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.

how about dell dj's?

[neersign]

the dell dj's are just rebranded creative mp3 players, so are they covered?

Punish corps by giving them money...

[pintpusher]

Completely orthagonal to the whole stupid debate over base10/base2 gi(bi|ga)bytes or whatever....

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>

Re:

[TapeCutter]

"I really hate this trend."

Ditto! However since the base10 thing has been standard industry practice for eons I think that in this case that type of 'winning' is entirely appropriate.

I'm waiting for the spam headline - "Disk prices double, get a 50% discount by signing up now!"

Innumeracy

[Detritus]

The court should have awarded each of the plaintiffs a calculator and a boot to the head.

Re:

[statemachine]

The court should have awarded each of the plaintiffs a calculator and a boot to the head.

It's been quite a while since I've heard that skit [youtube.com].

Oh for fuck's sake...

[NonSequor]

When will we computer geeks get over this obsession with binary memory measurements.

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.

Re:

[nmb3000]

Everyone around here seems to hate tradition for tradition's sake unless it's a computer related tradition.

I don't know if that statement is accurate as "get off my lawn!" posts are so common, but in any case I think change for change's sake is worse.

The usage of K to mean 1024 has been around the computing industry essentially since there was a need for the term. It was simply understood that because computer hardware doesn't do base 10 (it can, but just creates waste) in computer circles and reference th

Re:

[prockcore]

In the computer industry, K, M, and G stand for slightly different values than their normal SI meaning.

Except when it doesn't. Network speed is always base10. So is CPU speed.

Re:

[kurt555gs]

Except when using Vista.

Re:

[AcidPenguin9873]

You obviously didn't read the thread that GP linked to. Things that computers address are measured in powers of 2, like RAM. Measurements of things like network speed or CPU frequency can use base-10 because computers don't need to address every bit in a network transmission or every cycle in a CPU clock. Read this post from that thread [slashdot.org] if you're still confused.

Re:

[NonSequor]

I understand that internally many things are aligned along 1024 byte boundaries. I don't see why that should be considered relevant to the end user. The machine exists to serve me and any time it displays information in a format that is inconvenient for me, the machine has failed.

I'll only change my opinion on this if it can be demonstrated that displaying file and storage capacity sizes in binary measurements benefits the user.

People can call 1024 byte units whatever they want when they are working with th

Re:

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

I don't hate tradition for tradition's sake. And I don't think its done for tradition's sake either. Its easier to count things based on boolean logic with a base two system. Its not like they made it base two because they didn't know any better. Its not the equivalent of defining current as the flow of positive charge and then discovering years later that its usually the negative charges that move.

Re:

[drfireman]

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.

That's because consistent use of units of measurements is not tradition for tradition's sake, it's so that we can tell how much stuff will fit on a storage device. As luck would have it, we have a decent system for that, and it's based on round numbers in base 2. I don't think the system has any real drawbacks, although apparently you find it somehow clumsy. But as soon as you introduce a second system, suddenly it becomes difficult to tell how many bytes a 120GB drive will hold, unless you happen to ke

Re:

[Oggust]

Exactly. The only thing that ever used the base-2 units was memory, because it actually made sense back when. (Since memory capsules come in base-2 sized units.) And the error was small.

• * All the ethernet (and other networking)standard use real (base-10) megabits/gigabits.
• * Disks, DVDs and tapes. Yes, they all do this. Because it makes sense.
• * CPU frequency. I get 3.6 GHz, and those are real "G"s.
• * Some of the stats on memory chips are even base-10, like the latency and clock rate, for example.

Al

Re:

[NonSequor]

The fact that this thing still lingers in end user software after decades of usability research is two-thirds of what makes this so annoying.

The other one-third is the people who keep on defending it.

Re:

[zippthorne]

Wrong question. Why is it that everyone assumes the hard drive manufacturers are doing the dumb thing. They are using the prefixes as SI intended, after all.

They should really sue the OS distributors for under-reporting both the size of the disk, and the size of the files on the disk.

Re:

[SanityInAnarchy]

They started out using the binary units, actually, like everyone else. At some point, some manufacturer figured out that, yes, it's technically correct to use them for 1000 instead of 1024, so they did that -- and it seems like they did that to deliberately misrepresent it as being bigger than it is.

Kind of like broadband providers which sell "unlimited" connectivity at a certain amount of "burst" bandwidth, with no guarantees whatsoever.

Now, if they had actually attacked the OS distributors back then, they

Re:

[NonSequor]

So the exact same file should change sizes depending on if it is read into RAM or not?

Pretending not to understand someone else's argument doesn't make it invalid.

got wood?

[unt0ld]

Does this mean I can sue Home Depot because 2x4 studs do not measure out to be exactly 2 inches by 4 inches? They are actually 1.5 x 3.5. That's a lot of missing wood.

Re:

[Raineer]

lol, very good point actually.

I wonder if the rep. plaintiff will complain...

[harmony7]

... upon receiving his $5k, that he should have gotten $5,120 ?

So....

[Donniedarkness]

Now that I've bought an MP3 player from Creative, I can get a discount on an MP3 player from Creative...

slashdot broken... again

[Hans Lehmann]

37 comments, my threshold's set to 3, and only one comment shows up. Hey Taco! What's the deal with the new code? Forgot to beta test it first?

Re:

[Tacvek]

No, slasdot is not broken. There was only one post rated 3 or higher at the time of your post. There are only a few more than that at the moment

Just trying to clarify

[Tangamandapiano]

http://www.xkcd.com/394/ [xkcd.com]

What kind of punishment is this?

[ryanisflyboy]

Let me get this straight. If you got "screwed" (somewhat debatable), you get a choice between 50% off a 1GB MP3 player (so it'll cost you about $30), or you can get a coupon for 20% off at the over-priced company store? What's to stop creative from upping the prices 5% to offset the 20% 'discount'? This isn't a punishment, it's a marketing campaign. You get a better deal going to their sales and clearance sections!

http://us.creative.com/shop/shopcategory.asp?category=720 [creative.com]

Go Creative Labs. You must have very

They should have offered to settle for $10000

[MrSteveSD]

...in base-2 money :)

Re:

[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%?

[mrbluze]

...they misrepresented the capacity...

I'm sure they thought they were just being creative.

Re:

[__aaclcg7560]

If they wanted to be creative, they should've used octal base.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:It has to be said..

[Z34107]

"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!

Gibi = garbage

[Gonoff]

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%?

[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?

Re:50%?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is part of the trade, and if you don't understand the rules and definitions in the trade tough shit, you should learn them before getting involved.

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:

[zippthorne]

I was under the impression that 2x4s are, in fact, actually 2in by 4in when cut wet, but shrink to the standard size when seasoned. Or, at least, did at some point in their history of manufacture.

Re:

[Graff]

I was under the impression that 2x4s are, in fact, actually 2in by 4in when cut wet, but shrink to the standard size when seasoned.

Partially true. A 2x4 is rough cut to 2" by 4", then is dried (seasoned) and planed (smoothed), reducing its dimensions to approximately 1.5" by 3.5". The shrinkage due to drying and the material removal due to planing is what reduces the boards to their current commonly-found dimensions.

Re:

[Alpha830RulZ]

2x4's are definitely 1.5" x 3.5" as purchased. It's close enough to exact as to not matter (construction grade lumber is not a tight precision material). They -have- to be pretty close to this spec, or the plans won't work out. Framers don't even measure them to check. They've been this way as long as I have built stuff, which is coming up on 40 years.

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

Breath of fresh air

[LilGuy]

One of the very few times a car analogy wasn't the first choice on slashdot.

Re:

[Toonol]

Yeah, but honestly, everybody ignores the standard bodies on this issue. Does your computer have 512 megabytes of ram or 537 mb? It's very rare that anybody refers to a memory measurement based on a power of 10, and it's obviously going to be pretty unanimously misinterpreted if printed that way on product labeling.

Printing both clearly would be fine, though.

Re:

[fbjon]

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.

Re:

[koollman]

How can it makes sense for memory but not disks ?

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

Re:

[binaryspiral]

we should all follow Nintendo, and go with "blocks"

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? :)

Screw that... let's go with KLOCs and nibbles.

Re:Read your references

[smallfries]

OK, I'll take that challenge.

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:

[Smidge204]

I thought the standard was "Libraries of Congress" for data measurement!

=Smidge=

Re:

[fbjon]

Ok, just to clarify then: suppose we start using computers that have trits as their fundamental unit. Three states of each "bit", 100 follows 022, three voltage levels, etc. Would it then make sense to count filesizes in base three?

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,

Re:

[h4rm0ny]

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

Re:50%?

[aleph42]

Because when your OS displays the empty space on your device, it uses powers of 2.

You don't have to be a "technical professional" if you OSãtranslates for you.

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.

The OS _is_ wrong - Long live bits and base10!

[PMBjornerud]

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.

Burn these foul aberrations begotten by the kilobyte! This, my dear IT fellows, is the path of evil and only horrors lurk ahead.

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:

[swillden]

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

Re:

[Xtravar]

You aren't used to how things are done around here (the world), are you?

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

[shutdown -p now]

WTF does it have to do with Americans? I'm not an American, I'm Russian. I don't know anyone here who would strongly believe that kilobyte is not 1024 bytes. In fact, most local books of a "Learn to use PC in 7 days" kind explicitly state that kilobyte = 1024 bytes. Metric doesn't have anything to do with it - yes, it was used for a long time for SI units, but byte is not a SI unit! And, for as long as byte was used as a unit of measurement, "kilobyte" has meant "1024 bytes" for the majority of users, like it or not.

Re:

[i.of.the.storm]

Yeah, 32 bit OSes can't see the full 4GB due to the way memory addressing works. Check wikipedia or something for more info.

Re:

[Psychotria]

Which definition of GB? The 32-bit OSs can only address 4GB because it's 2^32 (i.e. 4294967296 bytes)...

Re:

[i.of.the.storm]

No, 32 bit OSes can address 4GB TOTAL memory, that's including graphics RAM and various caches. Thus, the total RAM addressable by a 32 bit OS is somewhere around 3-3.5GB depending on the configuration of the computer.
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]

Re:

[zippthorne]

A kilobyte is 10^3 bytes. You are thinking of a Kibibyte (kilo_binary-byte) where kilo_binary takes advantage of the fact that 2^10 is very close to 10^3. Unfortunately it gets worse for mega, giga, etc, which is why SI finally ruled on the standards.

I believe it's customary to include a relevant xkcd [xkcd.com]

Re:

[iamacat]

So should they also take your filesystem overhead into account to somehow come out with 2^30 bytes of formatted capacity? If not, how do you know it is not 2^30 bytes internally, including 70MB for remapping bad sectors?

Stupid liars

[TapeCutter]

Misrepresented? - I thought this had all been settled in the early 90's and the entire industry knew it was base 10. To emphasise this point can you (or anyone else) find a HDD manafacturer who still advertises in base 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.

Re:

[TapeCutter]

Bad form to answer ones own post, ect, but hairyfeet [slashdot.org] has pointed out in a reply to another post of mine that Maxtor use base2. Kudos to Maxtor, any others?

Re:

[PAjamian]

What kind of "warning" is that? That if you misrepresent your product you might have to sell another product to affected consumers at around the wholesale price (where the manufacturer still makes a profit)? And that people might flock to your online store to buy loads of stuff because they think they're getting a great deal with a 20% discount? The only real fine here is $5000, pocket change.

Re:

[Grant_Watson]

Don't jump the gun or anything! What if they actually did make a mistake?

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

Re:

[LilGuy]

If they truly made a mistake I would wonder if the mp3 player would really function at all then. I would think it would constantly crash trying to access memory it didn't have.

Re:

[uvajed_ekil]

I'll pass. The prescribed relief for having bought crap is a discount on more of the same company's crap? No thanks, I'll just buy from somebody else next time.

Re:

[beav007]

Yes, but is it a 1GB player in Base2 or Base10?

Re:

[Kingrames]

Of course it's different. they haven't been sued yet.

Re:

[anethema]

Seagate settled and it was a class action suit. If you havent made any claims against the class action settlement, you are also free to sue Seagate for the same reason.

Not quite.

[raehl]

Creative didn't rip anybody off, but some snarky lawyer thought he could make some legal fees by suing them for using standard definitions.

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.

Re:

[anethema]

These definitions haven't been 'standard' in this industry for over half a century now. Just because some storage company's marketing departments have now decided otherwise, does not mean this is legal. Every piece of software including the OS (not to mention all software system requirements, oops!) measures in base 2.

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]

Re:

[packeteer]

We don't use the Si"ssy" system in the god damn US of A.

Re:

[corsec67]

What is wrong with saying that there are "2 kilomiles" between Chicago and Los Angeles?

Re:

[hobbesmaster]

Yes, [nist.gov] we do.

Re:

[TypoNAM]

Nearly every programmer, network administrator, and what have you I've talked to in this I.T. industry do NOT recognize IEC has an authority figure over redefining of nearly forty years of well known and understood meaning of byte size modifiers (kilobyte, etc..) as a base of two, not base of ten. It was the marketing departments of various storage vendors that started this confusion mess and for IEC to basically give in to these vendors (I wonder how much it cost them to pay off IEC) and IEC's reason of "c

Re:

[anethema]

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.

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

Re:

[i.of.the.storm]

That's interesting. I noticed that my 80GB regular hard drive was actually 73.something GiB, so I assume Raptors were actually giving their size in GiB when they said 74GB. You learn something every day...

Re:

[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 (prefixin

Re:

[TapeCutter]

Your right, it hasn't happened already so it probably won't. Instead of a bunch of legal ink they could simply write out the whole thing.

Eg: Instead of 250GiB they could write something like : 2.0^E13 useable magnetic toggles : and let the consumer translate it into what they see in the O/S.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:

[TapeCutter]

I agree that a few cents on each HDD sale is worth far less than a happy customer and tip my hat to Maxtor. The post was intended as sarcasm.

You also answered a question I put in another post ie: Is there any manafacturer who still advertises in base 2?

I hate these settlements

[Propaganda13]

I remember Iomega's settlement for the click of death was "Sorry, we built a poor quality product that was supposed to back up your data, but lost it instead. How about you buy another product from us at a reduced priced"

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.

Re:

[NonSequor]

If something says a file is n GB then in a just and reasonable world the actual size of the file would always be a 10+int(log n) digit number that is closer to n*10^9 than it is to (n+1)*10^9 or (n-1)*10^9.

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.

Re:

[gardyloo]

In a just and reasonable world you'd specify a base-10 log there, rather than leave it ambiguous :)

Re:

[Asmor]

You know, I've never actually measured the amount of liquid in a gallon of milk (or water, or any other product, for that matter). It's entirely likely that the unopened gallon of milk in my fridge right now is only .9 gallons, for all I know.

Re:

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

That may depend upon you local laws. I'm pretty sure in the us, we buy our milk by the quart/gallon (although the legal measurement is mL/L) and have a whole scientific agency dedicated to weights and measures. They really do have to sell the stated quantity of milk (and not the volume of the container) within a certain tolerance. Otherwise, they very well could be sued -- just like creative.

Re:

[jhol13]

If the MP3 players were solid-state, the rules of RAM apply.

No, they do not. There is no "raw" device in a MP3 player. Just for an example even my USB memory stick has "only" 4073432 usable 1024 byte blocks.

I would assume that the manufacturers cannot state the actual usable capacity as it vary between devices ("bad" blocks).

The lawsuit is completely idiotic. Well, it would have been anywhere except in the USA.

Re:

[anethema]

Every software lists their requirements in base 2 and even your OS shows it in base 2. It has been an SI prefix for a long time granted, but it HAS been industry standard to use base 2 in this industry for over half a century.

I wouldn't say these suits are meritless.

Re:

[prockcore]

My OS gets it right. GB = base 10, GiB=base 2. Pretty much all linux tools use SI prefixes.

You're using base-10 numbers when you say "20 gigs".. you should use base-10 prefixes.

I know it's an unpopular viewpoint here, but we programmers are *wrong*. The user should NEVER be exposed to base 2.

Re:

[OverlordQ]

And their usage as such has been deprecated for the last decade by the relevant standards bodies.

Your point being what exactly?

Re:

[Martin Blank]

nslookup has been deprecated since around 2001, as near as I can tell, and yet it shows no signs of dropping out of use. Its usage still commonly shows up in a very wide variety of training materials for all manner of operating systems. Sure, dig is slowly replacing it, but by the time it's completely gone, it will be because DNSSec has finally come into serious use and nslookup no longer functions sufficiently.

The old terms aren't going away, no matter how much a small group of geeks demands it to be so.

they don't think anything of the kind

[HappyEngineer]

The average non-techy person isn't going to assume 1GB=1024^3 bytes.

They're going to look at the 10GB one and think that it's twice as large as the 5GB model which is 5 times the size of the 1GB model which they currently own.

If they currently have X songs filling up the 1GB model then they'll look at the 10GB model and think "wow! X*10 storage!"

The whole GB vs GiB thing is an argument that is relevant only to geeks and lawyers. The only important thing to average consumers is that all MP3 players be consis

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[anethema]

Cant sue everyone! And this is a start.

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[Toonol]

Good for you. I'm teaching my children to never use the term, also. Not that they would.

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[Reziac]

And this isn't the 2nd time it's happened; it's the third. Western Digital got bit by the first (that I know of) of these stupid class action lawsuits.

In the case against W.D., the plaintiff was asking something like $8 MILLION dollars (which was more than W.D.'s income for that year; such an award would have put them out of business). Fortunately the judge saw through it, awarded something like $250k in legal fees (half what the lawyer was asking just for HIS "expenses") and a few grand to the main plainti

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[Dunbal]

Wait just a second here... Standards are good unless they mean you get less? Kilo is 1000 not 1024.. Yes the computing industry has been using it as 1024 since the beginning of time, but thats incorrect and has always been incorrect.

But isn't it the industry that gets to define the "standard"? After all, what exactly is a "horsepower"? What if my horse is stronger than your horse? Who has the right horse? Then someone comes up with something completely new - called "brake horsepower" a

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[Psychotria]

I don't think it's the OS programmers fault. All OSs I use do convert, but what is the use of that after you've bought a product?

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[Dunbal]

Mark me redundant, but I just don't feel like these lawsuits represent a good use of the legal system.

      Sure they do. They lawyers made money, didn't they?

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[pelrun]

It's like going to buy a TV, but you get home to find that the seller didn't sell you a television, but the letters T and V printed on a bit of paper in a box. Sure, technically they described what it was correctly, but they're still ripping you off.

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[karmatic]

A gigabyte is exactly one billion bites, hence the name "Giga".

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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[Nullav]

Here's a nice idea: State what you mean on the box. "2TB (SI)" Drive manufacturers and the like will still use SI kilobytes for the sake of larger numbers, but at least we can all stop arguing about this stuff and put that suing power to a better use. Also, I will never ever say 'tebibit' aloud.

Byte me.

[argent]

We have an SI standard for this nomenclature now. No matter what idiot lawayers want to argue they can't deny the fact that GB is defined for base-10 usage and GiB is base-2.

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.