It seems to me that, to be a legitimate claim, there must be an established alternate standard for computation and reporting of file and disk sizes. The question then becomes, how does Microsoft, Linux, Solaris, Apple, and HP/UX compute file sizes? Also, what does Intel, Sun, TI, etc use compute megahertz? If they are using 2^10 (1024) instead of 10^3 (1000), then the lawsuit may have a basis. If, however, the OSes utilize the same measuring stick as the drive manufacturers, then there should really be no problem.
As an example, ls -al shows clarkconnect-1.3.iso on my Gentoo Linux box as 183009280 bytes. This corresponds to 183.0MB, or 174.5 MiB. An ls -alh (added h for human readable) shows the same file as 175MB. Therefore, Linux seems to use M = 2^20, as anyone who has used computers for more than 10 years would KNOW is correct.
Computers are based on a binary system.
2^1 is a bit,
2^2 bits is a nibble,
2^3 bits is a byte,
2^10 bytes is a KB, or kilobyte,
2^10*2^10 bytes is a MB, or megabyte.
It is unfortunate that the originators of these names used the metric prefixes, but they did, and it was understood by those dealing with it.
This lawsuit is really pathetic. Users should read the box, where it plainly states the meaning of the abbreviation (Maxtor 120 GB drive says "A gigabyte (GB) means 1 billion bytes."). I could see how someone could be frustrated, though if they lost 7.37+% of their storage to an "executive decision" (1024*1024*1024)/(1000*1000*1000) = 1.0737.
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It seems to me that, to be a legitimate claim, there must be an established alternate standard for computation and reporting of file and disk sizes. The question then becomes, how does Microsoft, Linux, Solaris, Apple, and HP/UX compute file sizes? Also, what does Intel, Sun, TI, etc use compute megahertz? If they are using 2^10 (1024) instead of 10^3 (1000), then the lawsuit may have a basis. If, however, the OSes utilize the same measuring stick as the drive manufacturers, then there should really be no problem. As an example, ls -al shows clarkconnect-1.3.iso on my Gentoo Linux box as 183009280 bytes. This corresponds to 183.0MB, or 174.5 MiB. An ls -alh (added h for human readable) shows the same file as 175MB. Therefore, Linux seems to use M = 2^20, as anyone who has used computers for more than 10 years would KNOW is correct. Computers are based on a binary system. 2^1 is a bit, 2^2 bits is a nibble, 2^3 bits is a byte, 2^10 bytes is a KB, or kilobyte, 2^10*2^10 bytes is a MB, or megabyte. It is unfortunate that the originators of these names used the metric prefixes, but they did, and it was understood by those dealing with it. This lawsuit is really pathetic. Users should read the box, where it plainly states the meaning of the abbreviation (Maxtor 120 GB drive says "A gigabyte (GB) means 1 billion bytes."). I could see how someone could be frustrated, though if they lost 7.37+% of their storage to an "executive decision" (1024*1024*1024)/(1000*1000*1000) = 1.0737.