He who conquers the left side

musings from someone that likes to use the word musings.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

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...

2 Comments:

  • At October 29, 2007 at 12:52 PM , Blogger Stephen Smoogen said...

    Yes a frivolous lawsuit, and there are better things to deal with.

    However, the definition of GiB and GB are relatively new in the computer industry (the first time I heard about the Gi standing was 5 years ago). Many older CS people still think the idea of a GiB is stupid since when you are dealing with computers you should always be dealing with powers of two as any SANE person should know. [Actually I remember a blog from some other Fedoran a year or so ago on that very fact.]

    Then there is the fact that computer parts are not sold in similar terms. You buy a 128 MB memory stick and you get 128 MiB. You buy a 128 MB disk drive and you get 122 MiB raw space. You buy some other item and you may or may not get MiB or MB.

    At one point not too long ago when you bought a 40 MB diskdrive depending on the vendor you could get a 40MiB or 40MB. I think around that point the vendors standardized on MB and the reason was quite simple: You could say bigger numbers 'faster' as someone who worked for Seagate once told me.

    So there is a level of promotion and 'deceptive practices' (eg normal marketing). I don't think it should have gone to court, but its a bit late for my sentiments.

     
  • At November 5, 2007 at 3:01 PM , Blogger James M. Leddy said...

    Valid argument. To be quite honest I agree with your first point that GiB shouldn't be required when talking about RAM. Plus I hate the way it sounds, so I refuse to say it. However, since I've been buying hard drives it's been the case that they've been standardized to the SI definition, ie kilo = 1000 etc... I wasn't aware that hard drives were ever measured in base 2. That means that they've been standardized to SI for at least a decade, as any SANE person should know by now.

     

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