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.
Re:50%? (Score:1, Informative)
Just trying to clarify (Score:2, Informative)
Re:50%? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:50%? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:50%? (Score:3, Informative)
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]
What? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:50%? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Well you can argue the OS is wrong (Score:3, Informative)
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 sizing and addressing (the IBM System/360, IIRC), didn't show up until ten years and a half-dozen generations of hard drives later. The drives still used base 10 notation for their capacities, though, both because that was the established notation and because there wasn't (and isn't!) any engineering reason to use base two. Unlike inside the computer, where CPU memory addressing makes it very convenient to have power-of-two memory sizes, inside the hard drive there is no reason to use such strange units. Similarly, all data communications technologies measure bandwidth with base 10 units.
The argument that HDD manufacturers label drives with base 10 capacity in order to mislead buyers implies that at some point they did use base two. If not in their published capacities, at least in their internal calculations. That is simply not the case. The logical units for engineers designing HDDs to work in are base 10. They design a drive and then pass the specs on to marketing, in the natural units. I suppose marketing is guilty of not telling the engineers "Wait a minute, it may make sense for you to work in base 10, but modern computers will divide the space up in power-of-two block sizes, so we should advertise it on that basis, to be honest to our customers, even though it'll make our drives look smaller than all of our competitors', since they're using the traditional measure."
The situation is a little less clear for flash memory devices, though, since they're directly addressed by CPUs, just like DRAM, and are therefore usually constructed in power-of-two sizes. Choosing to construct a device sized in powers of 10, against industry norms, so that you can advertise it as 1 GB while saving a few bucks is arguably underhanded.
I think the real answer is quite clear: Device manufacturers should be required to use correct units on their capacity statements, either GB or GiB. It is not beyond the capacity of the average person to understand that these are different, and that GiB is a little bigger than GB. I know the binary units piss off a lot of slashdotters, but, really, they just make sense. I can't figure out how anyone can think it's a good idea to use ambiguous units and then try to guess which meaning is intended.
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!
Re:Read your references (Score:2, Informative)
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 [nist.gov] 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.
Re:It has to be said.. (Score:1, Informative)
K doesn't always mean 1024 even in computers. When you say the computer in the 70s booted in K, I don't think you remember right. There's some huge history I read a while back, you can google if you want.