Why? It’s not the manufacturer’s fault if their customers are ignorant.
This is ridiculous. This thread has established quite clearly that there are two ways of expressing storage capacity, both of them quite valid. One of those ways is used perfectly honestly by the manufacturers. That right there is enough to tell me that the suit is frivolous.
It’s like a guy that would rather have two dimes than one quarter, because “two is bigger than one”. If you apply a different means of measurement to a product other than the one the manufacturer uses, of COURSE you’re gonna get different results. You wouldn’t drive in Europe with a car that gave a readout only in MPH (unless you’re really good at math), because you’ll find yourself going 20 or 30% over the speed limit.
I think this is just a case of computer illiterate people demanding that the industry conform to their own ignorance, rather than educating themselves to the point where they can understand the industry.
Well, in all fairness, after capturing my first raw footage from a recently-filmed movie, I realized just how precious a few gigs can be. Total storage space required for seven hours of uncompressed footage can up to be around 70 gigabytes.
I will say one thing nice though. Maxtor’s 120GB drives are actually 122GB (real GBs). After years of being short changed (and I mean before you even format the drive) that was a really nice surprise.
All of this confusion comes from trying to juggle two different definitions for the same term, and ignoring proper terms.
A Gigabyte is, definitionally, one billion bytes, or 10^9 bytes. This is what harddrives are measured in, as is noted in all advertisements and literature.
A Gibibyte is, definitionally, 1,073,741,824 bytes, or 2^30 bytes. This unit was created because of the inherent problem of using metric, powers of ten units to mean quantities that were not powers of ten. Unfortunately, everyone ignores these units, probably because they sound so freakin’ stupid. “Yeah man, I’ve got two gibs of RAM!”
While I sympathise with the customers, since I know HDD manufacturers are just out to mislead consumers, they have no basis for a lawsuit since, as DreadCthulhu mentioned, the units they’re using are clearly defined. Other areas where similar confusion is rampant include internet access, where “256K” means “256,000 bits, minus overhead” rather than “262,144 bytes.”
The practice is deceptive, but it is standard. If a single manufacturer were to label its hard drives properly, it would put itself at a disadvantage. Unless there is a universal agreement to measure hard drives properly, we’ll have to get used to seeing 7% less space on our formatted drives. And 9% less when 1+ TB drives hit the market.
Frankly I’d like to see all HD manufacturers label with actual megs, not their pretend ones. Do you complain that monitor manufacturers had to stop advertising their monitors as 19" when only 17.x" of screen were actually visible? Did you say “Well, the consumer should know that monitor companies measure distance differently than others, and if the consumer is too ignorant to know that, then too bad.”?
I think the ounce depending on what you’re measuring to be a bad idea, the same for the idea that “fine print” should allow you to re-define standard notation.
That’s my 2.3 cents.
Nanoda defines his dollar to be 86 cents, as measured by him and other supergeniuses.
Yes, actually, I thought that was a RIDICULOUS complaint. Once again we get back to the idea of measuring one thing in two (or more) different ways, one of which is perfectly valid. What’s next? Punishing monitor manufacturers because the size refers to diagonal size? Should they be required to list the horizontal and vertical measurements for those that are too lazy to do a quick calculation?
Ignorant people shouldn’t be spoon-fed every iota of information. It is the CONSUMER’s job to educate himself about a product, not the manufacturer’s job. If the consumer doesn’t care enough to learn it himself, then it’s clearly not necessary.
>> Frankly I’d like to see all HD manufacturers label with actual megs
And who will define an “actual” Meg? Because, I got news for you: The standard definition of Mega in the metric system is 1^6 and that is about the only valid definition and there is no other valid and accepted standard to challenge that. If the consumers were not so absolutely ignorant they would not be suing. (Although I feel a few lawyers might be involved)
Because, as SPOOFE has pointed out, not all data processed by modern computers is text. People use computers for audio processing, 3-D graphics rendering, film making, and other activities, which can easily fill up multiple gigabytes in just a few hours.
You didn’t have to get started typing that explanation at all. Just refer people to the NIST website for information on SI binary prefixes, or even the normal SI prefixes, which sailor seems to have forgotten. (I’d put a winking smiley here, but it would ruin the next link.)
The NIST website seems to be down right now, perhaps due to Hurricane Isabel. Try the Google cache instead.
While I don’t think that the lawsuit has much merit, the practice is deceptive. First of all, you’re buying a device to be used with a computing device. If the drive label says 200GB, your operating system installer should say the same before formatting. After all, the only place a hard disk drive will be used is in a computer. And if the computer measures capacity in a certain way, that’s how manufacturers should report those numbers.
But then again, since the labels do clarify that "1GB = 1000000000
But then again, since the labels do clarify that “1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes” indicating there is a deviance from the public’s perception and the actual raw capacity, the lawsuit is moot.
I am not sure I understand your mention of me or if I am missing anything but, in any case, your link confirms what I said:
one mebibyte 1 MiB = 2^20 B = 1 048 576 B
one megabyte 1 MB = 10^6 B = 1 000 000 B
one gibibyte 1 GiB = 2^30 B = 1 073 741 824 B
one gigabyte 1 GB = 10^9 B = 1 000 000 000 B
In other words, the plaintiffs don’t have a leg to stand on except maybe if they sue the school they attended for giving them such a poor edgercation.
You made an egregious typo in the post quoted below. I mentioned that I would have included a winking smiley, but it would ruin the link to the Google cache, as it did when you quoted my post.
Oh ok. Now I see it and get it. This keyboard is awful. Almost as bad as my brain. You have to hit the keys exactly in the perpendicular because if you push the slightest sideways they jam and don’t depress. Not only do I miss letters but also the shift key often won’t work and I end up not capitalising letters.
Of course, this only works if you intend to strike the key because if you barely touch it without intending, then it will work and I often end up typing “thoink” instead of “think”.
SPOOFE, are you yanking my chain? Measuring bits of the CRT that are behind the plastic shell is legit for you? So… so… that means I can advertise 19", 20", and 21" monitors using the same thing with bigger cases! That’s not a case of measuring something in a perfectly valid but different way, it’s a case of blatant misrepresentation! And measuring diagonally… TVs and monitors all have the same aspect ratio, so diagonal measurement tells you both height and width.
All I can say is I hope you aren’t in charge of marketing anything by weight, volume, length, duration, capacitance, resistance, velocity or probability. I think that leaves colour, taste, and running shoe performance.
You can’t imagine that? You must not be a gamer. I have close to 6gb of stuff on my HD for The Sims alone…but I’ve only got a 30gb hard drive. I’m planning on buying a second hard drive when the sequel comes out next year
In my post I quoted amore ac studio and then I said “your link confirms what I said”. The information I posted was got from amore ac studio’s link.
You could say that of of RAM and other types of memory but you cannot say that for hard disks because HD manufacturers have been using the (more correct) decimal system. If the plaintiffs ignore this they cannot blame anyone else but themselves.
