[geeks] Seagate buckles to math ignorant consumers

[John Francini]

> No, 5% back, not 7%, and it is the after-rebate price, not the  
> retail sales
> price (how they will arrive at a real ultimate price is beyond me,  
> I guess it
> will be a matter of trust and industry norms for pricing back when  
> the drive
> was manufactured).
>
> This won't make Drives larger, and this won't make drive makers report
> capacity in anything other than decimal values, they annoyed  
> Seagate to the
> point of writing a check to end this case.
>
> The argument appears to be "you say this drive is 250 Gigabytes,  
> which I
> expect to be 250*(2**30) bytes of storage, but you are actually  
> providing
> 250*(10**9) bytes of storage - you LIED" When asked how they came  
> to expect
> the drive to be 250*(2**30) bytes of storage, they can only point  
> to the
> numbers their OS spits out, and what others have told them (legend).

The numbers that every OS in existence spits out are 2**n, not 10**n  
based.  That is the standard. The drive manufacturers should JUST  
DEAL WITH IT.  Because, otherwise, this will keep coming up, again,  
and again, and again -- especially as the variance between 10**9 and  
2**30 values grows wider as drives grow larger.

I hope the drive manufacturers get sued enough that they'll just  
throw in the damn towel and make the drives have accurate capacities  
-- reckoning the way the OS does, not the way SI says you should.

And "gibibytes" be damned.

John


>
> Seagate could have won, IMHO but IANAL - once a jury is involved,  
> all bets are
> off... What are the chances you'll be able to get 12 people who  
> understand
> exponents or binary math on the jury?
>
> Lionel
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