David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
On Tue, March 16, 2010 14:59, Erik Trimble wrote:
Has there been a consideration by anyone to do a class-action lawsuit
for false advertising on this? I know they now have to include the "1GB
= 1,000,000,000 bytes" thing in their specs and somewhere on the box,
but just because I say "1 L = 0.9 metric liters" somewhere on the box,
it shouldn't mean that I should be able to avertise in huge letters "2 L
bottle of Coke" on the outside of the package...
I think "giga" is formally defined as a prefix meaning 10^9; that is, the
definition the disk manufacturers are using is the standard metric one and
very probably the one most people expect. There are international
standards for these things.
I'm well aware of the history of power-of-two block and disk sizes in
computers (the first computers I worked with pre-dated that period); but I
think we need to recognize that this is our own weird local usage of
terminology, and that we can't expect the rest of the world to change to
our way of doing things.
That's RetConn-ing. The only reason the stupid GiB / GB thing came
around in the past couple of years is that the disk drive manufacturers
pushed SI to do it.
Up until 5 years ago (or so), GigaByte meant a power of 2 to EVERYONE,
not just us techies. I would hardly call 40+ years of using the
various giga/mega/kilo prefixes as a power of 2 in computer science as
non-authoritative. In fact, I would argue that the HD manufacturers
don't have a leg to stand on - it's not like they were "outside" the
field and used to the "standard" SI notation of powers of 10. Nope.
They're inside the industry, used the powers-of-2 for decades, then
suddenly decided to "modify" that meaning, as it served their marketing
purposes.
Note that NOBODY else in the computer industry does this in their
marketing materials - if it's such a standard, why on earth don't the
DRAM chip makers support (and market) it that way? The various Mhz/Ghz
notations are powers-of-10, but they've always been that way, and more
importantly, are defined by the OSes and other software as being that
way. HD capacities are an anomaly, and it's purely marketing smooze.
They should get smacked hard again on this.
It would be one thing if it was never seen (or only by super-nerds like
us), but for the average consumer, when they buy that nice shiny Dell
with an advertised 1TB disk, then boot to Windows 7, why does Windows
then say that their C drive is only 900GB in size? How is that /not/
deceptive marketing?
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)
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