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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.)
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.
1. For hard drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB
2. For RAM, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
3. For mp3 players, it depends
4. For CD-R, DVD-R/w, the industry defines 1024 MB = 1 GB
5. For USB flash drives, the industry defines 1000 MB = 1 GB.
Unless you are very used to dealing with these markets, they can be hellishly difficult to understand.
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
disgorge
v. disgorged, disgorging, disgorges
v. tr.
1. To bring up and expel from the throat or stomach; vomit.
2. To discharge violently; spew.
3. To surrender (stolen goods or money, for example) unwillingly.
I would love it if the statement "The lawsuit asks......" uses disgorgement to describe the first meaning. I doubt Apple, etc. would do as meaning (2) suggests. Meaning (3) seems appropriate in this context.
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]
Thats just stupid. I think the lawsuit is innapropriate.
HD manufacturers always measuered their disks like that.
No, they did not. You young'uns probably don't remember it, but the first hard drive I ever owned was 10MB - 10240KB, on the dot (give or take a few bytes).
The binary switchover happened as a marketing scheme sometime between 100MB and 1GB - it was at one of those two milestones, as one of the major manufacturers wanted bragging rights getting there first, as I recall. Since then, all sorts of revisionist history has been written claiming that 1GB was really 1,000MB all along when it plain and simply is not true.
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. The same way that words like "token ring" don't mean the same thing in PC land as they do in real life. If you bought a "token ring adapter" from Cisco and opened the box to find a device that allowed you to slip a Cracker Jack box toy ring over your finger, would you not feel a bit deceived?
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. . .
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...
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.
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.
Now, if you'll forgive me, I'll get back to looking at my 19.96-inch monitor and spinning my 73.47-times-2^10-times-2^10-times-8-bit (post-formatted capacity, using a single ext3 partition, your results may vary, not valid in Utah) hard-disk drive.
Yeah, but look who they're suing. Not really many HD manufacturers. Apple, Dell, Gateway, HP, IBM, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba. OK, IBM does make HDs. But these companies sell complete PC systems. And therein lies the problem.
Another poster has pointed out that some components are measured in SI-unit GigaBytes (=10^9 bytes), such as RAM or CD-Rs, while others are measured in Binary-unit Gigabytes (=2^30 bytes = 1 GiB), such as HDs.
Now, the plain hard drive manufacturers haven't been sued because they are consistently using only SI units. But the desktop PC sellers are advertising using MBs and GBs everywhere, (deliberately? unknowingly?) not paying attention to the differences, thereby misleading the consumer.
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 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
A gibibyte? Jesus. I'm aware that these are standard SI terms, but at some point you've got to let common sense step in.
My production server at work has 24 gigabytes of RAM, by which I mean it has 24 x 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 bytes of RAM. I assume that you would claim this machine has 24 gibibytes of RAM, or that your desktop has 512 mebibytes of RAM, or that this particular object module is 72 kibibytes in size, then? If I started throwing around terms like that, people would look at me like I had gone completely batshit.
"megabyte" and "gigabyte", as they pertain to computer storage, have always been based off of multiples of 1024. This is different than the traditional meanings of these prefixes, but that's a separate issue (and it's hardly new; they've been around for more than fifty years.) What is new is how HDD manufacturers have silently discarded the existing meanings in order to artificially inflate the size of their media. This is a phenomenon that has come about only in recent years (i.e., in the past 5 years or so.) The fact that these manufacturers protest "But look! Technically, we're right!" is not particularly meaningful to me. 40 MB hard drives used to be 40 x 1024 x 1024 bytes. 512 MB of RAM is still 512 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, the same as it's always been. And you claim that "HD makers redefined squat?"
Another obvious example of this is CD-R versus DVD-R. A Yellow Book CD has a capacity of 650 MB, by which I mean 650 x 1024 x 1024 bytes, which is well above 650,000,000 bytes. DVD-R, on the other hand, which is advertised as a 4.7 GB medium, can only hold ~4.35 GB as gigabytes have traditionally been interpreted. So you've got one interpretation for CD-R, and another for DVD-R.
Now, you can crow about SI units all you want, and you can go around talking about how many mebibytes of RAM your laptop has and how many kibibytes this e-mail attachment consumes, but if you don't see that there has been a recent redefinition of standard computer terminology by media manufacturers to hype their products, then you are being either naive or deliberately obtuse.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
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.