Computer hardware vendors being sued

[MarvinisaLunatic 0]

From my WinXP newsletter:

 

It seems a potential class action suit has been filed against a number of large computer hardware vendors, including Dell, HP, Apple, IBM, Sharp, Sony and Toshiba. Now, most of us could think of a few good reasons to sue some of these companies. But how about this allegation - that computer makers are deceiving customers by claiming hard disks on the systems are larger than they actually are.

 

The problem is based in the way disk space is measured. In their advertising and documentation, computer vendors traditionally use the decimal notation system that we're all used to (the base 10 system with which most everyone learned to count in school). Computers, on the other hand, process information using the binary system (a base 2 system that uses only two digits - 1 and 0 - to represent all numbers).

 

Decimal system users like nice round numbers, so it has been traditional to think of a megabyte as 1 million bytes (since the prefix mega means "million"), and a gigabyte as 1 billion bytes (giga means "billion"). However, in the computer's binary notation there are actually 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte and 1,073,741,824 bytes in a gigabyte.

 

If you're thinking "So what? All this math gives me a headache," then you're obviously not as nit-picky as the Californians (and their attorneys) who filed the lawsuit. The result of the discrepancy in numbering systems is that a hard disk labeled as 20 gigabytes under the traditional method of denoting capacity actually only has about 18 and a half gigs of space under the (more accurate) binary method. Of course, the larger the disk capacity, the more space is "lost" - a "150GB" disk really gives you about 140GB of usable space.

 

The eight plaintiffs in the case allege that they're not getting what they've paid for. The computer vendors will, no doubt, point to the fact that a gigabyte as 10 to the 9th power, or 1,000,000,000 bytes, has been a well known and accepted way of notating disk space since the advent of the personal computer. Who's right? Does it matter? Is this another debate about what "is" is? Will defending these lawsuits cost computer vendors big bucks, which will be passed along to us, the consumers, in the form of higher prices? Is this just a matter of "rounding up" to a more convenient and understandable approximation that happens in all industries? Or are the plaintiffs fighting for a just cause, forcing computer makers to tell us the whole truth about how much hard disk space their products really contain? Let us know what you think, at [email protected].

 

Stupid. I learned in day one of computer class how many bytes there are in a MB/GB (We were given a day one test to see what we thought we knew, and only 2 out of about 15 got it even close).

 

Next someone should sue someone over the fact that you can never get 56k speed on a 56k modem since the goverment has a cap on it at 53k.

[MrRant 0]

They are really going to be mad when they discover that if they format the drive a certain way they lose even more space.

 

Morons.

[Guest El Satanico]

What's the point...what would this accomplish?

 

Will consumers see 18 instead of 20 and think "well i guess i better spend more money for a 40 gig". That would just make the companies more money, so what's the point. The consumers would gain nothing.

[MrRant 0]

What it start to be on the box "18-20 GB" and "37 - 40GB" etc.

[Dr. Tom 0]

I'm actually surprised this suit took this long to appear.