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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.
they misrepresented the capacity of their products knowingly, this is a warning to any other company stupid enough to lie like this.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
The court should have awarded each of the plaintiffs a calculator and a boot to the head.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
...they misrepresented the capacity... I'm sure they thought they were just being creative.Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
According to the most accepted definition K == 10^3, M = 10^6, G = 10^9, T = 10^12. Why should consumer product manufacturers use definitions only understood by technical professionals, that will confuse their average customer and are unflattering to the product?
When will we computer geeks get over this obsession with binary memory measurements.
Using the binary units makes referring to RAM capacities easier and makes many other things (storage capacities and file sizes) clumsier to deal with. I suppose that OS internals also use 1024 bytes as a basic organizational unit, but that hardly seems relevant to the issue of whether a file labeled as 8GB should actually be 8 billion bytes or 8.6 billion bytes.
Everyone around here seems to hate tradition for tradition's sake unless it's a computer related tradition. Congratulations, you've become what you hate and you didn't even realize it.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Does this mean I can sue Home Depot because 2x4 studs do not measure out to be exactly 2 inches by 4 inches? They are actually 1.5 x 3.5. That's a lot of missing wood.
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.
... upon receiving his $5k, that he should have gotten $5,120 ?
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.
Now that I've bought an MP3 player from Creative, I can get a discount on an MP3 player from Creative...
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
http://www.xkcd.com/394/
Yeah, but honestly, everybody ignores the standard bodies on this issue. Does your computer have 512 megabytes of ram or 537 mb? It's very rare that anybody refers to a memory measurement based on a power of 10, and it's obviously going to be pretty unanimously misinterpreted if printed that way on product labeling.
Printing both clearly would be fine, though.
The metric prefixes predate OSes by a long time and as the GP pointed out, they are very well established. Computers decided to coopt kilo and use it to mean 2^10 instead of 10^3 since they were close. However now that we are dealing with 2^30 vs 10^9, the difference is quite a bit bigger.
Personally, I think the things like HDs, network gear, and such are correct. We need to use the metric prefixes for base 10 for base 10. If we want to talk base 2, use the base-2 prefixes.
Yeah, 32 bit OSes can't see the full 4GB due to the way memory addressing works. Check wikipedia or something for more info.
All your base are belong to Wii.
One of the very few times a car analogy wasn't the first choice on slashdot.
You're nothing; like me.
No, 32 bit OSes can address 4GB TOTAL memory, that's including graphics RAM and various caches. Thus, the total RAM addressable by a 32 bit OS is somewhere around 3-3.5GB depending on the configuration of the computer.
This forum post explains it in greater detail, people were asking this so often that they eventually just stickied the post. http://www.maximumpc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=71236
All your base are belong to Wii.
Sapere aude!
It's like going to buy a TV, but you get home to find that the seller didn't sell you a television, but the letters T and V printed on a bit of paper in a box. Sure, technically they described what it was correctly, but they're still ripping you off.
A gigabyte is exactly one billion bites, hence the name "Giga".
Um, no. A kilobyte is exactly 1024 bytes. It's "close enough" to 1000, hence the term "kilo". Why bother making up a whole bunch of new prefixes when there's one that already exists, especially given that it's blindingly obvious that the original meaning makes no sense in context?
Since measurements are conventions of man to begin with, they mean what people define them to mean. The original definition of kilobyte was 1024, since 1000 bytes is an largely useless number in base 2. If we were working in base 10, it would make sense. Terms are redefined based on context all the time - after all, what does a "metric tonne" have to do with pounds, anyway? As in this case, there was a term (ton) that was "close enough" to what they wanted, so they used it.
Once they were (wrongly or not) used and understood to mean 1024, saying "kilo always means 1000, and can never mean anything else" is senseless pedantry.
Creative (and other companies) attempted to redefine a commonly used and understood term, and did so for the purpose of making their product appear to be larger than it actually was. It was not done because it provided a more meaningful, or useful measurement. It made the companies that did it look bigger than the companies that didn't, and everyone decided to play "keep up with the joneses".
we can stop using those ridiculous kibi, mebi, and gibi prefixes?
When you have finished this cup of coffee your adventure will begin again.
SI prefixes are there to make things simpler. They don't do that in the case of KB, MB, etc. because it has different needs. Only people who lack understanding of what the numbers mean find it confusing, whilst using base 10 is more awkward for those who do know what they mean. Why should technical terms be biased toward those who know less? A very long history of usage determines the meaning of the word and the re-definition came solely from marketing departments deliberately trying to cause confusion to profit from it. Thank about it: if everyone used the same terms, there are no preferential terms you can exploit to make your product sound better than it is, but when there is confusion over terms, you can use the preferential one and rely on people's expectation that it is another meaning. The only profit is in confusion. And then once the hard drive marketing departments had instigated this confusion, it was sustained by people who liked to be able to correct others.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Here's a nice idea: State what you mean on the box. "2TB (SI)" Drive manufacturers and the like will still use SI kilobytes for the sake of larger numbers, but at least we can all stop arguing about this stuff and put that suing power to a better use. Also, I will never ever say 'tebibit' aloud.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
I remember Iomega's settlement for the click of death was "Sorry, we built a poor quality product that was supposed to back up your data, but lost it instead. How about you buy another product from us at a reduced priced"
Give a check for $3.50 instead, but don't give me a discount on the same manufacturer's products.
I haven't looked lately, but I thought a lot of manufacturers used GB*.
*GB refers to 1,000,000,000 bytes. on their packages.
Computers function in the realm of magic. Behold! 500MB plus 500MB! The sum not a full, but strangely a 0.97 of a gigabyte. The remaining 3 percent gone, - a sacrifice to evil!
Don't even get me started with base 2. The byte itself is not even a 1, but itself an 8. Thus, the kilobyte is really 2^13 bits, and a megabyte is 2^23. The whole system is ludicrous. This happened because a useful technical shortcut have been kept alive for too long, and made its way into the real of the end-user.
Stop this madness and see the light of the network engineers. Behold! The wonder of the Mbps. 1Mbps is a wonderful, intuitive 1,000,000 full bits per second. This is stuff I can explain my mother - and she'll understand.
I lost my sig.
It seems a lot of geeks try to "defend" using powers of two, as if it were somehow the "correct" way, without thinking whether or not it is really correct and logical (*).
(*)Yes, it makes sense for memory, but nobody's confused about memory either.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Even though when talking I still use "megabyte" for both MB and MiB (prefixing it with "decimal" or "binary" if neccessary), when writing I do take care to differentiate between MB and MiB because they describe different things and things are clearer when using them.
What the hard drive manufacturers should do is give the capacity in both GB and GiB. That way there is no confusion and everyone is happy. Well, except for those who think that the GiB figure isn't stylish enough.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
If we're going to go down that road, why don't we measure disk space in tracks and cylinders, like the IBM mainframes I work on?
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.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I thought the standard was "Libraries of Congress" for data measurement!
=Smidge=
2x4's are definitely 1.5" x 3.5" as purchased. It's close enough to exact as to not matter (construction grade lumber is not a tight precision material). They -have- to be pretty close to this spec, or the plans won't work out. Framers don't even measure them to check. They've been this way as long as I have built stuff, which is coming up on 40 years.
Around the turn of the century, a 2 x 4 was definitely a 2x4. I had an older house that used them. However, the studs were still on 16 inch centers.
I don't buy any planing and shrinking argument. The turn of the century boards didn't shrink, and they were cut from douglas firs, same as the modern ones I use. I think the industry just wanted to get more boards out of a tree. Interestingly, they are still priced by the board foot, which is calculated on the nominal, rather than the actual measurements. This is true for 2 x 6's, 2 x 8's, 2 x 12's, etc, as well.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
or Gb instead of GB... x8!
Or suppose we use septs: 100 follows 066, seven voltage levels... would it then make sense to count filesizes in base seven?
No, of course not. All countables make sense to count in one base, and that base is 10 by convention. Bits, bytes, digits and apples are all countables, regardless of their internal representation.
I duly note that I still haven't seen an argument for using base two.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
"Gibi" is a prefix invented by Wikipedia. For those of you who have been foiled, I supply a conversion chart.
Some people are angry that their precious SI prefixes were usurped. I'd say "understandably angry," but I'm afraid it's not. Memory has been measured in kilo-mega-giga-tera-et al. since at least the time that IBM made PCs, and probably since 5000 years ago when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church every Sunday.
Case in point: Go to newegg.com's memory page. See any memory modules sold by the "gibibit"? Consult your motherboard manual; I doubt they'll support a 512 mebibit SDRAM stick, but it maybe, just maybe might support that 512 MEGABYTE module.
Gibi? Might as well measure memory in millionths of a square furlong chip area times a density coefficient.
Remember booting any computer made since the '70s? The BIOS POST would always report memory in "K" - which God^H^H^HIBM did not intend to mean metric kirbybits or whatever nonsense.
Moderators, I humbly suggest modding any "gibi" references as "troll." It's what's right for America!
DATABASE WOW WOW
Furthermore, for the past two thousand years, the greek prefix giga has meant one billion. Just because we have binary computers doesn't mean we should change that for the purposes of lawsuits.
Lastly, you know damn well after reading the fine print on any mass storage device in the last 10 or 15 years that it says that when the listed capacity is x gigabytes, that means x * 1,000,000,000 bytes. And that fine print is on the outside of the box, so you know before you buy.
The National Institute of Standard's has suggested that for the useful binary numbers (2^10, 2^20, 2^30), we use the different prefixes KiB, MiB and GiB to show that they refer to the binary versions. See NIST's recommendation on this.
I'm happy to buy my ram with capacity listed in GiBs and my hard drives with capacity listed in GB or GiB, but let's not confuse the two prefixes.
IT has always calculated in powers of 2. The "gibi" nonsense was invented by dodgy salesmen to talk up their equipment.
Even Microsoft gets it right. I am sitting at a machine with a HDD of 60,011,606,016 bytes. It was sold as 60GB but Windows reports it correctly as 55.8. Why should people be misled because some suit wearing sales wheasel decided to invent a series of rubbish words beginning in gibi?
We need more court cases until this misrepresentation ends. Have you noticed that flat screen monitor sizes are correct, where CRT ones dishonestly used to include bits of the tube you couldn't even see...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.