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Creative Sued for Base-10 Capacities On HDD MP3 Players
Posted by
Soulskill
on Thu May 01, 2008 11:05 PM
from the basic-math dept.
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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Seagate Offers Refunds on 6.2 Million Hard Drives 780 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Seagate has agreed to settle a lawsuit that alleges that the company mislead customers by selling them hard disk drives with less capacity than the company advertised. The suit states that Seagate's use of the decimal definition of the storage capacity term "gigabyte" was misleading and inaccurate: whereby 1GB = 1 billion bytes. In actuality, 1GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes — a difference of approximately 7% from Seagate's figures. Seagate is saying it will offer a cash refund or free backup and recovery software."
Submission: Creative sued for Base 10 sizes on MP3 Players by Anonymous Coward
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how about dell dj's? (Score:2)
Punish corps by giving them money... (Score:5, Insightful)
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>
Innumeracy (Score:3, Funny)
Oh for fuck's sake... (Score:3)
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.
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The other one-third is the people who keep on defending it.
got wood? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wonder if the rep. plaintiff will complain... (Score:5, Funny)
So.... (Score:3)
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Re:50%? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:It has to be said.. (Score:4, Informative)
"Gibi" is a prefix invented by Wikipedia. For those of you who have been foiled, I supply a conversion chart. [xkcd.com]
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 [newegg.com]. 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!
Parent
Gibi = garbage (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:50%? (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:50%? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Breath of fresh air (Score:3, Funny)
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Printing both clearly would be fine, though.
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The fact is after nearly ten years IEC has failed to get their standard adopted by the majority so it loses.
You're right, it loses, but it shouldn't. There's no logical reason whatsoever why we should use powers of two, except tradition. If it causes confusion and isn't useful, why keep doing it?
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.
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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 h
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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?
Re:Read your references (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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=Smidge=
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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,
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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
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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 do
Re:50%? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to be a "technical professional" if you OSãtranslates for you.
Parent
Well you can argue the OS is wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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The OS _is_ wrong - Long live bits and base10! (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Parent
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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.
Even computers didn't do this at first. The first computers with storage capacities large enough to bother with prefixes used base 10 units. The first ever hard disk drive (IBM 350) had a capacity of five million characters. 5 MB, base 10. That was consistent with the units used by the machine it was built for (IBM 305 RAMAC), which had a 3500-character drum memory, plus a 100-word core memory buffer. Notice, all multiples of 10, not two.
The first computer to seriously use base 2 in its memory sizin
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If we say the Queen of England is Kylie Minogue, she better damn well be, because that's who we'll be signing treaties with.
Re:Well you can argue the OS is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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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 [maximumpc.com]
Stupid liars (Score:2)
I don't think anyone is lying and I'm not sure who's 'stupid' here, is it the courts, the plantifs, or the manafactures? In any case uninformed is a much better word to describe leagal pedants who complained.
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Drive makers have been doing this for a long time-- it's not an accident.
Heck, the drivemaker's kilobyte shrinks four bytes each year [xkcd.com] for marketing reasons. :-P
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Not quite. (Score:2)
So they decided to make some lemonade and sell some units.
Not losing much is only fair when they didn't do anything wrong to begin with.
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Companies are unsurprisingly getting sued, and equally unsurprising, are settling these suits as quickly as they can because they know they will lose.
http://www.betanews.com/article/Seagate_Se [betanews.com]
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Storage makers ALWAYS label their products as base-10 amounts.
My 74GB WD Raptor HDD is 69.2 GB. They are getting sued because for 40-60 years now, maybe longer, storage/ram etc in computing has been base-2 (it being a binary system). Now they are switching to base 10 because they can advertise a higher space
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Except for those geeks who think that sticking to ambiguity because the unambiguous prefix doesn't pass arbitrary coolness standards is unprofessional. "I don't support it because the name isn't cool enough" is not a best practice.
Even though when talking I still use "megabyte" for both MB and MiB (prefixin
I hate these settlements (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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I do not think I am unreasonable for expecting this and by extension, I believe that you are unreasonable for suggesting that this should not be so.
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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 i
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Byte me. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent