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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 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.