Brian Martinez (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} cluebyfour) wrote,@ 2008-05-02 00:04:00 |
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| Entry tags: | computers, courts, stupidity |
how do you write "douchebag" in binary?
It would be disingenuous of me to say I hate lawyers; I'm married to one after all. But shit like this, involving a class-action suit against Creative Labs over the advertised capacity of their MP3 players, convinces me that some lawyers deserve to be shot in the face:
According to the settlement agreement, the lead plaintiffs, who filed their federal lawsuit in California, alleged that Creative had misled consumers by exaggerating the capacity of its MP3 players. The fraud allegation hinged mainly on two different definitions of gigabyte. According to the decimal definition (the only one I knew until today), a gigabyte is 1 billion (109) bytes. According to the binary definition, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (230) bytes. While Creative used the decimal definition in its advertising, the settlement says, "certain computer operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition." On those systems, a 20GB Creative Zen player would register as only 18.6GB or so, about 7 percent less than advertised.
Now it's true that hard drives use the decimal definition for a gigabyte when advertising their capacities. However, it's not "certain computer operating systems" that report hard drive capacity using the binary definition; it's all computer operating systems. Computer data is stored in binary format, so it can't report capacity in gigabytes using any other definition.
The rank stupidity of all this is that, whether you divide a hard drive's capacity by 1,000,000,000 or 1,037,741,824, it's still the same number of bytes. Only the divisor has changed. So Creative didn't exaggerate the capacity of their players at all; they simply failed to account for the fact that computers use the binary definition of a gigabyte. 20GB decimal = ~18.6GB binary. There's nothing misleading about this, except to consumers who are ignorant of how computers and data storage work. And I don't think Creative has an obligation to educate them; it just has to be truthful.
But in the hands of skilled trial lawyers, this inconsequential difference can be represented to a judge (who quite likely is also technologically ignorant) as a case of deceptive advertising, even fraud, and instead of wasting enormous time and money on defending themselves from this nonsense, Creative opted for a settlement. So if you own a Zen or other Creative MP3 player, you're entitled to buy a 1GB MP3 player at half-price, or 20% off any item ordered from Creative's online store.
For striking this courageous blow for consumers, the lawyers pocket $900,000. If it makes you feel better, in binary that would only be $878.9K.
Update: As
ilcylic demonstrates in a comment below, an OS (Linux in this case) can report hard drive capacity in decimal format if it so chooses. But given that volatile memory storage will always be reported in binary, I'm not sure that resolves the confusion issue.
