Invariably this article, like the ones on Foxconn working conditions, will be dismissed as something that all multinational corporations do, not just Apple. Be it better working conditions in China, more jobs in the U.S., or paying a fair share of California taxes, Apple won’t do it because it won’t “maximize competitive shareholder value.”
Yet don’t we expect more from Apple? Many wouldn’t think twice of criticizing Mitt Romney’s 15% effective tax rate, yet Apple gets a free pass? It’s clear to stay competitive Apple can’t change everything. But something, from donations to California public schools, to bumping up the price on iPhones and Macs (or at least presenting the option) by a few bucks for better working conditions, can be done.
Smartly written piece by Killscreen Daily writer Theon Weber reminiscing on radio stations in the Grand Theft Auto and Fallout series. I loved this line:
Mario’s never needed period pop to bind together his adventures, or situate them historically: Princess Peach is to the right of where he is, and left is where he came from.
As the debut of Google Drive underlined this week, there's a lot of options out there for cloud storage. To help you decide what's best for your needs, Ars Technica breaks down the pros and cons of each service.
(For the record, I'm pretty happy with the 8GB I get via Dropbox. Some great iOS integration with key apps doesn't hurt either.)
Twitter is awesome, yet I’m very selective with my follow list; a lot of people I otherwise respect just don’t tweet with either a frequency or content that I’m comfortable constantly scrolling through. For that reason a lot of Twitter recommendation engines I find don’t work well.
Peep could change all that. It’s a little tool, produced during this year’s Seven on Seven conference, where you type in any user name and get a private list added to your account which mirrors all their followers. In other words, you get a list that mirrors their timeline. Clever.
Apple sold more iPhones in the last quarter, 35 million, than Nintendo has been able to sell handhelds in any single year. The total of 109 million iPhones sold over the past four quarters eclipses the 98.5 million Nintendo portables sold over the past four years.
The market of a dedicated portable gaming device is clearly drawing to a close. Sans major handheld sales, where will Nintendo move next?
Excellent discussion over at Slashfilm this week regarding the death of film as a physical media. Hosts Dave, Devindra and Adam break down the implications for a half hour, covering technology, economics and the emotional attachment to celluloid.
Because the Slashfilmcast moved to a shorter, more streamlined format a few weeks ago to accommodate host Dave’s new day job, I didn’t expect we’d see in depth discussions like this. Kudos to the team for keeping production levels high.
Perhaps you’re reading this post, don’t know much about HTML and CSS, but want to start. Many if not most would recommend some sort of online tutorial. Based on the sample chapter I’ve read and reviews elsewhere, check out this book first. Gorgeous work and $15 on Amazon.
Granted it’s true 99% of technical books out there are outdated within seemingly a day after their publication. Yet the raw basics of HTML and CSS – markup, attributes, layout – are fairly timeless. I expect this book, for this reason and with its shallow learning curve, will last on shelves a lot longer.
This week’s Mad Men episode was probably my favorite of the year, and I couldn’t at first put a finger on why. Then I read this excellent point by Slate critic John Swansburg:
One of the pleasures of Mad Men has always been its unpredictability—it’s a fool’s errand trying to guess how the plot will twist—but that unpredictability has reached new heights this season. It’s no longer merely a question of story—now it’s a question of form, too. “Mystery Date” incorporated elements of horror, “Signal 30” culminated in a hilarious comic set-piece, and, as you guys have noted, last night’s episode dabbled in noir and the psychedelic while also experimenting with chronology. When I tune in on Sunday, I’m not just wondering what’s going to happen, I’m wondering how’s it going to happen—what mode will the series operate in tonight?
I love noir works like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, along with fragmented chronologies like Pulp Fiction and Memento. Seeing how Mad Men borrowed from both the noir and fragmented timeline genre, it makes a lot more sense why it clicked so well for me.
Really nice roundup by Verge writer Nilay Patel on the privacy implications of each cloud service. Not crazy about Apple’s ability to delete “objectionable” material, but then again, I’m not the audience for buying iCloud space.