Why are people going on about the Woolworth's logo being in the shape of an apple? Could it be that they only see the shape of an apple subliminally because Apple is taking legal action against Woolworth's?

If you actually look at the shape of the Woolworth's W logo you will see that it is in the general shape of produce, and not specifically an apple.

The shape is actually more like a tomato or pumpkin than an apple, and it is also the shape of other well known fruits and gourds due to its squat shape.

So while Apple's logo is clearly the shape of an apple, Woolworth's W logo (besides being a stylized letter and not a solid object like Apple's logo) is clearly not specifically in the shape of an apple.

In this case, Apple is going beyond what would be considered to be "reasonable" in going after Woolworth's.

That is a cool and useful search engine!

One neat trick I found, is that if the cover art is not the one you expected, or if there is an alternate cover for the same album that you are looking for, put a number after the album title.

For example, you will get different cover art for the same album if you enter:
electric ladyland
electric ladyland 1
electric ladyland 2
electric ladyland 3
electric ladyland 4

Yup. We're human (always have been ;-)

But we don't get viruses like Windows users do.

Read below for the reason why.

Your article tile "Apple Quietly Admits Macs Get Viruses" is... well let's say it's misleading.

The definition of a Virus is "A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without the permission or knowledge of the owner."

There has never been a Mac virus in the almost 10 years that it has been in existence. This is because nothing gets installed without an admin password being entered. A Mac cannot be infected "without the permission or knowledge of the owner." (unlike some other operating systems ;-)).

There have been a few examples of Trojans produced for Macs, but they never got very far because 1) you had to be tricked into downloading the Trojan, and 2) even after downloading it, you need to enter an admin password to install it.

This is not to say that Macs are immune to malware. They're not. But Macs are far more secure and impervious to malware attacks than PCs that run Windows.

Those who support this change are bringing up two points that have no logical basis.

First of all, for anyone to say that "It started with computer types INCORRECTLY using the previously word existing "kilo" to mean 1024." is laughable, and demonstrates a level of ignorance that is hard not to pity.

Computer storage and addressing has NEVER been metric, and never will be (unless someone goes back to square-one and reinvents computers based on a system of 10s... in which case we will have to trash all of our current computers, software, hard drives, etc.).

Second, the IEEE is not a holy spirit that sees and knows all. It is a group of people who make decisions on technical standards for marketing purposes. Sometimes their decisions make a lot of sense, but other times (such as in this instance) they don't!

What the IEEE is doing with this decision, at the pressuring of the hard drive manufacturers, is to change the long-standing, reality-based binary system of sizing hard drives (to what they have been getting away with for the past 10 years) so that they can make more money by selling their products at inflated, unrealistic sizes.

If you are supporting this and enjoy being ripped off by buying a "1TB" hard drive that is really only 930 GB in size, then it's hard to understand your point of view.

As much as it is an IEEE supported standard, instigated by the hard drive manufacturers, it is still not based on anything approaching reality.

The reality is that computers (and hard drives) always have been binary systems, NOT base-10. Saying that you are doing this to go metric and/or be less confusing to people also is unrealistic.

Hard drives are made up of sectors/blocks of 512 bytes (2 to the 9th bytes) or 1024 bytes (2 to the 10th bytes) (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector). These are the smallest units that make up a hard drive. There is no such thing as a 1000 byte (10 to the 3rd) sector.

It is therefore IMPOSSIBLE for hard drive manufacturers to make a hard drive that actually uses their own measuring of "1TB" (1,000,000,000,000 bytes). They are stuck in reality having to make hard drives that use the binary system, NOT the base-10 system!

This is why an advertised "1 TB" hard drive is 1,000,204,886,016 bytes in actual size (not 1,000,000,000,000 bytes). There is no amount of IEEE decision making that can ever make a hard drive base-10. Repeat... It is IMPOSSIBLE.

When you buy a "1TB" hard drive you are only getting a bit more than 90% of a real 1 TB.

And just remember that the gap between what the hard drive manufacturers sell you and the actual number of bytes you think you are buying will widen as time goes by.

With each progression to a new order of measurement, (MegaBytes, GigaBytes, TeraBytes, PetaBytes, ExaBytes, etc.) that difference gets bigger and bigger; meaning more savings for the hard drive manufacturers and the less you are getting when you buy a hard drive.

For example the difference between a real kilobyte (1024 bytes) and 1000 bytes is only a 2.4% difference. But the difference at the TeraByte level (1,099,511,627,776 bytes vs. 1,000,000,000,000 bytes) jumps way up to a much larger 10% loss! And this loss will get greater and greater exponentially into the future.

In other words: Reality Bytes.

Windows, Linux, even the UNIX system running under Snow Leopard report Gigabytes as 1,024 MB... NOT 1,000 MB! And RAM manufacturers do the same. It is only 10 years ago that hard drive manufacturers started selling us less than what they advertised. They probably saw that they could make a lot of money this way. They also must have seen that as hard drives increase in size, the less proportionally they could sell as an advertised hard drive size because the difference between the true binary sizes and their base-10 sizes becomes exponentially larger.

This is an excellent point. If drive manufacturers sell hard drives as 1TB in size for example... even using their own false base-10 calculations it's impossible to have a hard drive that is exactly 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. This is because hard drives and RAM are built using the same binary systems that have always been used by computers. I have a 1TB hard drive that shows up in Snow Leopard as "1 TB (1,000,204,886,016 bytes)". This is a binary number, NOT a base-10 number. But a real, honest binary number for 1TB is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes. In other words we are being short-changes by about 100,000,000,000 bytes!!!

@Anderson: You wrote:
"So, I would have felt ripped off, as in your analogy, PRIOR to the change."

Your logic is backwards. Before the hard drive manufacturers turned away from using correct base-2 sizes, if you bought for example a 1GB hard drive and took it home it was a full 1GB of storage (as advertised).

After the change to non-standard sizing, the same hard drive would have been sold as 1.2GB but when you took it home it was (what it was before) only 1GB.

You didn't feel ripped off "PRIOR to the change."

You do feel ripped off NOW!

This article is pure bull. For example:
"It's been traumatic for some, having a psychological effect similar to Pluto losing its status as a full-fledged planet."

This is the wrong analogy. An appropriate analogy would be going into a grocery store to buy a dozen (12) buns. But one day you go into the store, pay the same amount for a dozen buns, but you are given 10 buns. The grocer tells you that this is the new "dozen", and so the price is the same as before.

Would you feel ripped off? Of course you would.

It was the hard drive manufacturers that came out with this new way of calculating disk sizes in order to convince us we were buying hard drives of a certain size when in fact they were smaller than the advertised size. Unfortunately, Apple is now going along with this sham.

It's only in recent years that hard drive manufacturers colluded with one another to change the way it sized hard drive capacities. Most people, such as myself, can remember when hard drives were sold in real MegaByte and GigaByte sizes. They only created this new "dozen" in order to sell us less for the price of what we would have been buying previously.

Being ripped off like this should make you very angry. Yet we get an article like this trying to convince us that these new smaller measurements were there all along and that they are correct. They are not!!!

There are a lot of pleasant surprises added into Snow Leopard, but there is one very dumb change that has been intoduced, and unfortunately there is no option to change it.

Starting with Snow Leopard, Apple has decided to show disk and file sizes the same non-standard way that hard drive manufacturers have been advertising and selling their hard drives in order to convince people that they were buying larger hard drives than they were actually getting.

Bits, Bytes, Kilobytes, Megabytes, and Gigabytes etc. have always been measured as a multiple of 2. But with Snow Leopard all sizes are now calculated at a multiple of 10. This may not sound like much of a difference, but you may have noticed that the "Terabyte" hard drive that you buy is not a Terabyte at all.

A Terabyte = 2 to the 40th power bytes (1,099,511,627,776 bytes. But when you buy a "Terabyte" hard drive you are only getting 10 to the 12th power bytes (1,000,000,000,000 bytes). In other words you are getting almost 100GB less than an actual Terabyte. This is a huge difference.

Now if you had bought a Terabyte hard drive, it shows up as 1TB instead of the slightly over 900GB that showed up correctly in the Finder before. This also means that all of your files are now shown larger than they actually are. For example, a 3.77GB video file that I have now shows up in the Finder as 4.05GB. But if you open that video file in QuickTime Player it shows the correct file size as 3.77GB.

This isn't the only inconsistency. Although hard drives and files are now measured in the inflated base-10 numbers, your RAM still shows up correctly as real Gigabytes at base-2. For example, a 2GB DIMM still shows up as 2GB (2,147,483,648 bytes) NOT as 2.15GB using the same base-10 calculation that the hard drive manufacturers (and now Apple) use.

This makes no sense, and it just makes things that used to be very straight-forward confusing now.

IMHO the hard drive manufacturers should be mandated by the government to go back to selling hard drives with the actual storage sizes, rather than conning people with inflated numbers. Also, Apple should not be going along with what the hard drive manufacturers are doing, and supporting them in their immoral sales tactics.