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Creative Sued for Base-10 Capacities On HDD MP3 Players
Dorkz brings news of a class-action settlement from Creative Labs over the capacity of their HDD MP3 players. Evidently they calculated drive capacity in base-10 (1,000,000,000 bytes per GB) instead of base-2 (1,073,741,824 bytes per GB). The representative plaintiff is entitled to $5,000, and everyone else who bought one of the HDD MP3 players in the past several years gets a 50% discount on a new 1GB player[PDF]. They can also opt for a 20% discount on anything ordered from Creative's online store. Creative has made available all of the necessary legal forms. Seagate lost a similar lawsuit late last year.
Allright all you penny-pinching jews, it's time to buy Creative(tm)!
537 mb is a very small amount of data. I am sure that you mean MB, but please, do not write milli bit when you mean something else.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
The metric system has been developed in France in the 18th century. And SI, the international system of units based on metric, has been around since 1960. I don't care if PCs have been saying that 1KB = 1024 for 20 years, only americans would argue that kilo means 1024. When I drive for 1 km that's 1000 meters, not 1024. There's also a lot more people in the world using the metric system than there is americans who think kilo = 1024.
Someone, decades ago, wrongly decided to use metric prefixes to describe the wrong values and now every time the capacity increases people think they're losing more and more space, just because people like you who are oblivious to the metric system think that abusing a system for more than 20 years in a specific field makes it okay.
1 KB = 1000 bytes (SI, note how the USA, Liberia and Myanmar are the only ones still stuck in the dark ages)
1 KiB = 1024 bytes (IEEE_1541)
If Creative had used the IEEE binary prefixes they would have won in court and set a good precedent, plain and simple. Leave it to the USA to have people win a lawsuit on the wrong facts.