Creative Sued for Base-10 Capacities On HDD MP3 Players 528
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.
Innumeracy (Score:3, Funny)
Re:50%? (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder if the rep. plaintiff will complain... (Score:5, Funny)
Breath of fresh air (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:Read your references (Score:3, Funny)
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:3, Funny)
=Smidge=
Re:Well you can argue the OS is wrong (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Funny)