"Whenever you scan a volume, the program asks if you want to save that scan as a baseline. Assuming you do so, you can later use that scan as, well, a baseline for comparison with a more-recent scan. Baseline will then tell you not only the size of every file and folder, but also how much each file and folder has changed since the previous baseline was saved. (If you’ve saved multiple baselines, you can compare the current scan to any of them.)" NERDTASTIC!

"iTunes has long supported the ability to rate (and display) half-star ratings for songs, but until recently, you had to use an AppleScript to actually set those half-star ratings. Now, thanks to a hidden iTunes preference, you can set half-star ratings directly within iTunes." NERDTASTIC!

"Even knowing that retaliation was certain, Hamas seemed to end the cease-fire in part because of its longstanding discipline and consistency. For years it has preached to Palestinians the rejectionist credo that Fatah negotiated with Israel and got nowhere; Hamas’s way of armed force, it argued year in and year out, was the only way."

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

"Certainly, some developers are attempting to counteract this App Store effect, by providing higher quality products at a higher price. SimCity, currently the #2 selling app, has a $9.99 price tag. However, that's a game with an established brand; top sellers have by and large been $0.99 applications. It's difficult to look at iFart Mobile, which has sitting at #1 in the App Store for nearly a week, and view this as a quality, stable marketplace for developers or consumers. The App Store, like Walmart, has been reduced to selling disposable goods at the lowest possible prices." That last sentence KILLS.

"If you know nothing about maintaining a mower, Wal-Mart has helped make that ignorance irrelevant: At even $138, the lawn mowers at Wal-Mart are cheap enough to be disposable. Use one for a season, and if you can't start it the next spring …, put it at the curb and buy another one. That kind of pricing changes not just the economics at the low end of the lawn-mower market, it changes expectations of customers throughout the market. Why would you buy a walk-behind mower from Snapper that costs $519? What could it possibly have to justify spending $300 or $400 more? That's the question that motivated Jim Wier to stop doing business with Wal-Mart. Wier is too judicious to describe it this way, but he looked into a future of supplying lawn mowers and snow blowers to Wal-Mart and saw a whirlpool of lower prices, collapsing profitability, offshore manufacturing, and the gradual but irresistible corrosion of the very qualities for which Snapper was known." Amen, brother.

"TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain." Stuff like this will bring down the curtain, and then it'll be something else. It's always a pricing game in telecom, and then someone undercuts the competition.