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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.
Completely orthagonal to the whole stupid debate over base10/base2 gi(bi|ga)bytes or whatever....
I really hate this trend. A corporation loses a case and the punishment is that consumers get to spend more money with them. I fully believe that they will at least break even if not make money on this settlement. WTF. They should be forced to refund everyone who bought one of these players an amount equivalent to the proportion of storage space the "lost".
I'm a class action settlement "Winner" in my business and my prize? I get 20% off products that are outside my usual purchase contract with the company. How lame is that! They get to keep charging me the same ripoff prices as before *and* I get to spend more money with them. And if I mess up filling out the little coupons, then they are invalid, no recourse. </rant>
man, I feel like mold.
Because it is part of the trade, and if you don't understand the rules and definitions in the trade tough shit, you should learn them before getting involved.
Nobody is suing lumber manufacturers because 2x4s aren't 2 inches by 4 inches. Everyone in the trade understands the real dimensions. If you want to get involved in construction you have to learn things like that.
Because when your OS displays the empty space on your device, it uses powers of 2.
You don't have to be a "technical professional" if you OSãtranslates for you.
Don't take my posts literally; it's just code to control my botnet.
We have an SI standard for this nomenclature now. No matter what idiot lawayers want to argue they can't deny the fact that GB is defined for base-10 usage and GiB is base-2.
Given that even people who are advocating this obscure terminology can't get it right (it's IEC, not SI, that defined this standard, and if you want to use SI units, you should be calling them "Octets" not "Bytes"), and that virtually nobody (not even the drive manufacturers) actually uses it outside legalese and fine print, I think you are making unreasonable assumptions and unreasonable demands.
How can it makes sense for memory but not disks ?
On my computer, disks sectors are 512 bytes, and the most commonly used memory block size is 4096 bytes. which is also the block size of my fs. now, what happens if the blocks on disks and in ram are not multiple of each others ?
Should I use non-aligned storage in ram when reading the fs or use non-aligned blocks on my hard drive?
And how should I calculate the hard drive cache size ? with powers of ten ? And how about DMA ?
The point is : connected pieces of hardware should use the same basic units. and since it really makes sense to use power of two for some of these pieces, these basic units really should use powers of two.
OK, I'll take that challenge.
Most quantities that we measure are base-neutral so we default to base-10 because it is the standard counting system. But when we measure storage we are talking about a volume of information. And information in digital form is inherently binary, both when stored, and when manipulated.
So the only base that it makes sense to talk about amounts-of-information in is binary. Hence decades of engineers using the correct, i.e most logical measurements.
Now on a tangent, but if I think (way back) to my school days I seem to remember being taught kB, mB and gB. The idea being that the lower case prefix would prevent confusion with SI prefixs. But I'm way too lazy to look for some sort of citation for that, and yes, only engineers would think that reduces confusion.
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WTF does it have to do with Americans? I'm not an American, I'm Russian. I don't know anyone here who would strongly believe that kilobyte is not 1024 bytes. In fact, most local books of a "Learn to use PC in 7 days" kind explicitly state that kilobyte = 1024 bytes. Metric doesn't have anything to do with it - yes, it was used for a long time for SI units, but byte is not a SI unit! And, for as long as byte was used as a unit of measurement, "kilobyte" has meant "1024 bytes" for the majority of users, like it or not.