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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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Helpful hint:
2^3 = 8
2^10 = 1024
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
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 was expecting $5.12
But the truth is most women find bigger is better.
Yes I would know.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
Explaining the binary system to a nation which can't even handle metric notation is unlikely to happen, even if the movement is backed by an angry mob...
Right! Does "gigantic" refer to one billion ntics? Of course not!
I have to admit that grep '^giga' /usr/share/dict/words did not prove nearly as amusing as I had hoped.
that I can store roughly one first person shooter per gib of drive space.
I'm sorry, but you too are wrong. MiB is a movie, while GiB is a chunk of flesh in Quake, often formed when a body is impacted by a rocket. Neither of these has very much to do with hard drives, and your attempt to pass them off as some sort of computer-related measurement only proves that you are an evil marketing type trying to bilk clueless Americans out of their hard-earned dollars.
government mandate that tech companies have to use binary SI prefixes on labels.
;)
Not likely. Most human beings count in 10s. Only technogeeks like us count in 2s. If the government standardized on anything, it'd be powers of 10.
Which means we'd all get to buy 1074 megabyte sticks of ram instead of 1 gigabyte sticks. Hey, how about that! An extra 74 megs for free.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
"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 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
Judging by the typical end-users I deal with, a mere 24MiB/MB per gig isn't going to help - to them 1GB == FREE.
10GB == Their Email archive.20GB == How much space they chew up when they
50GB == How much space they deserve.
Do any users actually pay attention to disk space, or do they just fill it up? You decide...
Lurgen.comLurgen's Blog
...I measure starting from the base of my spine.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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."
The first drive I bought that had this "SI compliance" misfeature was a 2 GB one, from Conner if I recall correctly. I think they are out of business now. The hard drive before that was 540 real MB's, and all of the ones before that were correct too, back to my first hard drive, which was 20 MB.
On a related note, one of my comp-sci professors always wrote mb instead of MB for megabytes. I was originally in engineering physics, where it is drilled into you to be anal-retentive with respects to units, and it pissed me off, because my first reaction was generally "what the hell is a millibit?"
Best Slashdot comment ever
Capital "K" means kelvin.
And capital "X" means Xobbes. :P
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. . .
When it comes to ice cream, I think that "Won't somebody please think of the children!!!" is more appropriate.
Perhaps the ice-cream makers are going to market the ice cream in those smaller containers as "lower in fat"?
I'm glad you pointed out the fine print issue. I seem to remember that complaining in the past led to almost every manufacturer and retailer putting this info in the fine print. I challenge people to find a major company who doesn't disclose this info.
Legally, I don't think they have much of a case. The fine print contains the discloser that they are suing about, so it is simply ignorance on the case of the consumer not to read it.
Take this example:
The U.S. court system has issued a ruling declaring that Microsoft should be split(1) into separate companies effective immediately(2).
(1) Split means remain one company while the ruling is appealled for the rest of eternity.
(2) Immediately means never, since said appeals will indefinately delay immediately.
The fine print is where all the substance is contained. Don't read it, and you don't know what you're getting.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
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?
All of mine are wide, ultra wide in fact, and hot swappable to boot.
Does this also have something to do with the recent reduction in size of software boxes, like PC games? It used to be that software was packaged in cardboard boxes that were 8" x 10". Heck, my Ultima: Ascention dragon edition is 12" x 15" (friggin HUGE!). Now the boxes are more like 5" x 7".
They're just trying to rip us off, I tell ya. We're not getting all the software we paid for!
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]
Gibibyte -- still getting used to that one ...
Not to mention the Giglibite, recently introduced Si unit of measurement for how badly a movie bites.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
millibits?
Shades of an 18 inch high stonehenge.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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!
PC ad:
"Special: Upgrade to 1 Gigabyte RAM today and get an extra 7% more memory absolutely FREE!!!:
Too much 'hard'ware, my friend. Mine is just swap but with the --grow flag. That wy I handle most requirements on the fly.
*tax will be added on check out
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
"A novice programmer thinks kilobyte contains 1000 bytes, an experienced one thinks kilometer contains 1024 meters" :)
I'll bet it's ultra fast too!
It's not the size of your .sig that matters, it's how you use it.