[mythtv-users] seagate giving refunds out

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Sun Nov 4 04:20:44 UTC 2007


On 11/02/2007 11:00 PM, Calvin Dodge wrote:
> On Nov 2, 2007 8:23 PM, Nick Morrott <knowledgejunkie at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> These are just my thoughts. Wouldn't the case have been thrown out if
>> it had no merit at all? In the UK, misleading advertising it taken
>> quite seriously.
>>     
> "Merit" is in the eye of the beholder - witness some of the nutty
> lawsuits which people have filed and won (visit overlawyered.com for
> some examples).
>
> I just don't think a 7% difference in storage space due to semantic
> issues is worthy of a lawsuit.
>   

Agreed.  But, if anyone is getting sued, IMHO, it should be Microsoft. 
After all, Windows is the one that's incorrectly telling users that they
have only 466GB (466,000,000,000 Bytes) rather than properly telling
them they have 466GiB or 500GB.

>> IMO storage media manufacturers don't help to bring clarity to the
>> proceedings by continuing to use two different systems to state media
>> capacity. If I buy:
>>
>> i) a 500GB drive, it has 500,000,000,000 bytes (465GiB)
>> ii) a 1GB stick of RAM, it has 1,073,741,824 bytes (1GiB)
>> iii) a 700MB CD-RW, it has 734,003,200 bytes (700MiB)
>> iv) a 4.7GB DVD+R, it has 4,700,000,000 bytes (4.37GiB)

What about USB flash drives...
- USB flash drive manufacturers specify capacity as power-of-two
multiples of decimal megabytes (i.e. 256MB flash drive is 256,000,000 bytes)

Or floppies...
- The 1440kiB 3 1/2 inch high-density floppy drives held 2 times the
data of the original 720kiB IBM PC 3 1/2 inch diskettes, but
manufacturers wanted to make it sound more impressive, so they called
them 1.44MB drives--in fact, 1440kiB is 1.40625MiB or 1.47456MB, so it
fits neither the binary nor the decimal prefixes (manufacturers used
decimal kilo times binary kibi to get the 1.44MB: 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 =
1474560 bytes)

(long diatribe on the same subject only a month ago at
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/294843#294843 )

>> I think it's reasonable that Joe Public should be able to compare
>> apples with apples, and not have to worry about GiBs. I understand the
>> difference. I doubt my grandad does.
>>     
> And since every hard drive I'm aware of uses the base-10 definition,
> Joe Public CAN compare apples with apples.

Exactly (and I agree with your rants).

> Now I think I'll calm down with the episode of "Moonlight" which
> Mythtv has just finished recording. (hmm, when I do a "ls -o
> /myth/tv", I'm given the file sizes in base 10).

ls -lh
ls -l --si

Mike



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