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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.
...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?
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.
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.
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.
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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"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!
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