[mythtv-users] seagate giving refunds out

[Nick Morrott]

On 03/11/2007, Calvin Dodge <caldodge at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the people who filed suit are akin to the idiots who blamed
> cigarette companies for their illnesses, when cigarettes have had
> warnings on the packages since the 1960s, and were known to be bad for
> the health long before then ("coffin nails" being a popular euphemism
> in the 1920s).

Is it reasonable to expect Joe Public to know the difference between
decimal and binary capacity representations? Probably not. Is/was it
reasonable for smokers to be aware of the health risks of smoking with
continued media coverage? Probably. Has there been legislation (at
least in the UK) to make the health warning on cigarettes very
prominent. Yes. Has there been legislation to prominently highlight
why Windows reports your hard drive as being smaller than it is? Not
that I am aware of (but the Seagate lawsuit goes some way to change
that).

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.

> Those 500 gig drives DO hold 500,000,000,000 bytes - you're just using
> a different definition of "gigabyte" (2^30 instead of 10^9). IMHO it
> wasn't worth a lawsuit (except possibly to the attorneys, who I'm sure
> will reap millions), and I won't be submitting the serial numbers of
> all of my Seagate drives.

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)

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.

-- 
Nick Morrott

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