Marketplace Airs Video From Foxconn

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Marketplace:

Marketplace Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz is only the second reporter ever to gain access to visit the factory floor at Apple’s Chinese producer Foxconn. In this exclusive video, see highlights from his tour of the assembly line and the Foxconn campus and facilities to see what living and working conditions are like for the hundreds of thousands of workers there.

It’s amazing to me how much of this is done by hand.

Be sure to read the rest of the group’s coverage.

Following the Money

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Jeffrey Inscho at Static Made:

Developers of the next Instagram: please give users the opportunity to directly support your service by paying for it! Please take our money! Please have a sustainable business plan, or better yet, a platform philosophy!

Some platforms are doing it and it’s working. Look at Pinboard. Look at 500pixels. Look at Instapaper. All thriving with a paying user base. It’s time for us, as empowered users of technology, to start following the money.

This.

Stop Crying About Free Services

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Michael Schechter:

If Facebook buying Instagram pissed you off, I have a suggestion. Don’t just stop using Instagram, stop using free social networks and services period. Stop using sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare or Pinterest, because it is a given that they will all inevitably let you down in favor of the bottom line. More often than not, when you actually quit a service, it’s not because they were evil. It’s just because they either became useless or boring. The reality is that you’re not going to stop using services that are useful to you. You’re just going to waste time switching from one company to the next until your latest service inevitably falls short or sells out.

Garret Murray, on the Das Keyboard

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He writes:

I’ll tell you this, friends: It’s hideous and it’s loud and it’s heavy and it’s huge… but I love typing on it. I love the feeling of rattling off a long paragraph of text uninterrupted while the air is filled with insanely loud clacking and I love the way the keys feel as I strike them. If I can just control my gag reflex each morning when I walk into the office and see the thing, everything will work out just fine.

If.

I feel the same way about my Extended II, except for the looks. I love this beige behemoth.

On Mike Wallace and Depression

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Thom Patterson at CNN:

But in 2005, Wallace made news of his own when he acknowledged his longtime war with depression – a fight that nearly caused him to take his own life.

“I came perilously close to committing suicide,” Wallace wrote in his memoir “Between You and Me.”

[…]

Going public with his struggle did much to help others know they weren’t alone, said Dr. Charles Raison, CNNhealth’s mental health expert.

Telling everyone that someone as famously intelligent and successful as Wallace could be taken down by the disease helped to lessen the social stigma that often comes with the label “clinically depressed,” said Raison, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

On the Thunderbolt Display

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Sam Oliver at AppleInsider:

The 27-inch Apple Thunderbolt Display is the North American market leader for LED LCD computer screens sized 24 inches and up, accounting for 26.2 percent of the market.

Though Apple leads sales in that market segment, its position has fallen considerably from 2010, when the Apple Cinema Display accounted for 53.3 percent of LED LCD monitors 24 inches and up, according to new data from NPD’s DisplaySearch.

While I love my 27-inch display, unless you have a ton of Thunderbolt accessories, its hard to ignore panels made by other companies that sell for far less.