Creative Sued for Base-10 Capacities On HDD MP3 Players

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%?

[wizardforce]

they misrepresented the capacity of their products knowingly, this is a warning to any other company stupid enough to lie like this.

Re:50%?

[iamacat]

According to the most accepted definition K == 10^3, M = 10^6, G = 10^9, T = 10^12. Why should consumer product manufacturers use definitions only understood by technical professionals, that will confuse their average customer and are unflattering to the product?

Well you can argue the OS is wrong

[Sycraft-fu]

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. However now that we are dealing with 2^30 vs 10^9, the difference is quite a bit bigger.

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.

Does this mean...

[Nozsd]

we can stop using those ridiculous kibi, mebi, and gibi prefixes?

Re:What's 73MB between friends?

[Jesus_666]

Mebibytes and gibibytes will NEVER catch on. The geeks would have to spearhead something like this, and they never will because the words sound stupid and you sound stupid and unprofessional using them.

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 (prefixing it with "decimal" or "binary" if neccessary), when writing I do take care to differentiate between MB and MiB because they describe different things and things are clearer when using them.

What the hard drive manufacturers should do is give the capacity in both GB and GiB. That way there is no confusion and everyone is happy. Well, except for those who think that the GiB figure isn't stylish enough.