EDI TIMES

(By: Wired.com)

Apple, it seems, is all about the hits. The iPod, the iPhone and the MacBook are all phenomenally successful, both as designs and as commercial wins. These highlights, though, lead us to expect a lot of the company, and serve to make the misses stick out all the more. Apple has some embarrassing techno-skeletons in its beautiful white iCloset. Here are five.

The Hockey Puck Mouse

For a company that built itself on the first commercial, mouse equipped-computer, it’s odd that Apple has never made a good mouse. Even the current Mighty Mouse isn’t so mighty, pretending as it does to have just one button while actually sporting two, and inexplicably copying the Thinkpad’s red nipple instead of using a scroll wheel.

But the prize for Worst Mouse Ever goes the the “hockey puck”, which shipped with the original iMacs in 1998. Not only was it ugly, it was hard to hold due to size and shape, and frustrated users with a too-short cord. Rarely for Apple, style not only triumphed over substance, it utterly buried it.

The iPod Hi-Fi

Apple’s $350 speaker lasted just 18 months before it was taken out back, shot and sprinkled with lime. It was an odd product from Apple, which normally leaves these kinds of accessories to a healthy third-party market. The Bose-designed box had stereo speakers and an iPod dock on the top, and the high price tag and poor performance meant market failure.

Earbuds

Just like the lack of a good mouse, the dearth of decent headphones from Apple is another paradox. The sound quality may be comparable to or even better than the bundled ‘buds from other manufacturers, but they’ll break, and the $30 Apple wants for a new pair is better spent almost anywhere else.

I have gotten through a lot of them, and the longest any set lasted was a few months. This includes the latest, remote and microphone-toting model, which managed about six weeks before dying.

QuickTake

Long before Apple put a terrible camera in the iPhone, it put a terrible camera into a camera: The 0.3 megapixel (640×480) Apple QuickTake. The camera had no way to focus, and zooming was done by walking closer to your subject. Neither could you blast away like we do with the digicams of today: The QuickTake 100, built by Kodak, could fit just eight pictures into its 1MB memory.

The problem was that the market was immature, and the QuickTake was one of the first consumer digicams on the market. Compare this to the successful strategy of Apple since the iPod: Wait until the market has been established, then make a simpler, better product than anyone else.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

iTunes

It started so well back in 2001. Apple’s jukebox software was built on the third party SoundJam which it bought the year before, and was a slick, quick and easy-to-use music player for a long time.

Then Apple decided that iTunes should be the conduit for the iPhone, and kept piling on bloated features. What had started as a pared-down, single-minded and simple application started to sync with Outlook, gained the useless cover flow view and, on the Mac at least, appeared to have a monopoly on the spinning beach-ball of death.

Worse, the iTunes Store, a fantastically user-friendly music store, gained weight in the form of the awful, hard to navigate App Store.

Of course, these days we have a new, simple and fast music app. It’s called Spotify. Apple, though, has shafted itself. The problem with selling a revolutionary device which is an iPod, a cellphone and an internet device, all in one, is that the software to support it needs to be similarly multi-tasking.

Anything we missed? While these failures are big, we have restricted them to the modern-day Apple, and ignored the Jobs-less wilderness years of beige-boxes and overpriced printers. Feel free to add more in the comments.

(By: Yahoo News)

No todo lo que brilla en la bóveda climatizada del banco Crédito Emiliano es oro, sino algo que en Italia es igualmente apreciado: queso parmesano en proceso de añejamiento.

Interminables hileras de hormas doradas de 39 kilos, apiladas hasta 10 metros de altura en una bóveda de seguridad, se añejan durante dos años al cuidado de empleados bancarios capacitados en el venerable arte de la fabricación del queso de Parma.

Los productores de parmesano obtienen crédito para su negocio, usando el producto como garantía mientras lo someten al prolongado proceso de añejamiento. Si bien este mecanismo no nació en la crisis actual sino que se remonta a la inmediata postguerra, los productores dicen que es más importante que nunca, ya que mantiene el crédito en marcha durante tiempos en que escasean los fondos.

«En tiempos de crisis, el sistema ayuda a los queseros», dijo Iginio Morini, vocero del Consorcio del Queso Parmigiano-Reggiano Cheese Consortium, el cual agrupa a los más de 400 productores que son los únicos autorizados a comercializar su producto bajo el nombre «Parmigiano-Reggiano».

El quesero entrega, por ejemplo, el 25% de su producción a un depósito bancario y recibe un certificado que el banco acepta como garantía de un préstamo. En muchos casos, el quesero vende el título a un distribuidor mientras el queso se añeja.

El típico productor de Parmesano que fabrica 7.000 hormas por año deja unas 2.000 en garantía. De acuerdo con el cálculo de Morini, cada horma vale unos 300 euros (425 dólares), de modo que el valor de la garantía es de unos 600.000 euros. El banco otorga un crédito de entre el 60% y 70% de ese valor, o sea unos 420.000 euros.

Ese negocio constituye apenas el 1% del ingreso anual del banco, pero es crucial para su imagen en la región, donde la agricultura es uno de los sectores clave de la economía, dijo William Bizzarri, director de la subsidiaria del Credito Emiliano a cargo de los depósitos queseros.

(By: Wired.com)

Three defense attorneys representing detainees at Guantanamo Bay are being investigated for possibly breaking the law after they showed photos of suspected CIA personnel to their clients at the prison.

The lawyers, members of the military’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, showed the detainees the images in an effort to identify CIA officers and contractors who may have engaged in harsh interrogation techniques with the detainees at so-called “black sites” outside the United States, according to the Washington Post.

The lawyer’s clients have been charged with terrorism crimes related to the 9/11 attacks and are being tried before a military commission. The lawyers have been considering calling the CIA interrogators to the witness stand.

The photos, some of which were taken surreptitiously outside the homes of CIA personnel, were taken by researchers hired by the John Adams Project, a project run jointly by the ACLU and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which is helping the military attorneys defend their clients, a source told the Post.

It’s not known if the lawyers told the prisoners the images were of CIA personnel or just asked detainees if they recognized people in the pictures.

The Justice Department’s counter-espionage section is leading the investigation to determine if the lawyers broke any laws. It’s not known which laws the DoJ thinks the lawyers may have broken, but federal statutes prohibit identifying covert CIA officers. There are also rules governing the military commissions that prohibit disclosure of classified information to prisoners.

The ACLU asserts that the investigation is simply an attempt by the DoJ to intimidate the attorneys and keep the ACLU from reporting information about prisoner abuse.

“We are confident that no laws or regulations have been broken as we investigated the circumstances of the torture of our clients and as we have vigorously defended our clients’ interests,” Anthony D. Romero, the group’s executive director, told the Post. “Rather than investigate the CIA officials who undertook the torture, they are now investigating the military lawyers who have courageously stepped up to defend these clients in these sham proceedings.”

Romero told the New York Times that investigating the claims of their clients was standard to a defense attorney’s work.

“Identifying who tortured our clients and what they did to them and when is an essential part of defending their interests in these sham proceedings,” he said.