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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!
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
But the truth is most women find bigger is better.
Yes I would know.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
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, 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. . .
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
that I can store roughly one first person shooter per gib of drive space.
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.
"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.
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
...I measure starting from the base of my spine.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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?
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."
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Man you GiB fan boys amaze me. As has been said 100 times already, bytes are not SI units, the SI prefixes do not apply. They are not metric units. A byte is a computer unit. We do this all the time in every day life, the same word can have different meanings in different contexts. If your NRA buddy is talking about a new rack, he could be refering to a gun rack. A nerd friend might be talking about a server rack. Another friend could be talking about a woman's breasts. It's the same word, but with different meanings.
In the computing world, the giga prefix means 2^30. In the physical world it means 10^9. Different contexts, different meanings. Give it up.
-matt
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.
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...
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 ----
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..
If you wish to beat me over the head with your analogy, how about making it a valid one? Adjectives and nouns are not the same thing. If I say you have a big gun, a big server, or big breasts, the word big means the same darn thing in all three contexts.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
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?
All of mine are wide, ultra wide in fact, and hot swappable to boot.
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...
Geeks would say "1024". Your average educated person would say "1000".
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.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]
giga- is not an adjective. It is a prefix.
if(!cool) exit(-1);
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..."
PC ad:
"Special: Upgrade to 1 Gigabyte RAM today and get an extra 7% more memory absolutely FREE!!!:
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
Too much 'hard'ware, my friend. Mine is just swap but with the --grow flag. That wy I handle most requirements on the fly.
The computer science community has accepted, by long use, the definition of 1KB=2^10 bytes. This means that, although it is inconsistent with the SI definitions of the quantifiers, this is a de facto industry standard; one which hardware manufacturers have intentionally defied for years. That this is not the SI meaning of those quantifiers is a moot point.
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.
Hard Drive
Disk Size: 111.79 GB (1K = 1024) 121 GB (1K = 1000)
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.
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.
*tax will be added on check out
Yesterday was the time to do it right. Are we having a REVOLUTION yet?
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.
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!
"A novice programmer thinks kilobyte contains 1000 bytes, an experienced one thinks kilometer contains 1024 meters" :)
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'll bet it's ultra fast too!
It's not the size of your .sig that matters, it's how you use it.
My, aren't we clever. He points out that differences in units led to the loss of a very expensive piece of equipment and you chastise him for his spelling.
If you were English then I would expect you to spell the word "metre", but since they use the metric system about as often as you Americans do I would not worry too much about them. The American spelling of the word metre is "meter"; whether it is right or wrong is another matter. All I know is that every textbook I own spells it as meter and not metre.
And by the way, the word is "measurement". You would think that someone this caught up in spelling would be aware of that.
Just because people were abusing the metric prefixes for years does NOT mean that they should keep abusing them.
Let me guess, you live in the US and don't have a fucking clue what the metric system is all about. For your information, the metric prefixes kilo, mega, and giga stand for 10^3, 10^6, and 10^9, and NOT 1024, 1024^2, 1024^3. The new units (KiB, MiB, etc) are meant to stop the abuse of the metric prefixes.
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?
Smart geeks would say, "Are we talking 'kilo' as in 2^10 or 'kilo' as in 10^3?" if the context was unclear.
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased