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.
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>
got wood? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:50%? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't have to be a "technical professional" if you OSãtranslates for you.
Re:Deprecated for quite a while now (Score:3, Insightful)
Printing both clearly would be fine, though.
Re:What? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 is an largely useless number in base 2. If we were working in base 10, it would make sense. Terms are redefined based on context all the time - after all, what does a "metric tonne" have to do with pounds, anyway? As in this case, there was a term (ton) that was "close enough" to what they wanted, so they used it.
Once they were (wrongly or not) used and understood to mean 1024, saying "kilo always means 1000, and can never mean anything else" is senseless pedantry.
Creative (and other companies) attempted to redefine a commonly used and understood term, and did so for the purpose of making their product appear to be larger than it actually was. It was not done because it provided a more meaningful, or useful measurement. It made the companies that did it look bigger than the companies that didn't, and everyone decided to play "keep up with the joneses".
Re:Deprecated for quite a while now (Score:3, Insightful)
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 profit from it. Thank about it: if everyone used the same terms, there are no preferential terms you can exploit to make your product sound better than it is, but when there is confusion over terms, you can use the preferential one and rely on people's expectation that it is another meaning. The only profit is in confusion. And then once the hard drive marketing departments had instigated this confusion, it was sustained by people who liked to be able to correct others.
Re:This is stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Read your references (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:50%? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 don't buy any planing and shrinking argument. The turn of the century boards didn't shrink, and they were cut from douglas firs, same as the modern ones I use. I think the industry just wanted to get more boards out of a tree. Interestingly, they are still priced by the board foot, which is calculated on the nominal, rather than the actual measurements. This is true for 2 x 6's, 2 x 8's, 2 x 12's, etc, as well.
Re:Well you can argue the OS is wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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 sizes are correct, where CRT ones dishonestly used to include bits of the tube you couldn't even see...