Linked List: July 22, 2009

Wednesday, 22 July 2009

Zappos is an amazing company: good prices, great selection, and absolutely top-notch customer service.

The Vanderbilt Republic Foundation ★

The Vanderbilt Republic Foundation was founded by a team of professional photography creatives with a shared desire to return attention to the value of the human experience. The VRF’s mission is to increase public awareness of critical arts, cultural, and human rights organizations. The Foundation does this by producing commercial-grade photography shoots with the industry’s most diverse and innovative working creatives.

The VRF’s first project is a four-week-long shoot in Cambodia this October, to document the lives of Cambodian performing arts masters — musicians and artists with cultural roots going back a thousand years, but whose ranks were decimated by Pol Pot’s regime in the late 1970s. It’s a fascinating, deeply moving subject, and I’m proud to announce that I’ve accepted a position on the VRF’s advisory committee.

Watch the movie, read about the project, and consider getting involved. Every donation, no matter the size, helps.

CNBC: Willfully Ignorant? ★

MacJournals on CNBC’s influential but erratic coverage of Apple’s financial results.

Apple’s Market Cap Nearly as Big as Google’s ★

Speaking of Dan “Fake Steve” Lyons, he has a good summary of Apple’s quarterly results for Newsweek:

Sales of Macintosh computers were strong too, perhaps thanks to a bit of a price cut that Apple introduced during the quarter. Apple sold 2.6 million computers, up 4 percent from last year. With market research analysts expecting the overall PC market to decline by as much as 5 percent this year, “this puts us 7 to 9 percent ahead of the market,” Cook said.

Sales of portable Macs — MacBooks and MacBook Pros — did even better, growing 13 percent in the quarter.

Maybe those Microsoft “Laptop Hunter” ads will kick in next quarter.

Hacked iPhones Share Phone Network ID, Receive Same Push Notifications ★

Remember how hacked SIM-unlocked iPhones weren’t getting push notifications? Now there are hacks that enable them, but a side effect of at least one such hack is that push notifications are shared between multiple devices that have applied the hack.

Fake Steve on the True Cost of Chinese Manufacturing ★

Fake Steve:

We all know that there’s no fucking way in the world we should have microwave ovens and refrigerators and TV sets and everything else at the prices we’re paying for them. There’s no way we get all this stuff and everything is done fair and square and everyone gets treated right. No way. And don’t be confused — what we’re talking about here is our way of life. Our standard of living. You want to “fix things in China,” well, it’s gonna cost you. Because everything you own, it’s all done on the backs of millions of poor people whose lives are so awful you can’t even begin to imagine them, people who will do anything to get a life that is a tiny bit better than the shitty one they were born into, people who get exploited and treated like shit and, in the worst of all cases, pay with their lives.

Apple Confirms Death of iPhone Worker in China ★

Jim Dalrymple:

According to various Chinese media reports, the worker at Chinese manufacturer Foxconn committed suicide last week after a fourth-generation iPhone prototype for which he was responsible went missing.

According to Shanghaiist’s translation, what drove him to jump to his death from a 12-story building was the torture he was going through at the hands of Foxconn security.

Even if the missing prototype was stolen, not lost (and let’s not be naive about how unlikely it would be for someone to lose, Uncle Billy-style, a secret Apple prototype when it’s clear that Foxconn doesn’t exactly chalk such losses up with an “oh, well”), torture is evil. Apple needs to investigate this, publish the results, and if the man was truly tortured, sever ties with Foxconn.