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Computer Makers Sued Over Hard Drive Size
FPCat writes "Finally, some one is doing something about one of my pet peeves. It seems a group of people are suing Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, and others for misleading consumers about hard disk sizes. About time someone spoke up and said '1000 MB != 1 GB'" It's not much of a mystery to anyone who's up on industry practices, but it's similar to the way graphic displays are sized, cereal boxes are filled, and so on. Andy Rooney could have a field day with this one.
It's how you use it. (Look, someone had to make the joke.)
It's about time that false advertising get's thrashed.
Karma: Good, or bust!
In SI units (which most civilised counties use) M means mega which is defined as 10^6, i.e. 1000000 , it is only the computer industry that deems K (1000) to equal 1024 which it does not, then extrapolates this to give 1M = 1024 x 1024. This is absolute rubbish, a different system of quantification should be used when referring to binary powers, as the borrowing of those from SI is clearly misleading.
I'd totally be on board with these people except that instead of 1000Mb == 1 Gb, 1024Mb == 1Gb.
They are getting MORE than they think!
Seagate employee?!?
Actually, 1000MB == 1GB...
you're probably thinking 1024MiB = 1GiB
If someone is suing Apple, etc, over the definition of 'mega', then they're going to lose.
The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees.
I'm not sure what disgorgement means, but it sounds really gross.
I'm looking for a HEPA media filter for my TV. I'm alergic to reality shows.
Due to the confusion between base 10 and base 2, the base 2 version of MB is now MiB and the base 2 version of GB is now GiB. Confusing but thats how it is.
That doesn't sound like any false advertising to me. But I haven't looked at other ads for hard drives in a while.
Thursdae
Thats just stupid. I think the lawsuit is innapropriate.
HD manufacturers always measuered their disks like that.
What next? Will people sue that their 56k modems are not 56kilobytes/second? Or that their DSL line is 1.5Mbits and not bytes?
This is just silly. They might as well complain that they lose size in formating.
In Soviet Russia, the television watches YOU!
Andy Rooney could have a field day with this one.
:)
Yeah, and while he's at it he can rile up the feminists by making a comment about how females shouldn't use computers.
A gigabyte IS 1000 megabytes. A megabyte is, however, NOT 1024 kilobytes or 104576 bytes. That's MiB and GiB you're thinking of. Giga and Mega are SI prefexes. Not binary compatible.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
bah, 1000 Mb is 1 GB...these people just don't know what a GiB is :)
On Slashdot, we normally complain about frivolous lawsuits. Doesn't this fall under that category? I'm POSITIVE that every hard drive I've bought in the past several years has come with an explanation of what each individual manufacturer considers one KB, MB, or GB to be equal to.
I hope this gets dismissed quickly.
You always find that after the filesystem is on a drive that it is even smaller.
It would be better for Hard Drive manufacturers to quote the size after formatting and installing a filesystem to avoid confusion.
Seriously how much is an extra gig or 2 going to cost them?
There is no god
I had this argument with a kid in eighth grade.
But the important point, can't these people with money to hire lawyers go after something worth fighting for? You pick one:
RIAA
Patriot Act
SCO
Definition of GB
Oh the horror!!!!!!!!
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
From the Article:
>>For example, when a consumer buys what he
>>thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the
>>plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140
>>gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10
>>gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra
>>2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures.
In other news, the RIAA is going the way of minority report and has started a new pre-download offensive.
The RIAA is now hunting children down and suing parents over the potential songs that could be stored in the extra 10GB missing on 150GB hard disks.
did somebody buy a 100gb drive with the intent of using EVERY LAST BYTE of it when they realized it actually works out to a touch less? if i tell somebody it's 100 degrees outside and it's actually 97, it's HOT.
people need to get a life, seriously...
well, it's nothing one behind the ear wouldn't cure
So now we're going to see fine print saying "Warning: actual byte conversions may vary" !
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
So, a bunch of lawyers get obscenely rich and 2 years from now we all get a $5.00 coupon toward the purchase of a new disk.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I somehow doubt that :-
.or 20,000 pictures.
That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs
is going to leave a favorable impression on the judges, they should just stick to their porn claim
. .
to get on their good side
the article says nothing about the MB to GB. I think what these idiots are complaining about is the lost disk space due to filesystem metadata. either way, they're bound to lose.
Are they complaining about what a GB is or the fact that you only end up with 95% of the drive when you get done formatting?
17" monitors, with 15.7" viewable?
Ya, I have an 11 inch... but you can only see 6.
---------------------------- DevNull - a discernible void in the province of Saskatchewan
Anyone who can understand that there's a difference between deciding a KB is 1000 bytes vs 1024 bytes should also know better than to make this into a lawsuit. I'll bet the motivation isn't even so much to screw consumers as to avoid confusing them. Once your average american on the street groks the metric system, explaining that we're working with multiples of 2^10 instead of 10^3 isn't going play well.
If you're really in a tizzy about this, just invent the distinction "binary GB|MB|KB" and "decimal GB|MB|KB" and stick with that.
Tweet, tweet.
I'm not familiar with California civil procedure, but if it's similar to federal civil procedure, the next--and most important--step is to certify the "class." If the court certifies the class, it's Settlement City with millions to go to the attorneys and coupons (or some other pittance) to go to the class. If not, game over for the plaintiffs who will then have to pay some serious attorney's fees.
Isn't it about time for some class action reform?
Unless they changed the metric system, 1000 GB = 1 TB
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Just read the box. All the HDs I've bought come in boxes that say "A megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes." Given, they are older hard drives. If anyone is worried, they can just cat /dev/hda | wc to be sure.
Every hard drive (even on web sites that sell systems) has a disclaimer that it isn't the "actual" byte size.
I really think that people should standardise the meaning of kilo-, and giga- to their SI meanings. The is a google cache link to a web page about the proposed changes where they would change to SI definitions, and new prefixes (kibi, gibi) would come into to define the warped computer terminology defintions of kilo- and giga-. It would be less fuss for most people, and everyone could then get on without all this trivial garbage.
those hard drives that are sold as 80gb drives, but have 20GB partitions allocated for the OS 'backup'. That's my pet peave. Luckally I don't buy systems with that 'feature'
If PDA manufacturers can get sued for it, why not their desktop counterparts?
Bye!
This gives my computer-illiterate family and friends to bitch to me about at get togethers.
"My hard drive is a few mega-whatever's short. Is there a program I can download? Can you fix it?"
:It would be better for Hard Drive manufacturers to quote the size after formatting and installing a filesystem to avoid confusion.
This would depend on the file system installed, and the settings of this file system. (journal, etc)
They may be able to give quotes on the simple FAT filesystem, but anything more than that would be impossible, even the mainstream NTFS filesystem.
But the truth is most women find bigger is better.
Yes I would know.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
There's no rule stopping the computing world from "borrowing" the term mega, to describe 2^20.
In fact, there's a lot of precedence. Look up any word beginning with 'mega' that ISN'T a *metric* unit of measurement, there are hundreds. Megalopolis, anyone? I'm pretty sure it doesn't refer to one million cities, the context makes that clear. Just as seeing 'byte' next to something has always indicated to everyone (with the exception of hard drive manufacturers) base 2, not 10.
It makes no sense to measure anything in a computer system in powers of 10, other than the make products look a few percent bigger, and confuse the public. The world got along just fine using MB, KB, etc until people started abusing it.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
yea i realize you're talking Fahrenheight, but the whole point of the suit is to get them to be exact
"For example, when a consumer buys what he thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive, the plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140 gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs or 20,000 pictures. "
Digitized songs? Hasn't the RIAA made a determination that these must be pirated material? This means that only music pirates and similar scum have an interest in measuring hard disk in Gigabytes rather than 1000 Megabytes.
Me and my 20-30 gigs of missing space (yeah, i gotta lot of computers) want in on this one.
-Tim Louden
As quoted from here, "1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less".
In this context, kilobits means 1000 bits, not 1024. So a 56 kbps modem corresponds (ideally) to around 6.84 kilobytes (of the 1024-bit variety) per second.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It's also worth noting that EXT2 and some other UNIX-based filesystems reserve a certain percent of the space; this makes their available capacity smaller for non-root users.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
I mean, if you make $10k/year, the decimal notation cheats you out of $240. $100k/year and you are making $2400 less.
I mean, who decided you could do this? My 120 gig drive is really only 112 gigs. If I sold gasoline for 1.29 a gallon, then put a little footnoot on my sign that said "*Gallon is used to mean 32 oz" you better believe I'd be sued. You can't just redefine things like that -- its deceptive. How many people buy 120 gig hard drivers not realizing they're really only getting 112 gigabytes?
Also, as a side note if anyone else is looking to sue someone, ice cream manufacturers recently reduced the amount of ice cream in their half-gallon containers rather than raise the cost. Despite the fact that thye no longer actually contain a half gallon, they are still clearly labelled "half gallon" on the containers (Though the ounces are properly listed, and anyone who knows how many ounces there are in a gallon knows they're being shortchanged).
Deceptive marketting practices make baby jesus cry. . .
I'm going to use my class action cupon to pay my SCO liscence.
Car, truck, and motorcycle represent their motors rounded usually to the nearest 100. My 1100cc motorcycle is actually onlt 1085cc. Isnt this sort of behavior rampany? Are 50mg pills always 50mg? Certainly 2x4 lumber is not actually 2x4. I would think making everything absolutely accurate would simple confuse the average consumer.
This just seems silly.
I have two Compact Flash cards from Sandisk, one is labelled 30Mb and was bought in 1999, the other was bought last year and is labelled 32Mb - guess what, they are both the same capacity.
So sometime between then and now, they've decided to change from an honest reporting of size to a dishonest one. It wasn't a matter of "it's always the way its been", someone there made a conscious decision to mislead.
(oh yeah, and I'm angry because that 2Mb could store half a digitized song!)
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
It's one of the two generally used systems when dealing with computer data: one based on the SI units (base 10), and one based on base 2. Arguably the latter were ill-chosen without much foresight: 1024 bits was "close enough" to 1000 to call it a kilobyte, but as you go up, it gets worse, so 2^10, 2^20, 2^30, etc. should have had their own names, not recycled the SI prefixes. Of course, that's what's happened now (kibibyte, Mebibyte, etc.), but nobody uses those.
In any case, the lawsuit doesn't make much sense to me. It's fairly common practice to measure things this way, even with computers. Your 56k modem actually transfers 56000 bits per second; your 128kbps mp3 is 128000 bits per second (not 128 x 1024), and so on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
...(especially when that sniffing is misspelled "most civilised counties", and directly contributes to marketing-droid number inflation), how about looking it up?
More power to the plaintiffs. Maybe next we can get it so monitors can stop being labeled ridiculous things like "19 inches (18 inches viewable)". Who cares what the size across the glass envelope is -- I wanna know how big my screen is, dammit!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I would say "Look. When you paid for 512MB of memory, you actually got 536,870,912 bytes. So I tell you what, compensate your manufacturer for the extra memory they gave you, and we'll have them compensate you for the disk space you think you should have had. Kapeesh?"
but yes this is a pet peeve of mine. However the bottom of the IBM flyers I've read have a notation next to the hard drive size and an explanation of how they measure size for the brochure.
To me that sounds like it explains it and if you don't read it / don't pay attention that is their legal out.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Heh, I remember when Apple actually did it THE OTHER way. I was trying to look up a Maxtor 4.0 GB HD that shipped in one of my macs, and could not find any mention of such a hd. The Apple specs clearly said it was 4.0 GB. But it turned out that Maxtor classified these as 4.3GB, whereas apple used the 1024 size cound, rather than the 1000 that maxtor used. Heh.
It has to be formatted. That's just how it is. You wouldn't get much use out of a hard drive without a filesystem on it. Suing them isn't really going to help much. Even if the lawsuit goes to court and they win, which they really shouldn't, then there will be weird numbers on ads like "now with a 73.45 GB hard drive". People just need to realize that they're gonna lose ~ 10% to formatting. It's like the halfs of penny's that are rounded down. Oh, maybe we could write a program to gather all the lost gigs and use them to.....store stuff......
-or so you'd think
Had I read the story, I would say something like "It's about time somebody did something about this."
However, since I have not, I feel less agitated and think that hard drives are so large now relative to ordinary computer uses (surfing the web, e-mail, word processing, etc.) that only us nerds would quibble about a few megabytes. This is the year 2003--we live in a gigabyte age now, so what does it matter?
All they need to say is something like "For every gigabyte you buy, you get another 24 megabytes FREE!"
This lawsuit has already happened. That is why monitor manufacturers always print viewable area right next to the diagonal length. In that lawsuit, consumers got the labels and the coupons for new monitors; lawyers got the cash.
If anyone has a link to more detailed information, please post it.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
The fact is, the prefixes kilo, mega, giga, and so on are not derived from SI, they are simply prefixes which SI uses. Technical conventions in the hardware and software industry define these prefixes to mean something different than the SI usage, which is completely fine. The problem as I see it, for example, is that using kilobyte for 1000 bytes is not very useful in describing your hardware. And, it mangles a well hewn industry convention.
Besides, we have a history of reappropriating words in English. biweekly
and this is nothing new...
"1. 1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less." source
It seems apple has had this issue in consideration for some time now.
Spoon not. Fork, or fork not. There is no spoon.
As long as they tell you their "20GByte" drive is actually 20,000,000,000 bytes unformated (which Maxtor does), then I don't see the problem. I was under the impression that every hard driver manufacturer used a multiplier of 1000 instead of 1024, in which case it is pretty hard to call this anticompetive behaviour. In fact, it is just the opposite -- every manufacturer was forced to use this definition to avoid unfavorable price/size comparisons with other vendors.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Yeah, and just when we were a few months away from talking about our desktops and their terabyte drives, (sound like terror, very 1337) we will instead get some kibi, mebi, tibi crap. That just SUCKS! Maybe there is hope yet. If we are lucky, they'll call it a titibyte! ;)
About time, i've been complaining about this for years!
Buy a 8gb hdd and you get some 7.8gb space. Yeah, ok..
Buy a 80 hdd and you get only 77gb space. Ya what? Where did 3 whole gb go?
You can argue that 1Gb = 1000Mb till the cows come home, but every OS (Linux, BSD, OSX, Windows!) say that 1Gb = 1024Mb and that 1Kb = 1024 Bytes, etc.
So as far as Windows is concerned, your 80Gb hdd isn't 80 gigabytes at all, but a whole lot smaller. Linux, BSD, MacOSX, hell, even MS-DOS says the same thing.
D.
You can tell how powerful someone is by the magnitude of the crime they can commit and be able to get away with.
Can you say "frivilous lawsuit?" We've got the RIAA, the "Patriot" act and SCO out there, and they're suing over 1000 vs 1024? My thoughts:
* If you actually know what 2^10, 2^20, etc is, you already know enough to see if the manufacturer means 1000 or 1024.
* If you don't, you're not going to notice a few percent difference.
* The average moron falls under number 2.
I mean, this is practically the *meaning* of a trivial lawsuit. No one will get anything from this except a bunch of scummy lawyers (Not that all lawyers are scum; it's just that the scum get more attention)
Personally, I think that when the law code is so convoluted, long, cross-linked, and full of antique, useless waste that you can make millions of dollars interperting it for others, it's time to do a serious code audit.
A lot of people here have claimed that the *bi prefixes are SI standards. They aren't. They're IEC standards.
I like smurfs.
Maybe we could make a beowolf cluster of these?
Hot grits and chicks!
Uh, uh, hard disk good.
Ok so we argue about MB vs. MiB. What about "blocks" on the f'ing XBOX thingy? What the fuck are those?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
KB 1.024
MB 1.048
GB 1.073
TB 1.0995
As you can see, even with TB, you are only getting 10% more with TiB than with TB.
Also, 26 metric prefixes after TB, the binary metric X-byte will be two metric X-bytes.
Want to waste some of your own time with it? Try it yourself. Use the formula
2^(10*X)/10^(3*X) where X is the magnitude of the metric prefix.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
Weren't they doing this back in the 80s? This seems silly to whine about it now.
Anyway, the argument is moot as there is a unit for base2 units:
1 GB = 1,000 MB
1 GiB = 1,024 MiB
The solution is simply a matter of diction.
A kilobyte is 10^3 bytes.
A kibibyte is 2^10 bytes.
It's easy to remember: the 'bi' comes from 'binary' and the 'kilo' conforms to SI notation (e.g., a kilogram is 10^3 grams).
Honey lamb, I don't know what planet you're posting from, but here on Earth a thousand million is a billion. We used to call 1024 bytes '1 kilobyte' and 1024 kilobytes '1 megabyte' because memory came in natural sizes that were powers of two.
We thereby confused the bejeezus out of everyone who wasn't used to talking in powers of two.
This is going to turn out to be one of those class-action suits were some people get a coupon and the lawyers collection $10 million in fees, you mark my words.
that I can store roughly one first person shooter per gib of drive space.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that this is a bogus lawsuit as far as Dell is concerned. They are nuts about the fine print. Anytime they show specs they always have little stars or those weird cross things next to them. Particularly two stand out in my mind: CD Speed and HD size. See for yourself:
k to ps.htm
http://www.dell.com/us/en/bsd/products/line_des
Scroll down to the bottom...oh hello, what's this?
2For hard drives, GB means 1 billion bytes; total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment
I don't know about Apple and the rest of them but I'm pretty sure this case doesn't hold water as far as Dell is concerned. And I don't blame them for following the industry and calling it a "20GB" hard drive when it's really only 18GB just because they know every shopper is going to compare the rough numbers, not the fine print.
-JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
And wtf, anybody else notice when formatting Windows that the installer always leaves an 8 megabyte free partition?
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
The hardware manufacturers usually use what the HDD manufacturers specify. If let's say Seagate said that HDD had 20GB of space, why should the OEMs say otherwise?
They could say it has an 18.6GB HDD. But if you open up the case, you'd see the HDD saying otherwise. Then someone would sue over that. So where does it end? Damned if you do, damned if you don't? Why not sue the HDD manufacturers and stop it where it starts?
They're barking up the wrong tree, IMHO.
someone should put a stop to this. these guys should be thrown out of court AND forced to pay the legal fees of the computer companies.
Now there's some overstatement. 802.11b for example: 11Mbs? Yea, we all know that the user only sees about half that.
Yes, I know where the 11Mb number comes from, but these Wi-Fi folks have really pushed the envelope on deceptive marketing with that one.
The hard drive manufacturing industry deserves to have the book thrown at them. They are scoundrels and cads, cheating their customers out of their hard earned dollars.
Let's compare disk drives to a consumer product like CDs. If, since 1985, CDs had advanced along the same sluggish path as the greedy disk drive makers took, we would still only be getting a paltry 40,000 hours of music on each CD and we would have to pay an outrageous $2 to get that music. Can you imagine the uproar if people still had to pay that much for sound recordings?
I hope that the hard drive manufacturers are taken to the cleaners on this one. I have never seen another product that I feel gives me so little value for my money.
The issue is really that the difference between
the two gets worse (a higher percent) on larger
disks.
at 1MB = 1024^2 = 1.048x10^6 (5% over 10^6)
at 1GB = 1024^3 = 1.074x10^9 (7.5% over 10^9)
at 1TB = 1024^4 = 1.099x10^12 (10.0% over 10^12)
at 1PB = 1024^5 = 1.125x10^15 (12.5% over 10^15)
at 1?B = 1024^6 = 1.153x10^18 (15.3% over 10^18)
So it used to be not as noticable as it is getting because the percentages are increasing as the
disks get larger. I guess the bigger issue is
that given enough time and larger enough disks the difference will be very very noticable.
First of all, the advertised size of hard drives is always the unformatted size. You lose some of the space to formatting anyway.
Secondly, I think it's more of an outrage when broadband providers use misleading advertising by listing their speeds at kilobits/sec instead of kilobytes/sec. Hear me out on this. While transfer speed is normally measured in kb/s, Windows displays its download speeds (i.e. in dialogue boxes) in KB/s.
So the avarage dialup user, for example, sees his downloads maxing out at 6 KB/s. He then sees broadband advertisements advertising, say, an upload speed of 128 kb/s and correlates that to the number 6 he sees in his download dialogue box on Windows. In reality, that upload speed would be 16 (KB/s).
My two cents.
My bigger beef is with this new 5GB hidden partition on new computers. It contains the Windows backup and recovery partition. Machines don't ship with CDs and DVDs anymore, they just slap all that in a "permanent" space on your HD. Buttheads. So, I buy a computer advertised as 40GB, it's really 37.5, but also has 5GB of junk hidden. So I can only "use" 32GB. 2GB for OS and 31GB of pr0n puts me in a nasty place. Jerks.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
"That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs"
"Your honour, we couldn't download as many songs from kazaa as we hoped when we bought the drives."
"GNU's not Unix....it's Linux" / Kami "kokamomi" Petersen
This whole powers of 1000 vs. powers of 1024 for sizes is silly. The disk makers report capacities based on powers of 1000 (standard SI definition of mega, giga, etc.) and the OS reports sizes based on powers of 1024. Presto chango, a brand new 200 GB (GB = 1000^3) drive reports that it has 186 GB (GB = 1024^3) of space after formatting.
Why can't the OS report all sizes in MB, GB, etc. instead of MiB, GiB, etc.? Are the coders so lazy that they insist on using a bit shift operator to divide by 1024, rather than actual division by 1000? Are we so stuck with the legacy of powers of two that we can't change things now?
Seems like a simple patch to the OS would have everything reporting based on powers of 1000. As a side benefit, I'd get my "missing" 14 GB of space back on that new firewire drive.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I love how the overly-cautious Reuters reporters, used to avoiding libel claims by saying "x CLAIMS y", or "ACCORDING TO x, y", say things like "ACCORDING TO THE LAWSUIT this", or "the lawsuit CLAIMS that". This is a simple matter of FACTS! One kilobytes is 1,024 bytes. One megabyte is 1,024 kilobytes. One gigabyte is 1,024 megabytes.
I wish the reporters who wrote this story would look the word 'gigabyte' up in the dictionary.
Saying moronic things about how it's being "claimed" that a gigabyte isn't 1,000,000,000 bytes is like... well, it's like if a car's maximum speed is really 60mph, but the car manufacturer considers 3960 feet to be "a mile", so they advertise the maximum speed as 80mph...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
This computer comes with 100GB of HD*!
*HD size may vary. Some restrictions apply. Professional in a closed course. Caution, do not eat, migh be hot. Do not insert into ear canal. May cause seizure. May cause drowsyness...
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
They should just follow AMD and Cyrix...
:)
Call their newest Harddrive the 2000+ or something
...I measure starting from the base of my spine.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
My ex-girlfriend (lets call her Miss Understood) and her friend (lets call he Babs) were both riding in her sister' car (lets call her Zelma). Babs looks over at Zelma's speedometer and makes a vocal note that the speedo in her car only goes to 85 mph, while Zelma's goes to 120 mph. After a few gear rotations in Babs's melon, she speaks out with, "I guess your 85mph is faster than my 85mph"
......um....ya...Just because I know how to read the MB's of a HD, doesn't mean I know anything about marine biology. So why should I sue the local fish market for selling Jumbo Shrimp?
There were protesters out the front of the Seagate offices yelling in unison:
MORE SPACE FOR PORN!, MORE SPACE FOR PORN! (what do we want?) MORE SPACE FOR PORN!!
Seriously, HDD space/$ gets better all the time. People if you 'lose' a few megs - GET OVER IT.
Yes, but using an already established system of measurement and then changing what it means in the fine print isn't exactly "right" either.
Imagine how quickly Coke would get sued if they made a new 2 liter bottle, but it was really only 1.8 litres and somewhere it has in small print "1 litre means 0.9 litres".
I doubt that would last very long... so why has it lasted this long with Hard Drives?
Personally, I think a more useful class action suit would cover the speed of drives. How many people realize that an Ultra 160 drive only does about 40 Mbps? To achieve 160 Mbps you have to have 4 of them in a pretty specific RAID configuration.
Doesn't seem obvious to me. And I'd been dealing with this for quite some time before I realized that it was false advertising.
Jory
Apple, at least, always documents that by 1 GB they mean 1 billion bytes. Go to http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html or any other specs page, and notice the footnote referenced by the Storage specs. It says "1GB = 1 billion bytes; actual formatted capacity less"
Seems pretty frivolous to me.
In a nasally, whiny voice:
"D'ja ever notice how disk manufacturers are using 10^9 as 'giga' instead of 2^30? I remember back when we useta get a true 1024 multiplier for every step up the metric prefix ladder. 'Course, then every megabyte would set you back $20, but it was a full 1048576 bytes you were getting, and that was something you could count on. Nowadays it seems as if every swindler out there is trying to lowball his numbers, just to save a little magnetic coating. And don'tcha hate it how you have to get up seven times every night to go to the bathroom, and your joints ache from leaning down to pick up the toilet seat? And how nobody likes to listen to an old codger whine about insignificant crap like how big a megabyte really is? I'm a sad, lonely old man."
Well, they are clearly understating how much space programs and data takes by using the KiB and MiB notations, hence making the poor hard disk manufacturers look bad. Even Windows explorer says it wrong pretending there is less space on the disk. While I am at it why can't use use ever bit of the disk for my data... file system overhead, how dare the OS STEAL some of my space.
James
Thing is, when I come over to The States from the UK I get cheated at the gas pumps.
For me a gallon is 4.546 litres.
For you, it's 3.785 "liters".
I think I might start a lawsuit!
> Chaz
Yes, hard drive sizes are misleading, but a lot of new devices just plain lie.
For example, I recently discovered that if you buy an Apple iPod that says "30 GB" on the box, and power it up, the device will say: "Capacity: 27.8 GB. Available: 27.8 GB."
By my math, 3x10^9 B = 2929687 KB = 2861 MB = 27.9 GB. So even with all this number trickery, the iPod's reported storage is actually about a hundred megs below the "3 with a whole buncha zeros after it" mark. That's another album or two of music, on top of the 25-30 extra albums that you'd be able to fit on the device if it could actually hold 30 GB.
It's great that someone has finally caught onto this little scam, and is raising awareness about it.
Bort.
Free, Anonymous surfing: Pagewash.com.
IMHO drive/memory sizes should follow the established Unix convention.
1k = 2^10 bit = 1024 bit (prounced "kay")
1M = 2^20 bit = 1 048 576 bit (pronounced "meg")
1G = 2^30 bit = 1 073 741 824 bit (pronounced "gig")
Stop treating the phrases "kay","meg" and "gig" as SI prefixes, because they're not. None of the other metric units abbreviate the prefixes like that, so there's no need to interpret them as impinging on the SI standard. Likewise, when you're speaking in the context of computers, there's no need to specify "bytes" all the time. It's redundant and everyone already knows the units.
This alternative is more in convention with what users say and expect. You say, "It has 3 gigs of RAM." No one says, "It has 3 Gigabytes of RAM" unless they're selling you the computer.
Consider my newest hard drive. Western Digital, who manufactured it, says it's 120GB. Windows 2000, written by Microsoft, tells me it's 111GB. Wieghing in the fact that it's slightly over 120,000,000,000 bytes, it's apparent to me that Western Digital is right and Microsoft is wrong. Had Windows 2000 been prgrammed to say "GiB" instead of "GB", Microsoft would be right as well.
It's actually a circle but most bears think it is a box. Smarter than your average bear-Yogi Bear
This is exactly the same sort of problem I had recently when moving from the world of CD-R's to the world of DVD-R. Granted, I wouldn't *sue* over it, but it's pretty frustrating sometimes.
For example, a 700MB CD-R (advertised as a "700MB CD-R") is actually 734,003,200 bytes. However, a 4.7GB DVD-R (advertised as a "4.7GB DVD-R") is really only just above 4,690,000,000 bytes or so. When you do the division upwards, it becomes a much-reduced 4.4GB.
This caused me to bang my head against my desk for about an hour as I tried to figure out why the software was telling me that the ISO was too large. "But it's only a 4.6GB ISO!"
Agh.
As a moderately interesting and way-off-topic sidenote, those weird cross things are called "daggers" in typography circles.
:-)
This Roman Meal Bakery thought you'd like to know
Unfortunately for the hardware manufacturers their products diplay the standard decimal prefixes, e.g. GB and not GiB. This is very much on purpose on their part because all of those extra little numbers tend to get into the way more often then not, and who wants to buy an 18.6 GiB HD, wouldn't you rather have a nice 20 GB HD?
That's marketing for you, fortunately we have choice words for people who come up with practices like this, weasels. Seriously, you either inform the consumer what sort of measurement you are using or you match the actual capabilities of your hardware to what you are advertising, otherwise you are commiting a civil offense known as Consumer Fraud.
The easiest solution would be to go the way of soda bottles and advertise the more familiar measurement in big letters, and then right under it (in a much smaller type face) print what the actual capacity is in computer terms with your GiBs and your MiBs.
Isn't the easiest soultion just to patch the OS to report the size of files and drives based upon 10^x instead of 2^x.
Heck, just give a user an option on which method they choose, it really shouldn't be that hard to implement.
Obviously it wouldn't satisfy the numbskulls with the lawsuit, but it might give the other stupid people less to complain about.
OK. I agree that the same standards should be used, but why are they suing Apple, Dell, HP, etc.? I would expect them to sue Maxtor, Quantum, Western Digital, Seagate, etc.
Sure it's possible that computer manufacturers are in collusion with hard drive manufacturers to dupe the public on size; but its just as likely that Apple, Dell, et. al. enter contract to purchase a certain number of hard drives at the manufacturer specified size; and that's the size reported on general advertisement.
That said, almost every computer I've purchased from Apple has listed the amount of available space for general use, written in its detailed specification somewhere. I admit to never looking for it at Dell, and never purchasing from the other vendors.
It seems to me, if they were going to sue over misleading claims, the the MHz, GHz myth would be more apt. Since 1GHz != !Ghz depending on which chip and a host of other issues. Least the drive information is consistently wrong.
I have been dead set against this unscrupulous practice since I first heard of it. 1GB == 1024MB. It is 1024 for a reason. Manufacturers pulling new numbers out of their ass is unconscionable and just plain wrong. These are computers, damnit, we should be precise about our measurements and not just make things up with no rhyme or reason.
Uh, there is some confusion here. If the vendor says the machine has a 1GB drive, chances are that it does -- but unformatted. Unfortunately, it's not like the contents of a cereal box, and users should be well aware that how the drive is formatted affects the net amount of space available for data. NTFS volumes are going to need more space for overhead than FAT16 volumes. "Some settling may occur during shipment."
:: Claimed :: Actual
The real shyster-ing occurs with performance figures for hard disks, and also with networking devices. Especially wireless devices. I'd like to see "net" figures for these instead of theoretical maximum. I've got a SCSI card that claims a 40MB/s transfer rate, as well as a hard disk. It does deliver 40MB/s, but that is the "gross" transfer speed; it only happens between the controller's cache and the computer's memory. The sustained transfer rate is more like 14MB/s. That is a *huge* difference, and the manufacturer should give a reasonable figure instead of the absolute maximum throughput from a tiny amount of RAM to the core. The layman's term for this practice is "lying."
I could conceivably have two disks, one 5400 rpm, and another 10,000 rpm, and there would be nothing to tell them apart, since both would claim the bogus 40MB/s tranfer rate. Yet one of those drives will have a better transfer rate. The consumer does not know what he is getting! It would be a different issue if, say, the actual transfer rate were withing 10-15 per cent of the claimed figure, but we're talking 1/3 to 1/2 the claimed figure.
Here are some performance claims that I ran across, paired with my tested performance results:
Interface
EIDE --> 5 MB/s --> 0.7 MB/s
EIDE --> 5 MB/s --> 1.2 MB/s
SCSI --> 10 MB/s --> 6.85 MB/s (a good one, wow!)
SCSI --> 40 MB/s --> 14 MB/s
UATA --> 66 MB/s --> 32 MB/s
Likewise with wireless devices, where the vendor fails to mention the overhead of the radio, ethernet, and other protocols. That's great for me, because I understand, but the average consumer is being fleeced. I find the typical wireless data tranceiver delivers 1/7th of the claimed transfer rate on average. Image if Chevy claimed the new Camaro to have 300hp, but it tested on the dyno at 43hp. There would be hell to pay!
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Could this be over more than just 1000 vs 1024? Its anoying and somewhat misleading that theres no * on HD boxes saying that it formats smaller. My origingal 40Gb in this box is only 37.5Gb, the 160 is only 152, i had an 80 that only formatted to 74, my 20Gb mp3 player is only 18.6, and i just helped my friend set up his new computer, the most we could format his 250Gb drive to was 233Gb. 17Gb is a lot, and you really wish it was there once you start to run low.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Apple has had a disclaimer and a technote about this issue for a long time. You can read the technote here. I'm pretty sure that they also mention it in the documentation that comes with the computer, but I couldn't find out where I left that stuff since I've never needed it for my Mac.
Sapere aude!
While one definition of megabyte is 2^20 bytes, HD makers have almost always used the definition of 10e6 bytes. Similarly, they define gigabyte as 10e9 bytes.
As long as there have been HDs for PCs, RAM makers have been using the binary definitions of megabyte and gigabyte and HD makers have been using the decimal definitions. Both used the definition that was easiest for them. (It'd be a bitch making chips with round numbers of bytes, wouldn't it?)
Nobody gets confused by the newbies.
Clear, Dark Skies
I don't really see the point of suing the manufacturers over this.. admittedly, it has always annoyed me a bit.. buying an 8.4gb hard drive really means you're buying something closer to 8.0gb.
To make it easier, I simply refer to those sizes as 'marketing megs/gigs' and belong in the same category as 'new & improved', etc.
2. People don't realize that there is a significant difference between formatted and unformatted harddrive size. Advertising unformatted size is a bit misleading since the buyer can't use the harddrive in this state. However, the formatted size varies with the filesystem being used: FAT-16, FAT-32, NTFS, etc. So advertising the formatted size can be tricky if the configuration is left up to the user as a "build-upon-request" system.
Both of these are technical issues that, if you try to explain this to a non-technical person, leaves them mostly angry and confused. God knows I have tried, but once you start talking about binary math, FAT-16, filesystems, and so on, their eyes glaze over and you get the distinct feeling they were sorry they ever asked. But when you're a computer company trying to sell a computer, you have to tell people some specs, without burdening them too much with technical jargon.
And reading off these specs can be simple and straightforward, or they can absolutly technically accurate (and therefore frightening to the average joe user/technophobe), but not both.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
If the consumer was actually an intelligent consumer, they would have noticed that the units of measurment are printed (somewhere) on the box.
Sure in the future the extra 10Gigs will be noticed, but when you have 150Gigs already, how much porn and ripped songs do you need anyway? 300,000 pictures? 30,000 songs? I'm doin just fine with my 40.
Lawsuits to come:
It's called street smarts, but I guess it's ok to be stupid and sue everybody because you didn't know what the hell you were buying.
While this is undoubtedly another angle for sleazy lawyers, maybe it will at least result in more strict adherance to truth-in-advertising laws, which have gotten completely out of hand lately. When is the last time you saw a commercial that wasn't misleading or downright inaccurate? For car and home-mortgage ads they slap up a 200-word paragraph in micro font on the screen that stays there for one second. How is that supposed to be readable? If you have to attach so much fine print to your advertisements, you should not be allowed to make such claims...
...blah blah.." This is a very sleazy way that advertisers imply that professionals recommend products. It should be illegal.
I'd like to see a lot of changes, including:
* abolishment of the "non-profit" credit-helping companies... that's obviously some shell entity to feed leads to banks
* strict enforcement of various weight gain advertisements, especially things like if you make reference to a "clinical study", the references to the study need to be listed
* the abolishment of the term "free" in any advertisement unless it truly is free, without any added charges
* very clear language about product sales which create "subscriptions" where you are automatically billed and sent product in perpetuity until you "cancel at any time"
* getting rid of the rebate scam, misleading people into thinking products are cheaper than they really are
* abolishment of advertisements for doctor-prescribed medication... this is really disturbing to me when you see an ad which coerces you to "ask your doctor" about a particular drug, and promotions that are designed to convince people that they have conditions that require prescription treatment when it is arguable
* abolishing the third-party reference to the testimony of professionals. i.e. "My doctor says
* regulation of the news media and some method by which information can be distinguished between news and editorial; a mandatory requirement that news media devote time in their broadcast to address any inaccuracies in previous testimony. Specifically, the news media should not be allowed to paraphrase what other people are thinking without some kind of "this is an editorial" crawl on the screen, and the limit of news stories to be based around ambiguous sources such as, "a government source says..." that's bogus. If you cannot cite specific references, then there should be a big graphic slapped on the screen which says "this is editorial/speculation"
I bought a 2x4 the other day, and it wasn't really 2" by 4".
instead of the drive manufacturers? And why JUST these manufacturers? With exception to the overlapping of IBM of course. My guess is that it is purely a financial issue, go after the biggest pockets.
"They'll say "look, it's got 512MB of RAM and 80 GB hard drive space," but that is actually 536,870,912 bytes vs. 80,000,000,000 bytes (which is closer to 74.5 GB). And that is some good ground to sue on."
this is probably the most insightful point in the whole thread.
everything else should be modded redundant or retarded.
1000 MB != 1 GB
YES IT DOES! It's 1024 MiB that equals 1 GiB. 1000 MB is a perfect way to describe 1 GB.
I mean... a few years ago, a megabyte lost here or there would have been a big thing. Now they're giving away 30 GB hard drives as prizes in Crackerjack boxes... it doesn't matter any more!
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
those systems that ship with 128mb or more of memory, but in the fine print says part of it is shared with the Video Card.
:)
I remember a long time ago my IBM PCjr had 128k of memory, but 16k of it was shared with the display card, such that only 112 was available. Consequently, many PC software apps that required 128k of ram didn't work. Thank god for the sidecar memory expansion kit
The number of fluid ounces in a gallon *can't* change. A gallon is 128 fluid ounces.
If you see the ounces change between brands, then they are measuring weight, not volume. Ice cream is half air. Cheaper brands will contain more air, thus less weight.
So Apple went with the flow and started marketing 12" monitors as 13". And for a time it was good.
Until the industry got slapped with a deceptive advertising suit or something. But rather than market it CORRECTLY, now more ink is wasted when ads are printed with disclaimers, like "* 18.1" viewable" on 19" CRT screens.
Why is it that as the yahoo article goes on about the intentions to sue HP and Dell, the screen becomes littered with Dell advertisements and HP sponsorship buttons. Is this some form of deceptive bias being placed on the article perhaps?
Where is the deception?? 20 gig has 20,000,000,000 bytes... right? If you're a computer-boy, you might ask if it had more... I remember my 80 meg drive had slightly more than 80 meg cuz of that stupid power of 2 thing... When did HDD makers make the switch?
You have to understand that all the storage terms have the word BYTES on the end, that would make them part of the binary system of 2s, NOT 10s.
In a 100gb hd, there are 1,000,000,000 bytes, so with all due respect to the metric system, they are doing nothing wrong, stop whining.
I think HD sizes are what they are today cause modern sizes are multiples of old sizes...
at one point, HDs really were 120,200,500 MB, etc... for MB=1024*1024 bytes.
as drives got bigger and bigger, they wanted tp keep the convention of even sizes... 10,20,40,80,100 GB.... but to do that, they needed to get creative.
Fact is, the actual capacity of a disk is determined by several factors: how many platters, how many tracks, how many sectors per track, how those sectors translate into addressable blocks, what small fraction of the disk may or may not be usable on each unit due to acceptable defects, etc...
In reality, hard drive sizes vary slightly from model to model and unit to unit, all supposedly of the same capacity. The actual capacity probably isn't a number anywhere NEAR an integral X*2^n or X*10^n.
Even with flash disks, calculating capacity from the number of blocks may not be a convenient number.
So, we take the actual or estimated capacity and round to the closest X*10^n that looks good. Exact size down to the byte doesn't matter, drives aren't byte-level addressable.
Memory is still done with X*2^n cause it's byte addressable: The exact amount DOES matter, MUST always be that much on every unit, and has to be added or removed in some 2^n increment.
Now, I do believe HD manufacturers changed from 2^n to 10^n and rounded up to get whole numbers. Remember 1.2, 2.1, 3.2, 4.3 GB drives? That's what you get when you force youself to use powers of 2. If you can only make a good estimate to start with, what do you think looks better, "approximately 96.240 GB" or "100 GB"?
It's not really false advertising when everyone does it the same way. I mean, you're not going to pay more for a "100 GB" drive only to find out it's the same size as the "96 GB" drive that was cheaper. There are no "96 GB" drives.
I mean, Dell buys a "60GB" drive from Maxtor. They aren't going to re-label it as a "56GB" drive.
Blame the hard drive makers. Tell THEM to change.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Well... um, yes, we are. The whole internals of your computer and mine and most others on the planet are mired in base-2 logic and arithmetic. Sorry to disappoint you. =)
not only on /. I see an ad for HP in the banner, next to the article in Yahoo there is an ad for Dell Storage Solutions
If you buy rough-cut 2x4's, you will find that they are exactly 2 inches by 4 inches. Smooth-finished 2x4's are sanded down from rough-cut ones, and hence are smaller.
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results. -- Winston Churchill
Seems like a simple patch to the OS would have everything reporting based on powers of 1000. As a side benefit, I'd get my "missing" 14 GB of space back on that new firewire drive.
How would changing the way the computer reports how many bytes are on your drive acually change the amount that are there? You'd have the same amount of storage, the number would just be larger because your OS is dividing by a different integer to arrive at it. All programs would still have to use base2, as well as the filesystem itself. What's the point?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
A quake unit: the Gibifrag !
Bitter and proud of it.
Last time I bought a drive, I paid for a 15Gb. But about a year later, I noticed that it was really a 30Gb.
Enter a 10K run. Note that the finish line is 10,000 meters after the start line.
Buy 10 Keys of coke. Note that it consists of 10,000 grams of coke.
Run a 100 Watt bulb for 100 hours. Note that your power bill goes up by 10 Kilowatt hours.
Most of the people buying hard drives are used to this system (10^n, not 2^(10^n)). It'd be a bigger lie to use the 2^(10^n) system that we mysteriously came up with.
I was on the engineering team for the Finder, and we just ignored Marketing's request to change drive-size units from base-two to base-ten. Someone must have caved since then...
An excellent book on the subject is The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleased the Lawsuit by Walter K. Olson, in case anyone is interested.
I read it many years ago and thought it an excellent analysis on the the underlying causes of litigiouness in the American legal system.
It's no longer in print, apparently, but you can get it used or pick it up at your local library.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Only total geeks measure 1K as 1024. So this guy's suing because he wants the geekified definitions used? How incredibly fucking stupid can you get. I'm already sick and tired of Windows Explorer measuring my file sizes in multiples of 1024. Now this guy wants EVERYTHING measured that way. What an asshole. HD manufacturers do it correctly, it is you who is wrong.
Because they chose to use an ALREADY IN-USE standard prefix for measurement! They aren't changing the meaning of the word "byte" like you're doing with litre. They're using the prefix as it was originally meant to be used. I don't think there's any case here.
Really though, in the computer industry most people generally don't have to know EXACTLY how much a drive holds. It's like CPU and video card. All you really need to know is that it's x% faster or y% larger than your existing device. Does it really fucking matter that there's a few gig "missing" when you have over a hundred of them already? You lose more than that due to filesystem overhead already. Have a lot of small files? Holy shit! You've lost 30% of your drive already! A FAR bigger concern than such a minor difference between the base-10 and base-2 notation confusion.
Unless they've got some strange units of memory (someone please correct me if this is the case), their memory cache sizes are measured in powers of two but their drive storage sizes are measured in powers of ten.
Here's an example - this is a Maxtor data sheet that shows the details for this drive - they cleverly point out in very small print (I had to go to +4 magnification in xpdf to even read it) that GB = 1 billion bytes, but they make no claim about what MB means. The
front page for the drive doesn't mention it at all. I'm sure Maxtor is representative of all drive manufacturers in this regard.
How could that be? Hmmm.....
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
Post #7,000,000 is yours! This is a true achievement here on Slashdot! PARTAY!
Not true... OLD Hard drives = 200MB were mesured in Megabytes of the powers of 2 vereity.
those AMD processers, AMD's 1300+Mhz != Intel's 1300Mhz... i'm not getting the correct radio interferance off of my amd chip!
Woo! Slashdot just passed the 7,000,000th post!
Oh, Puhhleeeze! Everyone knows how HD manufacturers rate hard drive capacities. Why shouldn't they do this? They do in fact say that they define 1MB as 1000 KB (or at least they used to). Really, do you really miss those few "extra" GB on modern HDs? It's not like they are expensive these days. Want more space? Buy another. Be thankful that you can buy such huge capacities.
Audio salespeople have been doing this sort of thing for many, many years without encountering such legions of litigious twits. One can still buy a battery powered boombox with, wait for it... 50, nay, 100W quoted output power. Per Channel!... "Ah, that's the peak instantaneous power when traveling downhill with a tail wind, sir. The actual RMS value is perhaps 1W if you are lucky". (*)
I sincerely hope this frivolous lawsuit is thrown out of court. I could think up many more examples where manufacturers trump up their statistics to promote sales (CPU clock frequencies comes to mind as one).
Caveat Emptor, Caveat Emptor.
(Rant mode off)
(*) Disclaimer: The numbers quoted are for example's sake. Perhaps the claims are not quite that wild, but they approach it.
So we're kibitzing over the difference between Kbits and Kibits. Great...
Of course this is stupid.. But it makes the attorneys some quick spending cash.
Remember, regardless of the outcome, both sides have to pay their legal people..
THIS is what we have reduced too in this country.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Under this proposal, for binary numbers the [...] prefixes are changed to "bi"
Close call, glad they didn't ratify "gay" as the new prefix!
and
How about systems with no monitor but in the ads there is always a 15 inch lcd display next to the computer. Kindof deceptive there.
The dual-processor G5s STILL haven't arrived yet. Apple's announcement several months ago really compared a computer that would (maybe) ship in 6 months, to a 6-month old PC.
Anyway, back to disk drives. Remember the time when companies were bundling disk doubler software and advertising the capacity as 2X? I'm glad those days are over!
Best Buy can have you arrested
What bugs me is that some fucktards started selling 32MB flash cards with MP3 decoders attached. WTF???
Next thing, they will be building shaky contraptions on shifty sands in the path of high winds and calling them houses!
hmm...
But most women don't like it that wide...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Except here common knowledge is against the 1024 non-standard. Ask a thousand random people how many things are in a kilothing and see what response you get.
90% or more would answer "1000".
I wouldn't be suprised if 90% had no idea. If you asked "smart people" how many bytes in a kilobyte they would mostly say 1024.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Let's go after them about monitor (and TV) sizes. This shit about a 17" monitor (or whatever) is bullshit. Sure the tube is 17" OUT OF THE FUCKING BEZEL! Then they put in small print * 15.2" viewable *
KMFA you buttholes! How about plastering the TRUE viewable area all over the box.
I'm so bloody sick of all these deceptive practices. Just like gasoline, $1.49 and 9/10. Like you can buy gas in 9/10's of a cent at a time. It's a RIP OFF scheme. You lose 1/10 of a cent each gallon you buy. They GAIN 1/10 of a cent each gallon you buy. Over the long haul they haul tons of $$$$ to the bank..
Everyone has to be a thief these days..
What does "Giga" literally mean? One billion.
"Mega" literally means "One million."
What about the design of hard drives would make one think that the way that their storage works naturally lends towards binary trees?
If you don't like the way your OS reports disk space, which is all this is about, then edit the source code to df.
How many bytes is a megabyte? Is it 1000x1000? 1024x1000? 1024x1024?
Who decides this? What about Microsoft or other disk utility programmers makes them more authoritative about that definition than the metric system? Further, what about the way drives work would make one naturally want to choose 1024x1024 as the definition over 1000x1000, and why are drive manufacturers being sued instead of those that report the sizes. Should either be sued? Probably not.
Next, let's sue powerplants for measuring kilowatt hours in groups of 1000W instead of 1024.
On this planet, we use a base-10 numbering system, regardless of the numbering system that one particular niche of products happens to use. "kilo" was chosen for 2^10 because it was conveniently close, not because it was meant to be legally binding!
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
If you must use the technology --You must first Understand it.
This is plain ignorance, I hope we can teach as fast as we let them have the technology
"It's Unix or NoThing"
If they win, all hard drive owners will get a certificate good for 2,000,000 bytes and the lawyers will get $5,783,774!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
megalo != mega. megalo, according to m-w.com, means "of giant size", "grandiose" (e.g. megalomania).
The Raven
First you need to stop and think how 1k became equal to 1024. Computer information is stored in a base 2 system. When they came up with the term "kilobytes" they kept things in base 2, therefore 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes. 1000 = 1K is a base 10 system. As far as my support for the suit, when I view file sizes by byte, 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes. When I look at the format utility on my Apple iBook, it tells drive size by base 2 or 37.25GB. To prove my point try this, go to your Mac OS X machine, and load "Apple System Profiler". Click on the "Devices and Volumes" tab and then expand the details for your hard drive. You should see a line something like "Disk Size 37.26GB (1K = 1024) 41GB (1K = 1000)". Now ctrl+click on a file and select "Get Info". You will notice a line that says something like "Size: 988 KB on disk (1,009,052 bytes). In the case of Mac OS 10.2, it is clearly evident that data is stored with the 1K = 1024 system. Because of this, using a 1K = 1000 system for hard drive sales is what Americans calls underweighing. It is a form of fraud, no matter what people say in relation to metric. In America, when a unit of measure becomes accepted as standard by the trade community for which it belongs, it cannot be mixed with a competing measure. For example, If I were a bagels maker I can not conspire with other bagel makers to make a dozen mean 11 knowing that with donuts it means 12. Since file size information is reported by the operating system as 1K = 1024, hard drive manufactures will need to use the same system.
For CD-R, DVD-R/w, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
You'd be surprised: all the writable DVDs I have claim 4.7GB but offer 4,700,000,000 (+/- a tiny amount) bytes = 4.3*2^30. (CDs, on the other hand, do use 1024: the "700MB" CDs I use are 736,966,656 (data) bytes = 703*2^20.
Good lord, this is confusing...
Get a clue. Read something about the history of computing from the time before you were born, when today's terminology developed. It isn't Microsoft who decided that 1Mb=1024x1024. That's just the way things are. Illogical? Fine. History often is.
I, personally, would prefer 1GB = 1024mb, instead of 1GB = 1000mb. You get an extra 24mb! Come on People! More than what you thought! MORE! Not Less! They're not gypin' you! They're giving you MORE!
carriage returns mean something slashdot!!!!
I guess Apple may change it a bit: iMB and iGB - just aka iTunes and iMac.
Less is more !
The invention of Kibibyte and Mibibyte and such as "binary SI" terms and the relegation of Kilobyte Megabyte and Gigabyte to the decimal version is just revisionism based on the co-opting of the original words by the manufacturers and a misguided sense of adhering to the SI standards.
Sure, it's unfortunate that the terms kilo and mega got applied they way they did because of the similarity between 2^10 and 10^3, but the definition is practical within the field and we (speaking as a general member of the CS/SE community) defined them that way first damn it!
No one would take seriously an attempt to define 1 AU as 10^11 meters just to make it fit in with SI standards. And if we're going to redefine Kilobyte and Megabyte why not redefine a byte as ten bits while we're at it? Or to ressurect an old joke, why not have congress define pi as 3.0 so that the average person can remember it?
Yeah, i'm overreacting a bit, but it just annoys me that they want us to stop using the name/definition we've been using for decades and go with stupid sounding things like "kibi" and "mibi" instead.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
and seeps down to the scientists in NASA, etc. who keep losing their navigators or misdirect the satelites because they didn't give a shit about meters.
Too proud to be stupid, eh?
Hopefully this stupid lawsuit madness won't stop. It is even beginning to be sort of fun.
The plaintiffs must be looking for a free computer and they didn't find any better idea. These people might as well end up suing their mothers for being dumb...
No! CD-R uses binary prefixes and DVD-R uses decimal prefixes. Actually, in reality, both CD-R and DVD-R capacity labels are inaccurate under either the binary or the decimal interpretation, but you have to really be splitting hairs to notice.
The exact expected capacity of normal sized CD-Rs (not counting overburning, yadda yadda) is as follows:
- For 74 minute CD-Rs, the capacity is 74*60*44100*2*2*2048/2352 = 681984000 bytes, or 650.390625 binary MiB (exactly, no roundoff error).
- For 80 minute CD-Rs, the capacity is 80*60*44100*2*2*2048/2352 = 737280000 bytes, or 703.125 binary MiB (again, this figure is exact, not rounded off).
For DVD+/-R[W] media, the exact capacity is 4697620480 bytes, or just shy of 4.7 decimal GB. The capacity of a DVD-R is certainly nowhere near 4.7 binary GB.Jokes aside, the prefixes "kilo-" and "giga-" respectively mean 1,000 and 1,000,000, not 1,024 and 1,048,576. I am definitely on the consumers' side here; an as-advertised 80 GB hard drive actually holds about 76 GB of data.
If nothing else, it's about damn time someone sets a binding standard -- since computers operate on powers of 2, let's respect that in our advertisements.
Finally, it occurs to me that they should be suing Western Digital, Seagate, Maxtor, etc., not Dell, HP, Gateway...
After tjat I took a course in marketing. Now it's no longer small, but compact.
It's all about presentation!
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
There is nothing left to say
One day another large asteroid will hit the Earth. Both will happen. Who knows when.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
That way, it would be accurate, extremely easy to implement and "round" numbers would still be round numbers. I'd much rather my OS reported that I had 512 MiB ram than 536,870912 MB ram. You'd still have X GB = X GiB the way OSs report it, should be very clear even for non-techies. "We had to change the name from GB to GiB because it conflicted with SI units, creating ambiguity. This is exactly the same GB unit that you're already used to in the computer world."
Then, if HDD manufacturers insist on continuing with GB (base 10), demand that they inform what it is in GiB. But as long as they can claim that the prefix G = giga = 10^9 is clearly defined by SI, I doubt you'll see any court that'll make them change their notation of GB, far less collect any damages. SI is "the" standards organization, and while counting in base 2 is very common among the public, it's more like when people measure weight in kilograms (instead of mass) than an official standard.
The problem with your suggestion is that old units will undoubtably be used. Everyone will still say they have 512 MB ram. And then you start running into "512 MB (base 10) on my HDD is not 512 MB in my ram (base 2) and the problem continues. In my opinion, going to units unequiviocally defined as base 2 is the only thing that can permanently resolve this problem, because some sizes *will* be natural multipies of 2, while none are natural multiplies of 10.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
First it's 1024 vs 1000. What next, pi is 3?
You don't really need those 'extra' decimal places anyway.
I don't care if it's takes longer to say, it's about precision and accuracy.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Elvis Presley said: 'My voice alone is just an ordinary voice. What people come to see is how I use it. If I stand still while I'm singing, I'm dead!'
Close to later re-phrased:
"It's not my voice. It's what I am doing with it."
Back to the topic:
IMHO if my HDD is used just as a big CD - it's dead.
Less is more !
claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives.
The companies marketing the drives and systems clearly state the capacity in Gigabytes. This means 1000 megabytes. While many customers believe that Gigabyte means 1024 Megabytes. This is not true. Refer to the list below.
1024bytes = 1KiB (kibibit)
1024KiB = 1MiB (mebibyte)
1024MiB = 1GiB (gibibyte)
1024GiB = 1TiB (tebibyte)
1000 bytes = 1KB (kilobyte)
1000KB = 1MB (megabyte)
1000MB = 1GB (gigabyte)
1000GB = 1TB (terabyte)
Therefore, the users are simply ignorant and the lawsuit should be thrown out. Yet I do feel that they should make the capicity in MiB, GiB, TiB, etc. Oh, and OS's are programed that 1024 MB = GB instead of 1000 MB = GB. So that would fool people too, maybe we should all sue Microsoft, Linus, and ATT.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
Hey, I don't disagree that the practice is somewhat deceiving. fter all, they report the RAM in BASE 2 derived values. However, what about filesystem overhead. That is likely to take the same if not more of that space, too. My two cents.
Yes, I too miss the dead-on accuracy of Communist spedometers, tovarishch Drinkypoo.
Gee, during the early days of PCs (before the Internet became commercialized and BBSes was the only game in town), the PC retailers put actual storage capacity in the fine print. But over the years, this was removed.. guess they thought that it was easier to just "round up". Unfortunately, it appears that even though drive capacity increases, so does more of the unusuable space too because of specific drive geometries.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
Ever since they've changed the size of a gallon, they've gone ahead and tried to change all the units of measure to suit them..
1 gallon = 4.55L , unless your in america, in which case it's 3.78
Bloody yanks..
Maybe they should switch back.. think of the gas milage their SUV's would get then!
You've *always* had a correct hard drive Megabyte and Gigabyte, but in memory sizes, you've gotten an extra 2.4% per Kilobyte for free!
It's not so much an issue of not getting what you paid for, but an issue of always getting a bonus when you didn't realise it.
Because the SI prefixes are base 10, not base 2. Now computers often use them to mean the nearest base 2 equivlant (like 1024 instead of 1000) however that doesn't mean the usage is correct.
PC ad:
"Special: Upgrade to 1 Gigabyte RAM today and get an extra 7% more memory absolutely FREE!!!:
If you want to nitpick:
10^3 != 1000
10dec^3 == 1000
---------------
10^3 != 10dec^3
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
Enough said.
What about all the thousands of bytes spread about your disk of empty space? Depending on the file system in use, blocks vary in size. If your block size for a partition is 1024 bytes, and you want to write a 500 byte file, then you just wasted 524 bytes - or over 50% of the size of the file. Multiply this times the thousands of files on your system, and you are losing a good chunk (maybe 20% of the space used) of the disk anyway - particularly if you have alot of small files.
On a 20GB drive, we are talking about 3.6 Gigabytes... give or take.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Giga, Mega, and kilo are SI prefixes.
They are powers of ten. They have been for a century, which by the way, is 100 years, not 102.4 years.
Using kilo for 1024 is a convenient, but sloppy, shortcut. It is also wrong.
Memory is constrained by the number of address pins, so powers of two are an inevitable consequence. We didn't use to have a shorthand term for large powers of two, so some people started misusing the names given to powers of ten. For memory, and memory only, it is an understandable shorthand to refer to the power of two closest to the power of ten that the prefix properly identifies. It is similar to the rounding that we commonly use in ordinary conversation, such as referring to a ton of bricks.
No other measure in a computer naturally falls into powers of two. Clocks frequencies don't. Data communications rates don't. And disk capacities don't. Using powers of two for anything other than address spaces is ignorant and misguided.
Suing people who are using the terms PROPERLY is insanely stupid.
When I get rough cut 2x4s here, they actually are 2"x4". The rounded-edge boards are smaller, usually as you say - about 1.5"x3.5". It seems like that would point to the planing/rounding to being the culprit.
Well, that and at the mills I've seen, they don't process green wood. It'd be a pain, especially if you were doing anything resinous like pine. The saws would keep sticking up. That's completely ignoring the problem you'd have trying to sell wood to anyone if they knew the boards would randomly shrink to smaller sizes - they wouldn't shrink evenly.
Now, this is in Canada, so there may be some differences in how things are done... the wood cut in my area goes to the US, though, so it's most likely done in a similar way there.
~ Leilah
OK, if a gigabyte is *really* 10^3 MB, then why does my 200GB hard drive read as only 186GB (in OS X)? They define it the "better" way when they are selling it to make it seem bigger, but their own OS uses the binary definition rather than the decimal definition. That seems to close it right there; Apple's own OS is telling me that they are being misleading.
i just got a new 12" G4 and if i recall, it says on the box that the 40GB harddrive isnt really 40GB, i dont understand how they expect to win this...
if there was no intent to mislead the public on the size of the hard drives, maybe just one of them would say its 100GB but err on the side of decency instead of greed and give you 105GB.
/. nerds would jump on the great brand where you actually got more than advertised, and no doubt sales and profits would be good with the great reputation gained.
The
But no, every one of them has erred on the side of advertising a number that is easily and often assumed to mean more space than it does.
The official definition of "byte" is the smallest separately addressable unit of memory in a system.
Most current computers use eight bit bytes. Some older systems used nine bit bytes, and others twelve bit bytes.
Because the size of a byte depends on where it is used, standards usually refer to "octets" rather than "bytes".
People always ask me why their drives show less capacity in Windows than the box says.
I then have to explain to them that 1 kilobyte is 1024 bytes, but the hard drive makers label their drives as if 1 kilobyte is 1000 bytes.
Most people I've explained this to actually did feel at least a bit cheated by manufacturers who told them they were getting more than they actually had.
Personally, I feel that hard drive manufacturers are being misleading with their boxes, for the most part. Some manufacturers DO put "(1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes)" or something similar on their boxes, but most do NOT (at least didn't when I last bought a boxed drive).
Obviously, marketing drones believe that consumers prefer nice rounded numbers. But they should at least put the TRUE capacity on their box underneath their "rounded" capacity.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
I wouldn't mind using base then for Mega, Kilo etc...
when a bit is a decibyte.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Well, at least the hard drives are off by a constant ratio. If I buy two 2 gig drives, they'll store as much as a 4 gig drive. If I take two 2x2s, and glue them together, I get somewhat less width than a 2x4. When human civilization collapses, in 1000,000,000 years, it will be because of all these little inconsistancies collectively making it impossible to actually engineer anything. Or did I mean 1024,0024,0024 years? Argh! Now I'm doing it!
First time I remember the HD vendors switching from binary MB's to decimal MB's was with the Maxtor 130 MB IDE HD, model 7131AT. It was 130 MB decimal, and only 125 MB binary.
I think this was 1992. IIRC, there were some lawsuits filed back then against the HD makers for false advertisement, and suddenly the HD makers started to claim that 1 MB is 1,000,000 bytes. Then all the HD makers switched to the decimal method. It's been that way ever since.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe." Albert Einstein
Where the GPU is 128bits and the processor 32bit.
Remeber the 64bit games consoles?
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
How long will it take to format?
This is going to seem obvious, but why don't Apple and Microsoft change the OS so that 1000 megs of HD is a Gig? I mean, it *is* deceptive if the Computer seller says that it's a 100Gig drive and then the OS says it's 86gig drive.
So the obvious way out of this problem is to change the OS so that it tells you that it's a 100Gig drive.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Nothing like having your stomach punched from the inside for between five minutes and thirty minutes, having some huge sack of potatos collapse on top of you, and then misunderstand you when you say "is that it? are you finished yet? get off me now! fuck that hurt! and no I don't want to go again!". Misunderstand that for some statement on inadequate penis size. It really is how you use it! Of course making a comment about inadequate size after such woeful performance is more humiliating to a guy than "I think you're crap in bed". So guess what I'll say...
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You've got a tiny prick and you're crap in bed.
OMG I didn't even catch that the first time I read it. I was just "eh, ok... yeah, sure"
Then you pointed that out, and I'm like... "Did he actually say 10^3, and not 2^10?... jup!"
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
I got a great car for sale!
Only $300 for this amazing 4 seater*! One of the fastest cars on the road with a maximum speed of 284 miles/hour*! And the best gas mileage too! Over 30 miles to the gallon!
* 1 person is 0.5 humans
* 1 mile/hour is 0.5 feet per second
* 1 mile is 10000 feet
I don't care if they change the labeling on the package: that isn't what the units mean. Units are standard for a reason! Your software has *always* measured in 1024-blocks, and your hard drive did too before marketingspeak took over.
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car
gets fourty rods to the hogs head and that's the way I likes it!
go back to France you stupid stupid metric bigots
The *world-wide* (yes, I know the US isnt part of the world) SI (System International) standard for GIGA is 1,000,000,000, and has been in place for 40 years!
This is one court case where the 'consumers' are being total retards. The fact is most hard drives actually have higher capacity than they are sold as, eg. the Western Digital 250GB drive is actually 250,059,000,000 bytes *formatted*!
I guess I should understand seeing how you have to cope with fluid ounces, gallons, pounds, miles, inches, etc. Bout time to wake up eh?
It seems to me that, to be a legitimate claim, there must be an established alternate standard for computation and reporting of file and disk sizes. The question then becomes, how does Microsoft, Linux, Solaris, Apple, and HP/UX compute file sizes? Also, what does Intel, Sun, TI, etc use compute megahertz? If they are using 2^10 (1024) instead of 10^3 (1000), then the lawsuit may have a basis. If, however, the OSes utilize the same measuring stick as the drive manufacturers, then there should really be no problem. As an example, ls -al shows clarkconnect-1.3.iso on my Gentoo Linux box as 183009280 bytes. This corresponds to 183.0MB, or 174.5 MiB. An ls -alh (added h for human readable) shows the same file as 175MB. Therefore, Linux seems to use M = 2^20, as anyone who has used computers for more than 10 years would KNOW is correct. Computers are based on a binary system. 2^1 is a bit, 2^2 bits is a nibble, 2^3 bits is a byte, 2^10 bytes is a KB, or kilobyte, 2^10*2^10 bytes is a MB, or megabyte. It is unfortunate that the originators of these names used the metric prefixes, but they did, and it was understood by those dealing with it. This lawsuit is really pathetic. Users should read the box, where it plainly states the meaning of the abbreviation (Maxtor 120 GB drive says "A gigabyte (GB) means 1 billion bytes."). I could see how someone could be frustrated, though if they lost 7.37+% of their storage to an "executive decision" (1024*1024*1024)/(1000*1000*1000) = 1.0737.
I can't think of any number system in which you can actually use the digit 3 where 10^3 != 1000...
your app looks nice.
I know I know... Sorry :p
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
2G + 2G = 5G
for large values of 2G
sorry, had to be said.
I personally think its about time something like this happened why has it been permitted to go on so long everyone involved in computers knows that 1gb = 1024mb not 1000mb that is everyone except ISP's and HD makers. I want my extra few gb on my hdd and extra hundred mb download allowance
Everyone is stupid, it is just the degree that varies
Why would the rest of the world count in twos? sure, we count in twos, but not non-technologys people, they count in tens.
Moderators: If you don't get the joke, its you, not me. Believe me, it's a damn funny one, so just give me +1 funny, and be on your way.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Offer the lawyers $5.52M and see if they accept that, then give them $5,520,000!
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
Hi.
The format that you use on your hard drive varies between standards. Such as:
1. FAT, FAT32, ext3, ext2, NTFS
2. Cluster size (4K, 16K, 32K, etc)
Labeling extact capacity would make you have a long list of actual capacities.
AND
1. 1000 megabytes does not equal 1 gigabyte.
- Most stupid advertising error made to bend down to non-literate computer users.
- Knowledgable people would not buy from a supplier that advertises as such.
2. Deceptive warranties.
- Maxtor and Seagate should have a true standard warranty based on 'one' warranty system.
- Some drives sold in systems have 1 year warranty instead of 5 years to lower costs for manufacturers.
...digital camera makers sued for advetizing 1280x1024 cameras as being "1.3 megapixels" when they're really only 1.3 million pixels. Ethernet manufacturers sued for selling "100 megabit per second adapters" that are really only 100 million bits per second. FM radio manufacturers sued for selling radios that claim to work over a band of "88 to 108 megahertz" when really they actually work over a frequency band of only 88 to 108 million hertz. when will this insanity stop? Krill
10^12 microphones = 1 megaphone
2000 guys who can't sing = 1 vanilli
"Well... um, yes, we are. The whole internals of your computer and mine and most others on the planet are mired in base-2 logic and arithmetic."
Well, your CPU isn't. Your power supply neither. It is only used for memory, for practical reasons. Disks and drives only used the base-2 Megabytes in those days when you had to calculate in your head if a program fits into your computers memory.
Mega means "1 million". Computer scientists started using the term Mega to identify 2^20, which isn't actually 1 million....they were approximating. In this case, it's the computer scientists who gave an alternate meaning to a common numerical term...not HD manufacturers.
A modern day witchhunt.
I'm much in favour of making the distinction between KB, MB, GB and KiB, MiB, GiB etc. standard units. (I think it's a bit naff having non-standard standards.) But in fact the manufacturers _are_ using standard units, just not the ones we might think they should... and hence if anything, they are giving more capacity rather than less than they advertise. Especially if they say Gb rather than GB ;-)
Then there's the anomoly of the 1.44MB diskette, which is neither exactly 1.44MB nor exactly 1.44MiB, so we need another unit. Probably 1.44KKiB (1.44 kilo-kibi-bytes). That's a bit of a mouthful though, and really needs a verbal abbrevation. I suggest kinky-bytes for KKiB (and for KKib, kickme-bits).
Actually, it's more like 7.4%
1 GB = 2^30 = 1073741824 bytes
The one I like is the '4x' wireless cards, which (if you believe the fine print) actually provide about 20% improved throughput.
Silly me, I thought '4X' would mean 'four times as fast'.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
The switchover happened when computer scientists started using Mega (1 Million) to refer to something other than 1 million (and kilo to be something other than 1000 and so on). HD manufacturers may have been true to the "computer science" use of MB early on, but they certainly weren't required to in any ethical sense. We have meanings for words for a reason. If a HD manufacture advertises 1K, and throws in an extra 24, great for all of us, but they only committed to 1000...not 1024.
I like how you casually dismiss the dictionary. If the dictionary is nothing else, at the very least it's a common acceptable explanation of usage of words. You can hardly hold someone at fault for using a term according to the usage defined in a dictionary.
A modern day witchhunt.
commercials actualy used the right way to depict memory and hard drive sizes... ...this computer comes with 536.870912 Megabytes of RAM!!!!!
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
Obviously the HARDWARE is correct, I mean if they say there are 100,000,000,000 bytes on a drive, I am sure there are.
In my experience, stable hardware is far less likely to be the problem than software. In this case I know it is a software issue.
Obviously, the OS vendors are wrong! Who told them to report 152GB for a 160,000,000,000 byte disk!
They should sue Microsoft! (well, and um, Apple, and "Linux", or your OS mfg of choice, unless it reports all the bytes, period.)
On a more cynical note: I am sure this suit is backed, not by some disgruntled consumer so much as by his brother-in-law, a sleazy lawyer.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If I offer 10 widgets and 5 fidgets for a price, and deliver (for agreed upon price) 11 widgets and 5 fidgets, you can hardly complain because I didn't also deliver an extra 1/2 fidget.
A modern day witchhunt.
According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.
I certainly hope the lawyers know more about than the Reuters' reporter. The discrepancy has nothing to do with "decimal vs. binary" notation. In fact, even if you correct it to "base 10 vs base 2" notation, base 10 usually underestimates rather than overestimates the power of 2 value.
The real discrepancy is due to a combination of boot sectors, partition overhead, filesystem overhead, virtual memory swap space, and bad blocks. Consumers don't realize that these take from 5%-15% of the available disk space.
This is like taxpayers complaining that the town library wastes valuable floor-space with a card catalog and information desk rather than have books occupy that space. However, if you through away the card catalog, you won't be able to find any book you are looking for.
Likewise, a disk's filesystem structures and directory structures are its equivalent of a card catalog. Without it, you won't be able to locate any of the data stored on the disk. Sure you may be able to hold a few hundred more MP3s in that space, but that is useless if you cannot locate any song you want to hear.
Do computer users sue the manufacturers because the operating system occupies between 100KB and 100MB of RAM, robbing them of space to run their applications?
Hard disk manufacturers can accurately specify how many hard sectors the disk has, but the cannot specify the exact amount of disk space that will be available to the user after system overhead. The filesystem overhead depends upon what filesystem is used (FAT32, NTFS, ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, UFSl, HFS, etc). Journaling filesystems require more overhead than non-journaled filesystems. Indexed filesystems (which allow you to search for data very quickly require even more space.
Commodity disks tend to have upto 1% bad sectors, especially with high capacity disks. Nearly all OSs will isolate these bad blocks when formatting the disk as they are unsafe for data storage. Sectors go bad as disks age, so the filesystem usually reserves a cylinder of space to remap bad sectors to.
Because of the various amounts of overhead sucked up by various filesystem structures and OS features, drive manufacturers cannot reasonably state how much space is available for user data.
No, everything execpt memory uses decimal SI units. Think of Ohm, Ampere, Volt, Seconds. Now think of storage: If a meter tape stores one Megabyte, how many Megabytes should a Kilometer tape store?
but I also understand that the term "kilo" was only used (knowingly incorrectly) because it was APPROXIMATELY 1000. For a manufacturer to say "1000K" and actually mean 1000, is correct. Assuming he means 1024, is incorrect. I'm glad these people are suing...and I hope their lawyers charge them out the ass at the end, they deserve it.
A modern day witchhunt.
Round numbers are not powers of ten, they are powers of two.
This sig no verb.
What? You aren't making any sense. My head is imploding.
You obviously don't know what you are talking about, are bad at math, don't know the correct notation to use, or some combination of those.
It's only because 1000 is relatively close to 1024 that the computer industry can get away with it.
This is really an amazing thread, because half of the posts seem to be really strident calls for use of this "kibibyte" terminology that I've never heard of before.
I teach CS in a community college and I've got a whole bookshelf here of CS books and not one of them has any reference to this "kibi" notation. My Webster's New World Dictionary (c) 1988 defines "kilobyte n. 1. a unit of capacity, equal to 1,024 (2^10) bytes 2. loosely, one thousand bytes". Webopedia lists kilobyte as meaning 2^10, and has no entry for "kibibyte". Link.
This "kibibyte" notation is really very nonstandard and it's astonishing to see people incensed over the decades-old practice of "kilobyte = 1024 bytes".
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Some free help with your ad:
"Welcome to Convea, the revolutionary web-based business application platform."
You did that website? Looks absolutely marvellous - but Dreamweaver isn't going to help you post a link here. So learn some HTML. Useful, isn't it? Unless your "revolutionary web-based business application" can live without it.
And for the record, your ad in this context comfortably fits my definition of spam, whatever you say.
Hrmph.
some computer scientist umpteen years ago decided to round 1024 to be a kilo....that doesn't make a standard.
You should really get over your first-year CS education...it doens't make you that special.
A modern day witchhunt.
it is only the computer industry that deems K ... to equal 1024 ... then extrapolates this to give 1M = 1024 x 1024.
They do that for a very good reason, it's not a surprise to anyone (you seem to be aware of it), so where's the problem, as long as they're consistent?
Yep, it's a 78.76 gig variety !
:-
God - what will they think of pursuing next ?
What is this
Who are we going to sue today ?
"Hmm - dunno - how about we weigh how much cereal is in this here box to see if it's right ?"
"Nah - I was thinking of counting the matchsticks in this here carton"
Sigh...
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
Hmm..
kilo hmm...
byte.. yeah, byte is 8 bits, hmm kilobyte, must mean 8000 bits, that's hmm...
Ok, let's use 1024 bytes, which is 1024 x 8 bits, that gives us 8192 bits.. not very hard. The only problem is the naming part.. we should start by understanding the difference with kilo and Kilo.
- Me -
Actually minutes per disk is based red book formatting which has less error correction code space overhead than the data storage standard. So you can fit significantly more music on a disk formatted as a music CD than you could formatting it as a data CD and dumping wave files onto it.
The obvious reason here, is that it's ok for music cd's to have errors on them since with a little filtering, you probably won't notice an occasional short gap in the sound. But you'd notice a short gap in the middle of a program.
So your calculations are all washed up, there sunny!
On topic. It's us computer geeks who are wrong. Mega-... means million. Live with it.
Also anyone with a brain, knows that a marketing person will always pick the interpretation that makes their product look the best. Anyone who couldn't figure THAT is too dumb to be programming or engineering anyway. And who other than an programmer would assume binary, or would care how many bits it takes to address the data?
Now who wants to bet that the largest chunk of change they are asking for is going towards the lawyers? Come on now!
This case is frivolous because we live in a competitive market. Drives are not priced per GB (I only need 94GB, so I'll just scoop out that much) they're priced based on market forces. A drive labelled 80GB or 80GiB or 74GB would sell for the same price, because that's what drives that size sell for.
And that's the real definition of frivolous -- the resolution of this case will have no effect on the market.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Next thing you know, OS vendors will get sued for their filesystems. "My collection of mp3/divx/pr0n/ should add up only to 10 GB but the stupid OS actually uses 12 Gb to store them! I want my 2 GB back! Sue those bastards!" Really...
they were advertising HD capacity, taking into account a 2:1 compression ratio! It was the DOS era with doublespace and others... So, a 40GB HD was in fact less than 20GB! Of course, they never forgot to put the little '*' and the tiny fineprints...
why are we discussing this: this is absolutely meaningless. who gives a fuck.
1GB = 1024*1024*1024 bytes.
1000MB = 1000*1024*1024 bytes.
A hard drive "GB" is 1000*1000*1000 bytes.
Note that, strictly speaking, the drive vendors are right. The ISO standard says that "giga" is decimal billions, and "gibi" is 10^30s.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I would never hire you. Words have always had accepted meanings outside of the dictionary ones. Especially in the context of a specific industry.
If you can't wrap your mind around that, your career in many industries would be very short lived.
Dork.
On a different note, but a similar one. A particular .
laptop manufacturer says 256MB DDR RAM and for the
memory for the video card says 64MB (shared)
By reading this one cannot tell if that is shared from the 256MB system's memory. And when you see the BIOS you notice that there is 64MB missing. So can we sue the laptop manufacturer for misleading the buyer like this?
What is the convention when specifying system's memory? Is the video card's memory included while
specifying memory?
Many computer users may not realise a 100GB hard disk cannot hold a 100GB file. Some of the data space is needed to organise the file or more usually, files plural saved on the hard disk. So there's one figure for HDD size and another for actual maximum file size capacity.
However this figure can't be easily quoted, as it changes depending on the OS used, the drive format type, and the nature of the files on the disk. It seems to me this has more impact than than the ~2.3% difference between the actual size of a Gigabyte and the assumptions often made by people using the term incorrectly.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
I think the question is, why sue Apple, HP blah blah blah when they are just posting what have been given to them. If you want to sue, shouldn't you sue Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate, Western Digital ect. ect.
SIO standards actually define 1000 MB (MegaByte) as 1 GB (GigaByte). If you want to use the 1024 thingie, use should say 1024 MiB == 1 GiB. This stands for MebiByte and GebiByte resp. The latter are only to be used for main memory sizes afaik, not for hard drive sizes. So you should still specify the hard drive size in MB, GB or TB. However, the difference between various manufacturers l;ies in the fact that they do not allways refer to size after formatting the drive with you favorite filesystem (e.g. ReiserFS). But do you really care if your 120GB drive is actually only 115GB after formatting? I think not.
I am the Shield Anvil. And I am not yet done.
I don't think it matters one way or another to hd manufacturers, it's just that no one manufacturer wants their drives looking smaller than everyone else's. Under this assumption, this lawsuit could, at best, serve as a well needed neutralizer to get everyone back to binary which we know and love so dearly.
The factor of 2048/2352 in my calculations accounts exactly for the error correction in the ISO9660 mode 1 data CD format.
Without mode 1 data CD error correction, the capacity (for an 80 minute blank CD) is 80 minutes * 60 seconds/minute * 44100 audio samples / second * 2 bytes / sample * 2 audio channels, or 846720000 bytes. This is the raw capacity of the underlying audio storage. Note that the audio storage layer itself has some error correction, which I am disregarding since it is underneath even this storage layer and does not impact these numbers.
The ISO data CD standard mandates that this available space be divided into blocks of 2352 bytes of which 2048 bytes are to be used for data and 304 bytes are to be used for error correction (additional error correction, over and above the error correction already present in the audio storage layer, which I previously disregarded).
Multiplying 846720000 bytes by 2048/2352 yields 737280000 bytes of data capacity. Exactly.
Summary:
What's interesting about this is that it becomes more of a problem over time. If you look at the amount of "missing" hard drive space as a percentage, it goes up as the drives get bigger.
It becomes more noticeable at the TeraByte, PetaByte range than it was in the KiloByte range.
2.34% KB
4.63% MB
6.87% GB
9.05% TB
11.18% PB
1 MB = 1 Megabyte = 10^6 bytes
1 MiB = 1 Mebibyte = 2^20 bytes
1 GB = 1 Gigabyte = 10^9 bytes
1 GiB = 1 Gibibyte = 2^30 bytes
Hexadecimal?
I remember back in the days of 30MB drives or so. The box would say 30MB, but in fine print it would define 30MB as 30,000,000 bytes. At the time, most customers wouldn't notice that 30,000,000 != 31457280 because of overhead from the filesystem and such.
I work in a computer store, and I can tell you that customers can be very upset when they learn (by doing properties in windows) that their new 120 GB drive only has 114.440918 GB on it. That's 5GB of lost space as far as they are concerned.
It would be one thing if windows and other operating systems identified a "120GB" drive as 120GB. But since two different systems are used to measure the same thing, I would call that deceptive advertising. The only reason it hasn't happened earlier is nobody noticed it. Now that there is a signigicant discrepancy, the average consumer is getting upset. As hard drives get larger, this will only get worse.
Now when will somebody file some class action lawsuits against the makers of spyware that auto installs itself on people's machines and doesn't give them a way to uninstall it?
Got Apathy?
...doesn't mean that the rest of the population does. Look, these people are lying about the capacity of their hard drives - and you think thats ok? Why? If the fine isn't big enough for false advertizing and faulty products, companies will just write it off as a business expense and keep doing their amature proctology on the ass of the consumer.
How can we convince these stupid money-grubbing lawyers to terrorize some other industry and leave the computer industry alone... perhaps some industry dearer to their hearts...
Say, that 32-foot-class yacht you sold me is actually only 31.2 foot...
Lots (well, some are, anyway) of files that come with programs I buy are claimed to be small, say about 1000 bytes, but they actually take up a lot more space than that on my disk, since the allocation units are larger than 1000 bytes. Who is going to pay for this??!
This message has been ROT-13 encrypted twice for higher security.
No, 80GB isn't really a BIG SIZE disk, but at least mine is REALLY HARD
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
*tax will be added on check out
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
My best attempt at 56k is actually around 45k. I don't think I'll be able to claim a 20% refund from the modem manufacturer for lost bandwidth, though. Or will I..? ;)
Computers are complicated, expensive, and filled with jargon and (especially) numbers. Not confusing enough? Let's sue so that 80 GB can now become "78.96 GB; formatted capacity less".
Yeah, I know that you can find that out already; but if this guy wins, it will be in BIG letters. Ugly box gets uglier, overnight, but hey, We're Informed.
I know it's annoying. But it's not deceptive, when everybody in the industry does the exact same thing. If this guy actually gets a settlement, enterprising Slashdotters can get into the action:
Sue the TV makers. How come it says right on the box in big letters "27 inch TV" and in little letters "26 inches in Canada"? Does the TV shrink in some bizzare Quantum fashion if it gets booted off in Vancouver instead of Seattle? No, they're lying to you, but they tell the truth to those damn Canadians. Sue them.
My car says it has a 5.7 litre engine, but I find out (ah, the fine print) that it's not really that exact size. What's worse, every car maker does the same thing. Sue 'em.
My boom box and my car stereo and my new 27", no, wait, 26" TV all say they put out 100 watts per channel, but later I find out that they're exempt from the FTC rules (glue a handle on 'em and they're "portable devices") about power specifications, and they really only put out 10 if you measure them like the law says real home stereos have to be measured. Sorry, can't sue 'em, those are the rules the FTC came up with when somebody sued 'em 25 years ago. Sorry.
Anyway, there's lots of these kinds of small annoyances, but consumers have to educate themselves. If everybody in a given product category is consistent, it's not such a big deal. If being annoying was grounds for a suit, we'd all spend the rest of our lives in court.
You sir, are an idiot.
That's not, umm... funny... Just worrying.
Dude, you can't come along CHANGING the meaning of "gigabyte", damnit!
Just because a lot of non-geeks by computers these days, and their intuitive guess as to how many bytes are in a gigabyte is wrong, doesn't mean we need to re-define it.
I think gibibyte should be the new term for storage in terms of powers of ten, and gigabyte can remain meaning 1024 megabytes, as it always has.
I postulate that this whole fiasco started because some marketing jackass whose storage product happened to have a capacity that was an even product of ten decided that it would look like more if he just lied so it could appear to have X megabytes when really it was a bit short of that. So other companies had to do the same to make their products seem comparable. Then they all agreed to try and change the standard before they get sued.
128 + 32 = 160 != 162
10h = 16
10h^3 = 16^3 = 4096 = 1000h
==> 10^3 = 1000 in all number systems excluding binary and ternary (which do not have a number "3")
Cthulhu fhtagn!
They can start being consistent. From now on you'll see ads for computers with 268.4MB RAM in stead of 256MB. So what's the big deal??
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
This isn't the first time the electronics industry has relabelled capacity for its own benefits. Megadrive cartridges used to be sometimes have blurb saying they were '4 meg' or whatever. In fact, they weren't referring to megabytes, but megabits, a much smaller measure of capacity. Maybe after this lawsuit the defendants will be rifling through their old game collection and decide to take out a retro-active suit against Sega.
Or more likely, the plaintiffs get a nice flash cheque for one hundred billion dollars, which is whipped away by an RIAA lawyer before they can get outside of the court.
So you could call it "Russian" mega/giga. Especially cool since russians are big SI fans (even their planes have altimeters in metres instead of feet! This causes some problems).
Why can't the OS report all sizes in MB, GB, etc. instead of MiB, GiB, etc.? Are the coders so lazy that they insist on using a bit shift operator to divide by 1024, rather than actual division by 1000? Are we so stuck with the legacy of powers of two that we can't change things now?
This would not solve the problem. The real problem is that the only people who use 10^x when referring to kilo/mega/giga/terrabytes of hard disk space are the hard drive manufacturers themselves.
If you go and buy a piece of software and look on the box, it's going to say, "Requirements: 3.4 GB of hard disk space," or some such thing, and it's going to mean 3.4*2^30, not 3.4*10^9. If I buy a new hard drive for the purposes of using this and other pieces of software, all marketed the same way, I'm going to make an incorrect calculation when determining which drive I should buy.
I add up the numbers, and for the software I use, I'm going to need 34.6 Gigs of HD space. I'll probably want another 20 Gigs free, so that makes 50. Windows takes 2.4 GB (this is a bullshit figure, I just needed an example), so I want a drive that is at least 57 GB. Except I don't want 57 GB, I want 57 GiB (to use the language that has become so popular in the last 25 minutes). I go and buy that 60 Gigger at Fry's and take it home, expecting to be able to install all my software and have the right amount of space to spare, and find out that I don't have the 60 Gigs like I thought I had. I've actually got 55.9 Gigs, at least in the language of software documentation, and now I'm short by a little over a Gig.
So true, the SI units sort of make sense, but the software world is quite entrenched in its base-2 lingo, and it doesn't matter if the next version of Windows or Redhat or Mac OS X gives you numbers in SI units. The industry is bigger than just them, and the confusion over such a change is bound to be even worse than it is right now.
Face it, hard drive and monitor manufacturers should give us the specs, if not in our language, then at least in the language of all the other expensive toys on our desks. Refusing to conform, when in the past they did conform, is blatantly deceptive marketing.
Surely a 100GB drive stores 100GB? Just because the file tables are also stored on the drive, reducing the size of 'User' storage doesn't negate the fact the drive is storing 100GB of data.
"A novice programmer thinks kilobyte contains 1000 bytes, an experienced one thinks kilometer contains 1024 meters" :)
HD designer A: ha! we have a disk with 1024 bytes! Why dont we use kilobyte to define this amount of data! I am 3l33t d00d!
HD designer B: er... do you realize that a kilo of anything is 1000? Are you insane?
HD designer A: dude, I can fucking change the SI units to whatever fuck I want. Thos bureaucrats should have some common sense.
Who needs to apply common sense???
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This is just a wild hunch... Before 1.44 "mm" floppys, there were 720 kb floppys. I dunno (haven't checked, haven't bothered), but it might be that the 720 kb floppys are indeed 720 kb, and that they were a little bit incosistent when they introduced High-denisity discs with double the capacity... 1440 kb or as they say, 1.44 mb.
Not Buzzword 2.0 compliant. Please speak english.
And the lay person should be aware about this ignorant techno blabbery imposed by ignorant nerds.
Sorry but not, the IT industry and the technical literatti got themselves in this mess and they should not get out of it without some degree of harm to their reputation as pompous assholes, that think the world should revolve about their technological niche of expertise.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
There's a big difference here. That missing capacity does actually exist on the disk, it's just your chosen method of using it wastes some of that storage space. You could, in theory at least use that missing space if you weren't using a filesystem. To give a metaphor: tha parent article is talking about suing a Acme Peanut Butter Inc because they are selling "1lb jars" which are really only 400g. You are talking about suing them because some peanut butter gets stuck to your knife and inside the jar so you can't actually get 400g onto your bread.
WTF? This thread has got to be the most banal waste of energy in the history of /.
I realise that contributing to it makes it worse, but really, if lives are so barren and devoid of meaning that this "issue" rates as anybody's "pet peeves" that's just fucking tragic.
1GB "marketing" size != 1GB true size != 1GB when formatted. I remember buying a 9.1GB HDD and being somewhat peeved when Windows showed it as 8.6GB.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Great, all this will end up doing in the end is making some lawyers rich (notice that they get paid) and the rest of us poorer as hardware vendors will just pass on the cost to the consumer in the form of higher prices.
Boy, I'd like to see someone hit MS with that one. It would be the biggest chunder in history ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
The amount of energy in food is measured in kilocalories (kCal), check your Cola-Light, 1 kcal per can (1,000 calories), but they say its "One Calorie". How the hell do they get away with that?
Shit, I need to lose 10 kilograms, and I should be running 10 kilometers a week. Think i'll just chnge the units, run 10 meters, and lose 10 grams.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Floppy disks are my favorite. When High Density disks came, they went from 720K to 1440K in size. For some reason they divided this number by 1000 to get the well known 1.44 MB which has 1.44*1000*1024 bytes :)
Actually I am on the HD manufacturers side on this. We use prefix because we want to make it easy for us. 4700000000 is hard to say, let's call it 4.7GB instead. It's much easier to move "the dot" a few times than to do 4700000000/(1024^3) in the head. It's easy to see that you can fit 20 230MB sized files on a 4.7GB sized media. It isn't obvious to see that you can fit 20 220MiB sized files on a 4.3GiB sized media.
I can't believe that the american people have not become enough computer literate yet to realize that a megabyte is 1048576 bytes.. Come on guys even memory is based on math and is not exact... 64 megs is 65... what are you going to do, sue all the memory manufacturers... give me a break!
As an engineer I can appreciate all the ways in which the internals of the computer revolve around powers of 2 -- bus structures, block sizes, address spaces, buffer sizes, registers, long int and short int counters, etc. To a programmer, base 1024 measurements of memory and file sizes are very natural. But as a user, I could care less and would prefer a consistent measurement scale that adheres to international standards (i.e., SI). As a user I would prefer 1GB = 1000 MB = 1000000 kB = 1000000000 bytes. Buying and using a 512 MiB RAM module is just as strange and idiosyncratic as having a 536 MB RAM module -- neither are "nice round numbers" for the average person.
And this shift to base 1000 should be easy to do. The power of modern software is in its ability to hide all the geeky details of the lower layers of the implementation (especially those in hardware). Since the average user does not think in base 2, the measurements reported by the user interface should not be expressed in base 2 terms.
Moverover, if the OS coders have done their job well, switching between base 1000 and base 1024 representations of memory and file sizes should be a simple matter of changing a single value in preference/defaults file someplace. In reality, I'd bet that divide-by-1024s are scattered throughout the code base. A simple grep for "1024" on the OS source code would reveal the poor level of reuse of code that converts integer bytes to kB/MB/GB notation.
Perhaps my rant is really about these poor engineering practices that create a confusing and inconsistent user experience. And these practices are worse than inconveniences. These are the same poor practices that have created input and buffer overrun security holes all over every operating system and application. Rather than patch a single, or a few, input buffer-handling code libraries to prevent overrun-based exploits, we seem to have to patch every single use of a buffer.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I think Wikipedia's entry on gigabyte should make this law suit appear really stupid. Here's a clip from the entry:
Since most people who buy computers are not in "computer science or computer programming", I would argue the value of 10^9 used by storage manufacturers is perfectly applicable when selling computers in the mainstream.
Sadly, it appears a lawsuit rather than education will be used to settle this matter, which will lead to a precedent that will be yet another aggrivation for the computer industry. Damnit, if you're a lay person, it's safe to say that 1,000 Megabytes is roughly 1 Gigabyte.
Join Tor today!
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't. Mega in a decimal context means 1000000, or 10 to the 6. Mega in a binary context means 100000000000000000000, or 2 to the 20. It's just the way it is.
I stole this
Norways biggest online computer store(komplett.no, I believe they have franchises in other countries as well, like in England) have got their backs covered. On their Customer Support page, they state quite clearly:
"1 GB tilsvarer 1.000.000.000 bytes med hensyn pa harddisk-kapasitet."
Or, in English, "1 GB equals 1 000 000 000 bytes with regard to hard disk capacity".
Actually, aren't the manufacturers right? Giga, et al are prefixes for a base 10 system, not a base two. People who view them as base two still pick the closest base ten prefix (i.e. kilo = 1024 which is the closest power of two 1000). Mixing systems is plain wrong, i.e. correctly a kilo byte should be 1000 bytes, not 1024.
I allways noticed that the scsi drives were quoted with the true values... Why the difference?
!
This is history rewriting. Everybody's been using powers-of-2 when it comes to KB, MB, GB, etc for decades. SI come along thinking there's some confusion - which there isn't, it's only the hard drive manufacturers who are causing confusion - and slap down a horrible "standard".
Let me guess, you've only been using computers for a past 5 years?
7000000th Post!
How appropriate it was done by a troll...
Actually a gigabyte is
1073741824 bytes (power of 2^9)
They sold you 150 gigs but after formatting
you multiply that times have 140 gigs
So multipy 140 * 1073741824 = 150323855360
STILL over 150 billion bytes. Byte me!
They actually understated the number of bytes they were selling and your formatting software is understating the number of bytes available.
If it weren't for bad karma I'd have no karma at all.
Any technology which is restricted by a power of 2 is best measured in powers of 2.
Any technology which is not restricted by a power of 2, is best measured in powers of 10.
RAM and Flash memory is addressed in powers of 2, it would be wasteful and technologically bizzare to count it in powers of 10.
Hard drives don't fill the storage capacity of their addressing hardware, it's just not the way the technology works. Counting it in powers of 2 would be a bizzare thing to do.
Anything involving time, like clock cycles or bandwidth (e.g. kBps) should be measured in powers of 10 since the 'second' is an arbitrary unit in the land of technology.
The only deviation from the metric system should be the necessary one. These people are complaining because they have been getting the bennefit of the difference between 2^20 and 10^6 in their 'M' prefix on RAM and they don't understand why they shouldn't get the same deal on their HDD's.
The Big Mac really isn't that big.
The Big Bacon Deluxe is neither big, nor deluxe.
Secure Shell really isn't that secure (:
The Patriot Act really isn't all that patriotic.
About the only true advertising claim is "home of the Whopper." Get a fricken life, you freaks!
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
BATS AREN'T BUGS!"
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Confusion startet long ago with the introduction of the "1.44MB" floppy disk drive. Which is actually:
1.44 * 1000 * 1024 bytes
Now that's sick.
But it's all solved through Gibi bytes and HD makers
explaining the use of the SI for _years_.
1000 MB == 1GB. Just because powers of 1024 are "convenient" at times it doesn't change the meaning of these units. Everything else is like mandating that pi==3 or pi==4 because it's more convenient.
a 2x4 is actually only 1.5" by 3.5"
talk about deceptive....
. . .when FDISK or CHKDSK or any other disk utility that provides numbers on free space comes back with "19.4 GB" when someone bought a "20 GB" drive. Naturally, they wonder where the other ".6 GB" went. I've had to explain to people that the other .6 GB never existed, because computers count 1GB as 1,073,741,824 Bytes, not 1,000,000,000 bytes.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Years ago - when this practice first started, and when the market was primarily techies - this lawsuit would have made sense. But it's been this way for years, and it's now standard practice. There's no way you can market geek stuff to the average consumer in geek terms - you will lose every time. History has proven this over and over.
The folks suing need a reality check.
Yes but Oct31 = Dec25
Who knew Tim Burton was such a mathematician?
Using the google calculator to look up "megabytes in mebibytes" says that "1 megabytes = 1 mebibytes".
Google has spoken.
If this is a competition to see who can think up the stupidest lawsuits, this one isn't even close to the RIAA suing its own fans.
False advertising is what our economy is built on. Misrepresentation is the foundation of our entire government.
Too many lawyers and not enough teachers.
2x4s are called 2x4s because that is the stock of raw lumber that they are produced from. The finishing process takes off about a 1/2 from each dimension.
Look, whatever the dictionary tells you "giga" means, this is a technical term that means something else in the computer world, and has always meant something else in the computer world.
What's intriguing is when a dictionary gives you seemingly inconsistant results.
This is not my sig.
Actually 10^3 = 1000 is incorrect.
It should be 10^3 == 1000.
My formatted 100 MB Zip disks read as a capacity of 95.9 MB, with 94.4 MB available. Using the 1,000 = 1,024 formula, my capacity should be around 97.66 MB. Hmmm... Is Iomega also being sued? And why am I still using Zip disks?
So that's 93%, not 91%... as long as we're nit picking over 1024 vs 1000.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Hey, I've got a 20 GB hard drive. How many bytes does it hold?
20 billion bytes. 20*10^9 bytes. 20,000,000,000 bytes. What change have they made to the definition of 'billion', 'bytes', or 'giga'?
OTOH, it's the OS and software designers who have made the change and said that 1 KB=1024 bytes. They're the ones who've screwed up the SI prefixes, not the HD manufacturers. Don't blame the wrong people here.
-T
First of all, everybody chill. When you can buy 120+/- GB disk drives for $60, who cares about a 10% difference? Especially given that filesystems waste so much of the drive with unused portions of clusters, etc.
And why are they suing the computer companies rather than the disk drive companies? This is just a nuisance suit because the drive companies generally remember to put the footnote on the box, but the computer ads are already too packed to squeeze in any more caveats.
Different disk drive companies use MB to mean different quantities. Believe it or not, there are more than two choices. You may think MB should be 2^20 or 10^6 bytes, but many disk drive companies use 1000 KB (or 1000 * 1024 bytes).
And hard drives actually have more space than advertised. A significant portion of the drive holds spare sectors, and there's quite a few ECC bits on there, too.
It's the computer folks that corrupted the meanings of the SI prefixes. To distinguish the difference, many used to use capital K to mean 1024 and reserved lowercase k for 1000. And nobody really cared about a ~2.5% difference. That was fine until we got to megabytes, since M and m are both standard SI prefixes.
The odds of a cosmic ray flipping one of your bits when you had 64KB RAM was infinitessimal, and we had parity bits just in case. But now RAM sizes have grown a million fold, and we've practically eliminated parity and ECC bits. (Though the odds of a cosmic ray flipping an important bit is still tiny since most of your bits are stupid bitmaps, MP3 samples, and spyware data.) In a sense, aren't the hard drive companies more noble by using that few extra percent to protect your data than the RAM manufacturers who give you a few percent more buy no longer make an effort to ensure data integrity?
And finally, I find the claims of the plaintiffs amusing when they estimate how many digital photos you could store in the "missing" space. Isn't a vague estimate without regard to image size, resolution, color depth, file format, and file system potentially just as misleading as the footnote on your hard drive's retail box?
How about using this same theory for my salary.
I want to get paid 80K = 80*1024 = 81920, not a measily 80,000.
I think everyone could use a 2.4% pay increase!!!!
"==" does not have any meaning that I know of outside of some computer language syntaxes.
No, it should be pow(10,3) == 1000.
1,000,000,000,000 / 1,099,511,627,776 = 0.9094947
This is the best arguement I've heard so far. Basically, if you go 1024KB=1MB your sticking to binary standard, and at 1000KB=1MB your sticking to a base-10 (standard mathematical) standard.
But by using both measurements for components in marketing a systemr, you're effectively breaking either standard and simply attempting to mislead the consumer.
Personally, I've always found it amusing that my 512MB of RAM is a bit over 512,000,000 bytes, but never seen the reason for it due to Mega in proper math being 1e6.
As an Internet discussion legnthens, the probability of a participant invoking the Jargon File approaches one.
Suing the harddrive manufacturers or computer makers will prove to be fruitless. They ALWAYS cover their asses. Upon reading this post, i went to say... western digitals site. all their harddrive listings say at the very bottom, in the fine print what exactly THEY consider a Gig. erm. sorry.. Gib. No matter how immoral this is to the geek community, suing the makers isnt gonna change a thing.
Right, it's exactly the same unit as has already been used in the computer world, so why change it? The only practical confusion resulting from using "gigabyte", etc. to mean base 2 is due to the hard drive manufacturers using base 10 in a context when base 2 should be used. Any time you see the word "gigabyte" it means 1024 megabytes. Transmission speeds (which don't adhere to base 2) are in "gigabits" anyway, and if you're doing a simple conversion between the two, transmission speeds are often so unstable, that the margin of error by converting from bytes to bits but not from base 2 to base 10 is insignificant in terms of how accurate the calculation is.
This is a language, not some ISO standard where unused, hackneyed words that sound stupid are afforded any validity. The regular prefixes have always been base 2 when in the context of memory, and while "gibibyte" may merely look acceptably funky when typed, I'm never going to say such an ill-conceived word.
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
While I think this lawsuit perhaps a bit silly as an educated "computer person," I can where 'average joe' would benefit from this (after buying an 80GB drive and having windows show it as 72 or whatever).
However, one has to wonder how many other places small corners are cut and the consumer more deliberately deceived. Anyone remember a case where 7-11 was giving out large slushes for medium price because some clever kid busted them for have a cup with capacity less than the advertised size?
Time to break out the measuring cups boys and girls. Is that 10KG bag of dogfood really 10KG. How often are these things checked, or are they checked by a regulating body? Perhaps it is up to the consumer to check, and then sue for disrepencies... I'm sorry to say it but when it comes to shaving a bit to save a buck, corps will sally forth without worry.
> Is a Giblibite how good a movie is then?
If so, then a Gimlibite is probably a measure of how short the movie is...
--
-JC
You Americans, with your ignorance of international standards! 1kb is 1000 bits. 1kB is 1000 bytes. Kilo meaning 1000. You mean Kibibytes. A kibibyte is 1024. Hence KiB. That's why they say KiB, MiB, GiB when they mean YOUR definition of kilobyte. There is even an ISO standard on it!
This lawsuit is taking place in the US where people's usage of SI terms are usually used (incorrectly) by the tech sector.
Getting Americans to use the KiB, GiB, etc. terms instead of KB, GB, etc. that they are used to is going to be difficult if not impossible.
If Americans were wiling to change, we would've been on the metric system in the 70s.
Look, binary and computer arithmetic predate HDs so HD manufacturers should have stayed with the definition of the the terms KB, MB and GB etc. as understood by computer science. Hell, the chips on their own drives work on these principles. When they say a drive has an 8MB cache, whose standard are they using, SI or computer science? Power of Two notation rules!!! It is sort of like the Power of Three on "Charmed" but after Prue died and before Paige came on board... ;-)
Volume ratings (baud, bits per second, space) that don't have usage expectations have always been base 10, and for good reason.
.
People tend to forget that there are other things in the world than the eight bit byte. People will get into huge arguments over that a byte is always eight bits, and won't shut up until you show them something like Foldoc: Byte, Knuth1 pp125, K&R1 pp34, etc. Hell, some people will keep trying to argue the point (don't you love those guys that tell you that language is mobile, and that therefore five year old slang, or misunderstandings that they and their friends have, or some other atrocity is legitimate?)
People also tend to forget that these units have been in use since considering a byte to be eight bits was a risk at best, and that changing the system which has been in place for almost half a century would balk far more expectations than the one litigant which couldn't be bothered to do their homework, either before shopping or before filing suit
Come on, how many of you here are old school enough to remember what that 8 in N,8,1 meant? How many of you remember dialing E,7,0? Was that for nothing? I was still calling Atari Hydra BBSes in the early nineties. That's not exactly ancient history. If the defense lawyers need proof that those systems were and still are common (embedded, these days, but still,) tell them to crack out the term programs that come standard with their favorite OS, or the AT command set.
It is not appropriate to assume that the space measurements of a device which is not itself allowed to assume the alignment requirements of the host align with your expectations. Period. The boxes of hard drives and modems have been reading the full numbers since the 1980s. It is not the manufacturer's fault that the plaintiff was not acquainted with old, appropriate practice that predates the standards that the plaintiff is inappropriately attempting to hold the manufacturer to.
Frankly, even if they were right, this would be a stupid, frivolous lawsuit. I hope they have to pay the manufacturer's legal bills. This litigation-happy society has got to go.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
1024*1024*1024*1024=1,099,511,627,776
You're looking at a gigabyte, I'm looking at a terabyte. Thanks for showing the same problem exists for just a gig though.
oh, and "ditto", too.
Clear, Dark Skies
In fact, I still have a 340MB hard drive which is exactly 340 Megabytes = 356,515,840 Bytes
and a 1.6GB Drive that is exactly 1.60 Gigabytes = 1,717,986,918 Bytes.
Then, I bought a 3.4 Gigabyte drive that was 3,400,000,000 Bytes = 3.16 Gigabytes.
They changed the definition when they realized it might be better marketing.
If hard drives had always been a certain way, it'd be OK, but, guess what, they weren't. The decision to change was a marketing one, and mostly unethical at that.
KiB, MiB, GiB, TiB and so on are a load of rubbish! They are not real units and were only 'invented' to give the dishonest sales droids something to try and fall back upon when challenged.
ffs Microsoft gets it right! My PC tells me that I have 74,885,554,176 bytes free and then says 69.7GB. That is the sort of evidence that Trading Standards Authorities are likely to consider. After all, surely the biggest & richest company in computing must have some idea?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
They shouldn't be sueing computer makers, but the drive makers! The drive makers are the ones who market their drives using the 1000kb=1mb crap to make them look better. I think that is blatent product mislabeling. It's the same as buying a gallon of milk that's really just a relabeled half gallon. or something.
Against my better advice, the wife went and purchased a HP box from a computer megastore.
The damn thing kept smoking out all the time - but one of the biggest problems was that the drive geometry was completely whacked. Seems that their engineers worked out some hack (that's why you need to use their "repair disk") to make a certain disk size seem bigger, even though the drive geometry wouldn't support it at all.
What's a dropped bit here or there? Naturally, any attempt to use Norton to fix any of these disk problems caused Norton to say "er, this drive is completely whacked, none of the values for drive geometry make any sense or match anything else.... I'm giving up now. Go and make this drive work properly."
But no, you couldn't go and set the drive geometry PROPERLY (which would reduce the "disk size" quite a touch) because then the "repair disk" would happily set it back to its buggy, marketing-friendly "size".
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
storage vs hd cache. they use metric for storage but the memory for the cache is still binary MB.
1Kb != 1000.
I'm not blaming the wrong people, but it's not exactly like the HD manufactures have *always* been using decimal instead of base-2.
There was a time when the HD sizes were the same as what you got when you formatted the drive. They simply changed to decimal because it makes the drives sound larger.
At least, that's about the only reason I can think of to provide capacity measurements in a different format then that of every single computer that will use the drive does.
If computers use 1024 bytes to a kilobyte and so on then shouldn't hard drives do the same?
If you find an 80GB disk which is really 80GB, you will have to leave 7% unused, that is 5.5GB waste.
My hypothesis is that the "80 GB" (80*10^9 byte) drives are actually 80 GiB (80*2^30 bytes), but that the disk's formatting reserves 7 percent of the tracks for damaged sector remapping to increase yield and reliability.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ugly is relative. I bet C looks ugly to anybody who has learned a wordier language such as COBOL or Pascal.
Hard to pronounce? "KiB" is pronounced as "KAYZ", "MiB" as "MEHGZ", and "GiB" as "GIHGZ". Distinguish from "KB" as "KIHL-oh-byts", "MB" as "MEHG-uh-byts", etc.
Will I retire or break 10K?
"A gigabyte (pronounced GIG-a-bite with hard G's) is a measure of computer data storage capacity and is "roughly" a billion bytes. A gigabyte is two to the 30th power, or 1,073,741,824 in decimal notation."
- my other operating system is a Linux distribution
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
For your typical sucky movie, the nanogiglibite would be more usual...
Base-2 arithmetic as at the core of a CPU; the entire mathematical scheme is binary. Other schemes have been tried, but none has been developed that is easier to design and, importantly, very fast. Since binary voltage levels are the easiest to design and discern (generally on/off, or positive/negative), there hardly even exists a feasible alternative.
All the adders and subtractors, as well as the integer and floating-point multipliers and dividers, are base-2. That's because 2's complement and modulo-2 arithmetic are easy. Very easy. And fast.
Not only that, but for efficiency reasons the registers and cache memories within a CPU are addressed with base-2 logic. So are the bus channels the CPU uses. Pretty much all communication within a computer relies in one way or another on base-2, and most certainly on binary itself (for the raw physical data).
Hope this helps. If you have any other questions, I'd be happy to answer.
1000 vs 1024 aside....
In ALL operating systems there is overhead for the whatever drive format you use. It may be an 80 'gig' drive, but there will always be less available after a format because of OVERHEAD such as something as simple as a TOC, FAT, markers, etc...
Am I the only person who recognizes this?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
the spell checker must have missed that one.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Who decided on those names? They are terrible! Having to make a "b" sound twice in quick succession like that makes an awful word. They should have picked a better replacement letter for the "g", such as R: "Merabyte", "Kirabyte" and "Girabyte".
I'm guessing "bi" was chosen because it's the start of "binary". It's still a bad choice.
I know that'd make me happy...
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Nope, bandwidth is standard and the phone company always gives you the same amount (3100 Hz) for the modem to use. What you lost was 20% information capacity and I doubt the modem manufacture will take the fall for the phone companies lines or your distance from your ISP... =)
[I] According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system.[/I]
It's actually a matter of arguing standards. ISO v IEC. Manufacturers use ISO (1000, or GIGAbyte) but the OS uses IEC (1024 or binary or GIBIbyte). However, it reports the results using the ISO standard. So of course this will make the drive seem smaller. If the result were reported in the IEC standard there would not be any problem. Most drive manufacturers list how they calculate the size (1000 or 1024).
Got it?
It's actually the Imperial gallon that's been fiddled with. There used to be a lot of different gallons. Which leads to all sort of problems, so both countries rationalized their traditional systems. The U.S. did so by standarizing on the English wine gallon (our current liquid gallon) and the English corn gallon (the dry gallon). But rather than choose between competing traditional measures, Parliment abandoned them all, and decreed that the volume of 10 pounds of water at room temperature was a gallon.
Apology accepted.