the points why, scroll up a bit for my other comment...
Think about it for a moment. Apple has the iPad 3 running the full resolution 2048x1536 in blazing 3D. That means the iPad can definitely handle the graphics that you'd ask from a gaming console. So all you need to do is devise a dock so that you walk to your living room, plug in the tablet and pick up your wireless controller and voila you're playing console quality games.
Heck, why keep it at a tablet level even, Apple has Apple TV, a small box that a lot of people already use for loads of video content. An upgrade on that device that provides you everything you could possibly want through the cloud (all content, including video, music and games) is a natural replacement to the game consoles. The only component that they need to work through is the controller. At a basic level anyone with an iPhone/iPod touch could probably use that as the controller (loads of accelerometers, touch screen that can mimic any gaming pad if it doesn't need to display the game itself). And dedicated controllers for hard core gamers. The juice is already there, it's not that tough to pack high end 3D graphics capable hardware into a small footprint. Most of iPad size is taken by the screen and the battery.
I think what the reference slideshow presented quite well is that the mobile part has already killed a number of the lower end gaming regions and is quite in a good position to target the final platform as well. A number of quotes taken from game industry figures seem to reference also the platfrom per-se as something getting destroyed by the mobile devices, not the content. So why would someone want to buy a multi hundred USD gaming console if they can spend the same money on a new iPad, get the same games (talking about near future, not present) and also being able to use said iPad for loads of other things while it's not in use as a console. Remember, it already has AirPlay so you can easily send your video game experience to the large screen in the living room, the only missing component is the comfy controller...
If someone wants to attribute bird chirping to anyone, then they should attribute it to the birds not some magical entity. If it actually came to the claim going to GOD, then I'd like to see concrete proof from the copyright holder (and actually the existence of it...). And I doubt anyone can claim representation rights for birds therefore it's not copyrightable per se and should remain free to use. If someone can copyright bird song, then the legislation leading to it should be dumped immediately and the proposers of it made to reform it or if they don't comply simply shot.
Not entirely true. Molecules are combinations of atoms meaning that you cannot be certain this one wasn't produced mere seconds before it was "photographed". Then again, noone considers a picture of a newborn baby nude as child porn so again, why no picture.
Oh and even atoms cannot be considered as something that was made at the big bang. There's nuclear fusion and fission happening all the time. At best the underlying quarks may or may not have been originally created or they may have come into existence during flavor changing currents (i.e. weak interaction as in W or Z exchange).