Creative Sued for Base-10 Capacities On HDD MP3 Players

Posted by Soulskill on Thursday May 1, 2008 @04:05PM from the basic-math dept.

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.

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SI by SoapDish · 2008-05-01 16:23 · Score: 0, Redundant

So, these companies are actually losing court cases for using the proper units? That's up there with robbers suing the house owners for injuries they get while breaking in.

Everyone knows (at least outside of USA) that M = Mega = 1000000, and so on. This is standard for all units of measurement, even bytes (yes, I know that's less well known).

I'm outraged.
1. Re:SI by totally+bogus+dude · 2008-05-01 17:31 · Score: 0, Redundant
  
  On the other hand, I also know that M = Mega = 1,048,576 when applied to digital measurements.
  Right. So how many hertz does a 2 GHz CPU run at?
  
  How many bits can a 100 MBit/sec network connection transfer each second?
  
  How many bytes can be stored on a 1 GB memory stick?