Seagate pays out over gigabyte definition

Article here. Basically, some stupid people sued seagate over the definition of a Gigabyte, (which BTW, is defined as 1,000,000,000 bytes in almost every context) because when they got their drives windows said it had less space than advertised. Well, to put it plainly, that isn't true. The OS and filesystem just counts the space differently. What's worse is that this has become the industry standard for hard drive capacity, and it's been known for YEARS that this happens. I'm afraid of a point in the future where I won't know what my hard drive size really is because they'll all be measured differently. Wouldn't that be great.

The manufacturer has NO WAY of telling how much storage space you're actually be able to use. There is a whole bunch of overhead involved in the filesystem and the partition tables. (alright, not a whole bunch, but still enough so that a measurement wouldn't be precise across all systems).

The thing that probably annoys me most about this is that now people are going to use this all over the place as an example of how bad class action lawsuits are. These people suing don't realize that they aren't empowering the consumer at all. Rather, the consumer now looks like the evil one, trying to sap the corporations for everything that they can get. Here's an idea, how about you sue over something important, like suv rollover or lead paint. You know, the kind of thing endangers your life and welfare because companies are cutting corners. I don't want to hear about how you thought you could store 100 more mp3's just because you were thinking like an idiot.

The worst part of the article is the comment at the bottom

Finally some sanity. How hard is it to simply make things the way they should be instead of dumbing down things to make them simple but not true? So don't tell us that a drive capacity is different based on your simplification of math. Stand up for what is correct even if it is not popular or simple.

Doesn't this guy realize that if the hard drive manufacturers were to cave they would be "duming down things to make them simple but not true?" 10 GB != 10 GiB. To call a GB a GiB would be making something "simple but not true"

He goes on:

Senator Larry Craig is a great example - he isn't homosexual (I take his word on that) but yet he was stupid enough to plead guilty to a crime he didn't commit to "make it go away" media wise. NEVER plead guilty to something you didn't do.

First of all, I don't know what Larry Craig has to do with this. The fact that this guy supports this jack-ass doesn't surprise me though. The funny thing here is that this guy is pointing out exactly why seagate was right AGAIN! By not admitting fault, seagate didn't "plead guilty" to misleading consumers. So, in his mind, they must have done right...

Eh, it's probably just a well crafted joke...

This guy is pretty much a social networking app genius. Friendwheel is the only facebook app that has ANY merit; and if you've been sending me requests to become a pirate, ninja, jedi, or hug you and spank you, your apps don't belong in the same category.

Now all someone has to do is combine it with piespy, we would have something really awesome. I might even consider researching the possibilities between all the time I'm spending becoming literate in perl, all the projects I NEED to do for work, and all the projects that people WANT me to do for work (Mr. Logistics), and all the projects I want to do ahead of this, which includes getting nm-cli to use wpa2-psk so I don't have to log into gnome and then re-login to fvwm.

Hopefully that will come very soon, the psk hash functions need to be rewritten in python, that's the only thing stopping a commit. I think I might port to C to avoid that kind of thing in the future (because I'm lazy and don't like reinventing the wheel)