Linked List: February 3, 2012

Friday, 3 February 2012

Doxie Go + Wi-Fi 

My thanks to Apparent for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their new Doxie Go + Wi-Fi — a tiny, portable, wireless scanner that works anywhere. It includes great Mac software that creates searchable PDFs and integrates easily with just about any imaginable workflow. Save scans to Dropbox, Evernote, Yojimbo, your iPhone/iPad photo roll, or keep them in the Doxie app. And with Wi-Fi, your scans push wirelessly and instantly to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

Doxie Go helps you go not just paperless, but wireless. I bought one a few months ago and love it.

Judge Not By What They Do, But Rather By How They Spin 

Avram Piltch of Laptop magazine, talking to Li Qiang, founder of China Labor Watch:

“Dell and Hewlett Packard are not doing as good as Apple is doing right now,” Li Said. “But when we talk about publicity and public relations, it’s another story.”

So who does CLW spend the most effort criticizing — the companies whose actual labor practices are worse, or the one whose “public relations” (read: willingness to take a meeting with CLW) are worse? Take a guess.

Apple Updates iBooks Author With Clarified EULA 

Matthew Panzarino:

Apple has updated its iBooks Author app in order to clarify the language of its End User License Agreement. The changes to the EULA clarify that Apple does indeed intend the packaged product to be sold on the iBookstore only, but also make it clear that it does not lay claim to the content that you use to create the book, nor does it try to limit what you can do with that content elsewhere.

First 

Horace Dediu:

Apple reached 75% of profit share, nearly 40% of revenue share and 9% of units share.

Apple and Samsung combined for about 91% of profits with RIM third at 3.7%, HTC fourth at 3.0% and Nokia last at 1.8% of a $15 billion total for the quarter.

Not bad.

In Praise of Cheap Labor 

Paul Krugman, writing for Slate back in 1997:

Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization — of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad.

But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.

Keep in mind that Krugman is, by anyone’s standards, a true liberal.