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Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives
An anonymous reader writes "Seagate has agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleges that the company mislead customers by selling them hard disk drives with less capacity than the company advertised. The suit states that Seagate's use of the decimal definition of the storage capacity term "gigabyte" was misleading and inaccurate: whereby 1GB = 1 billion bytes. In actuality, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes — a difference of approximately 7% from Seagate's figures. Seagate is saying it will offer a cash refund or free backup and recovery software."
Yes, cash seems like a good option, but the problem is that Seagate defines the dollar as having 93 cents.
Wikipedia notes its techie-colloquial usage, and states that it is incorrect according to the SI/metric standard.
Too bad we're "techies" and not scientists. Also too bad we don't use the metric system in the USA. As a matter of fact, we wouldn't touch it with a 3.04800 meter pole.
"In its out-of-court settlement, Seagate proposed to pay $1000000 in damages. When the plaintiffs signed off on the agreement, Seagate lawyers indicated that this was a binary figure, paid the plaintiffs sixty-four dollars in cash and departed, apparently in some haste."
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
i think Newegg can add a "class-action lawsuit" button next to the rebate button, so they can help their customers use their money responsibly. it's the only place i buy my stuff from, and they would have proof of purchase information on file. heck, they can be like Steve Jobs, and just credit me for more purchases from their store!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
The SI folks wisely realized that moving time to a base 10 unit was not practical because the natural division of days into years could never be forced into base-10 units comfortably. Instead, they acknowledge the usefulness of these non-SI units as acceptable for use in spite of their non-base-10 nature.
I totally agree! Now when can we please have reasonable measures of small quantities of volume, based on a unit approximately the size of two cupped hands? That's a human-understandable unit. Since it's based on cupped hands, we'll call it a "cup".
We had that kind of units. They went by the names of ell, foot, inch. After scientists realized that those units were pure idiocy for any kind of scientific work (and missed any kind of logic), they were replaced by the international system of units (abbr. SI). Units like the meters and grams have started replacing "old" units internationally starting in the 19th century and as for today, no civilized nation would ever have the idiotic idea to use something as arbitrary as a foot anymore, now would it?
I was more upset when I ordered a case of hard drives -- the shipping container said "Quantity: 1K", and I only got 1000 hard drives, not the 1024 I was expecting.