sizes

A sure bet: Shure's new flagship SRH940 headphones

Closed-back, over-the-ear (circumaural) headphones were the original noise-isolating headphones. Closed-back headphones seal your ears off from external sound, but the isolation is purely acoustic; noise-canceling headphones use electronics and do a slightly better job of blocking noise.

But there are a few downsides to that approach; noise-canceling headphones always use batteries, and on some models when the batteries run out of juice, the party's over. No more music. The noise-canceling signal puts a small amount of pressure on your eardrums, which some people find uncomfortable.

The other, bigger downside to noise-canceling headphones are their electronics, which can degrade the music's sound quality. Dollar for dollar, closed-back models block almost as much noise, and always sound better.

The closed-back Shure SRH940 is fairly light (11 ounces), and the thickly padded headband and plush velvet earpads make for headphones that are extremely comfortable to wear over long periods of time. The earcups' decorative covers appear to be metal, but there's lots of gray plastic in the design, which is why it feels so light and comfy.

Despite all the plastic, the SRH940's durability seems first-rate. It's a collapsible design with 90-degree swivel earcups for convenient storage and portability in the supplied semihard storage case.

The 42-ohm SRH940 headphones come with two detachable cables--a coiled 9.84-foot cable and a straight 8.2-foot one--and thanks to the bayonet clip mount, you never accidentally yank the cable out. The cables are terminated with 3.5mm plugs at each end, and there's a screw-on 6.3mm adapter for home use. … Read more

Apple's proposed campus larger than the Pentagon

With last week's release of floor plans for Apple's proposed Cupertino, Calif., campus reboot, we finally got details on the interior bits of the complex Apple hopes to have finished by 2015. We also have a better idea of how enormous the main building, which will hold some 12,000 employees, will really be.

Over at The Mac Observer, John Martellaro has done the math on the size of the main campus, which up until last week was depicted only in renderings. His findings? The finished building will be ever so slightly larger than the Pentagon.

Using measurements … Read more

Unique resizer

We can see how people would either love or hate Picture Resizer. Those with a geeky bent, especially those used to working with command-line parameters, will probably find the program to be innovative and useful. Those who like intuitive interfaces that are easy to understand and navigate will likely take one look at it and then start searching for another program to meet their resizing needs.

There are three ways to use Picture Resizer. Users can drag and drop images onto the program's icon, choose the program from the Windows context menu after selecting the desired images, or access … Read more

Size matters

Folder Size is a free Windows utility that scans your drives or folders and displays detailed information about the size of their contents so you can see where the disk space went. It displays the sizes of files and folders as well as their percentage of total disk size.

Folder Size uses a layout common to many such utilities, mostly because it's the most efficient design: toolbar, left-hand tree view, and main window. Folder Size displayed all our disk drives with their total size, space used, and free space listed below the tree view. We clicked on our C … Read more

Microsoft knocks font size in 'App Store' trademark spat

Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs is a big fan of typography. Before dropping out of Reed College and starting Apple, Jobs took a calligraphy class that he's since attributed to the inclusion of various fonts that are a part of the Mac OS. As it turns out, Microsoft is pretty interested in fonts, too, so much in fact, that font size has become a point of contention in the legal spat between the two companies over Apple's attempts at trademarking the term "App Store" as its own.

In a motion filed this morning with the … Read more

The 404 772: Where we eat shows like this for breakfast (podcast)

March 8, 2011, marks two important holidays: one is a global day to recognize the economic, political, and social achievements of women past, present, and future, and the other is a fabricated day of rejoicing for the most important meal of the day: breakfast!

This year is the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, so check out Mashable's list of what you can do to show your appreciation for females around the world. Our favorite is a joint collaboration between Vivanista, CARE, and Sprinkles Cupcakes that helps you organize a Cupcake Party for a Purpose to meet with like-minded women in your area.

National Breakfast Day sounds like a pseudo-holiday fabricated by Kellogg to sell more breakfast cereal, but the company's latest campaign at shareyourbreakfast.com is so cool we don't even care.

For every picture that gets uploaded to the Web site, Kellogg will donate a breakfast to a hungry child with the help of Action for Healthy Kids, a nonprofit volunteer organization that helps out underserved children in America. More than 800 photos of breakfasts have already been uploaded, and you can even text a photo or description of yours with the word "Share" to 21534 or post a picture on Twitter with the accompanying hashtag #shareurbreakfast.

Wilson's all about the advancement of women and eating breakfast, but as usual he's distracted with this Friday's iPad 2 release. On the other hand, he's not as obsessed as this Texan already camped out in line to buy one. It's Justin Wagoner, the same dude who… Read more

Poll: 61 percent of CNET readers want bigger iPhone screen

Maybe bigger is better.

Just a few days ago I wrote an article entitled, "Should the iPhone 5 get a larger screen?" As part of the piece, I included a poll asking readers to cast a vote for their preference. Of the nearly 5,000 respondents, the results (as of the time of this writing) were as follows:

61 percent thought Apple should make the screen larger 30 percent thought the iPhone's screen was just right 2 percent would like to see it get smaller 8 percent didn't care

Compare that with a very similar poll … Read more

Should the iPhone 5 get a larger screen?

Last year, with all the new Android smartphones with 4-inch and larger screens hitting the market, I posted an article asking readers whether they thought the iPhone's screen was too small. In a poll, close to 50 percent of the respondents said, yes, they'd like to see Apple make the next iPhone's screen larger.

Now I'm getting some grief from readers after leaving out "larger screen" when I recently updated my piece on the the 20 feature upgrades I'd like to see in the iPhone 5, so I thought I'd better take … Read more

Size matters

With Windows, it can be hard to see the trees for the forest; it does a pretty good job with the "big picture," but you've got to do some clicking to see the details, which actually makes it harder to get an accurate overview of your system. JAM's TreeSize Free is a nifty bit of freeware that displays the size of every folder and file, including every subfolder, in a series of expandable Explorer-like tree views. You can use TreeSize Free as a standalone app activated from the desktop or start menu, but you can also … Read more

The Beats Pro headphone, a better beat?

No one can deny that the original Beats by Dr. Dre was a revolutionary headphone design. It brought style and pizazz to the headphone market, and turned on a new generation of music lovers to the joys of great sound. The Beats Studio ($350) is still selling like gangbusters, but the Beats line has expanded to include something better, the Beats Pro ($450).

The Studio Beats have a lot of bass, but the Pros have more and distinctly tighter, more visceral bass. The two headphones sound very different; the Pros have a brighter, more forward balance, and the Studio Beats … Read more