Computer makers sued over hard-drive size claims

This is true. I agree with all you guys, and the lawsuite is very retarted, but I do wish that they would post true sizes. Like with the moniter thing above, they do show false sizes (like: 17 inch monitor...but only 16 inch viewable), but at least they show the true monitor size. I just wish they had true HD size somewhere as well...maybe it's just me.

(BTW, don't get me wrong on the iPod thing. I LOVE my iPod and do not regret getting it at all)
 
Originally posted by Pengu
I don't know if any of the americans here, or anywhere are aware, but the rest of the world recognizes the US as the land of sueing one another. These idiots are just out to make a quick buck.
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That is the truest statement. One unfortunate (mis)conception of the USA is that one can never, ever underestimate the intelligence of the american buying public.

Whatever happened to good old solid intelligent people that take responsibility for their own actions?
 
Before we go there, an aside that is closer to the question of misreading megabytes.

I have a pdf I want to send by e-mail. Get info says it is 2.5 meg. OK, so it's big for the mail, but the guy wants it sooo...

When I queue it up in eudora, it turns out that what OsX calls 2.5 meg is actually 3,567 K and that's too big for the guy's mailbox.

So Apple gets it both ways, they call a million a meg when it serves and they call it .9 megs when it serves.

Hey! where are my standards.

Still, I hope the lawsuit fails and the plaintiffs get to pay all court costs... ;)
 
The growth in size by sending it with e-mail has nothing to do with that. This is simply because normal e-mails only use 7-bytes instead of 8 bytes for a character in order to avoid using spezial chars. So the e-mail programm has to convert your binary from 8 bytes/char to an ascii text using 7 bytes/char. So the actually transfered data is 12,5% more.

Of course the 1000/1024 display in the info dialog adds some extra bytes too :)
 
I think people should sue Microsoft for their software which costs homes, sohos, companies LOADS of money each and every year for problems like security holes, crashes, etc. and should stop sueing other companies for BS computing details... :mad:

:p
 
This is all a complete waste of time and money and really has nothing to do with the actual size of the hard drives - if I bought a 10Gb drive and found it to be only 5Gb, I could understand but
some smart-Alecc has decided to make a point in law and scam the manufacturers for a few dollars as usual in Americas rediculously litiguous society.

This lawsuit is petty and just leads to items getting relabelled - does this really need a class action lawsuit to change a label? Remember the case where a cup of coffee in McDonalds now has on the side "Caution contents are hot" No, really??? Shit, and I thought that steam coming off the top was just for decoration. Therewas another case where a lady successfully sued a department store and got about $800,000 because she tripped while shopping in the store and broke her ankle. I really cannot understand what precedent the judge thought he was setting when it was her own kid crawling on the floor that she tripped over! And like the McDonalds case, why did the judge award that woman so much money when she had clearly broken all laws of common sense and put the decoratively steaming cup of coffee between her legs while driving her car and oh what a surprise, spilled it.

I was on an American Airlines flight earlier this year and the stewardess gave me a packet of peanuts with my pre-dinner drink. The label said "Salted Peanuts" and there was even a picture of some peanuts on the packaging. Then to my shock, next to the ingredients table there was a warning sign: "Caution, may contain nuts"

WTF???

Surely not - a packet of peanuts that ACTUALLY contains peanuts. HOLD THE FRONT PAGE!
 
Originally posted by arden
Krev, you're facts are correct but your logic is flawed. It is because the OS reads a drive as a factor of 2, not of 10 (1024 is a factor of 2, 1000 is a factor of 10) that the lawsuit should win. Drive manufacturers should make their 150 GB drives 150 GB of 1024-byte KB, not 1000-byte KB... in other words, they should make them 161,061,273,600-byte drives, not 150,000,000,000-byte drives. This is something that has bugged me for a long time, and it's nice to see someone doing something about it.
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Uhm, okay, a couple things... one: shouldn't you have said my facts were flawed and my logic sound? I was trying to point out that due to the difference between how an OS counts drive space, and how HD manufacturers count drive space was the real issue, and that these guys should be going after one of those two, not computer manufacturers. Dell, Sony and HPaq don't produce OSes (well, HPaq does have a Linux variant IIRC) or HDs... so why are they getting sued for giving numbers along the lines of the HD manufacturers? Toshiba produces HDs and uses the manufacturing numbers, which makes sense, but don't produce OSes IIRC, but rightly in the lawsuit. Apple produces an OS, but no HDs, so they are rightly in the lawsuit.

To be honest, the OS guys are the ones that need to change. A standard for prefixes that are in terms of 1024 HAS been out for about a year now (maybe less, my memory is foggy on the date)...

Kibi = 1024
Mebi = 1024 * Kibi
Gibi = 1024 * Mebi
Tebi = 1024 * Gibi

etc... So either OS makers need to adjust to using the new prefixes, or stop using the stupid "shift the number left by 10 bits to divide by 1024" trick. It worked when we didn't have processing power and divides were done by hand, but now a shift is just barely faster than a divide (if at all faster), so we can actually divide by 1000 to give real size counts.

It isn't that the OS HAS to count in powers of two... but they choose to use an old trick that was designed to save processing time.

Now, RAM manufacturers are being inaccurate too, since their KB is 1024 bytes.. but nobody cares since they don't see any loss.
 
Actually, I think a KB quite clearly has 1024 bytes. Sure, it's dumb that the term 'K' or 'Kilo' has been used for bytes, but in computer terms it has been like that FOREVER. I mean: Since the beginning. What's the fuss? _I_ think people who suddenly started counting 1000 bytes in a KB are wrong, because they took something that was perfectly okay with everyone and _changed_ it. Not only is the lawsuit a dumb one, it will also only create MORE confusion instead of clearing things up. Aren't we, by now, USED to knowing that it's just like that? Sure, we could all live in a better world, but an American lawsuit about how American computer makers count KBs and MBs in harddrives won't change how Koreans label their DIMMs, for one example. And then what? You STILL have to learn that computers count differently, but while they do it in some places, they suddenly don't in others?

I say: Just another dumb lawsuit. There have been many of those in the United States of America, and there quite surely will be more, "just because we can".

I certainly think that the US law system is more flawed than the US harddrive and/or computer manufacturers.

Which reminds me that I'm a bit low on money right now. Maybe I should become an American and sue somebody so I get rich. I'm sure I'll find something really stupid with just enough chances to bring me money...
 
After the trial, we'll see the 9.32 GB iPod, the 18.73 Gb and the new 35.987 GB.... That's information ! Isn't it ?

(and in small letters: BEWARE the iPod HD may contain bits)
 
Originally posted by fryke
Which reminds me that I'm a bit low on money right now. Maybe I should become an American and sue somebody so I get rich. I'm sure I'll find something really stupid with just enough chances to bring me money...
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Actually, since this is a class-action lawsuit, those involved will probably see 25-50$ US each. The only people who get rich off class-action suits are the lawyers.

Now the really stupid lawsuits like the hot coffee inccident fits in the category you are describing as a get-rich-quick scheme.
 
In general I am against this sort of frivolous lawsuit, but I have to admit that I have been wanting some sort of imposed requirements for truth in advertising related to technology.

Things like:

printer speeds
toner consumpation
hard drive transfer rates
megabytes versus mebabits
(previously mentioned) monitor sizes

The list goes on and on...

These are all vaguely explained and depend on absurd laboratory requirements in some cases (hard drive transfer speeds). In my early video editing days I bought a hard drive RAID based on its claimed performance. Of course it turns out that claim was burst speed only, not sustained speed. The RAID was basically useless to me at a cost of $1700. That's just wrong. If you say your drive can move 20 MB per second, when it really only moves around 5 MB per second sustained, something is wrong there. Car manufacturers don't claim their car goes 120 MPH, when it actually only goes 75. That was kind of a lame analogy, but imagine if other industries were as cockeyed about their data?

The question in this hard drive suit is whether or not consumers would have made other purchasing decisions had they known about the modest hit in actual available space. In other words. What are their damages? I would suspect that the real damages are none, because consumers would still have made the purchase as is.

So I guess in the end I"m against this particular suit, but I'm for some enforced clarity on these issues.
 
To extend your car analogy, you could go 120 mph a time or two (a burst) on, maybe, the Autobahn, but it's very dangerous and bad for your car, so you usually drive at a safer speed of 65-80 mph (normal operation).
 
That's not a bad extension of the analogy. The key difference being, of course, that in the car example the advertising theoretically would not imply a certain sustained speed, whereas in the computer world it does. Likewise, in the car, if I really needed or wanted to go 150 I could, whereas the hard drive limits my speed with its own inadequacies.
 
Originally posted by arden
To extend your car analogy, you could go 120 mph a time or two (a burst) on, maybe, the Autobahn, but it's very dangerous and bad for your car, so you usually drive at a safer speed of 65-80 mph (normal operation).
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However, if your car only does 20mph under certain conditions (say, driving up a meager 1% grade hill), you might be a little miffed.

I'd actually say your analogy is a bit silly - the reason that a drive doesn't read/write at the same rate, sustained, as it is capable of in "bursts" has to do with architecture and limitations of the technology (caching, for one), not with whether or not it may damage the drive if done too much...
 
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