Creative coughs up over MP3 player fiasco

This whole binary vs. regular units is getting rather silly, IMO.

You see, there are clear definitions by people who define these things:

http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html

If anyone checks, they'll find that KB is indeed 1,000 bytes, etc. 1,024 is KiB. Not the same at all.

It's unfortunate that a company has to pay for using the correct units. It's even more unfortunate that not a single lawyer on their team was aware of the existence of page above, evidently.

Just wondering how come people are suing Creative while hard drive manufatures have been claming 1GB = 1000MB rather then 1024MB per GB for many years and they don't get sued?

Is this sort of activity greed or is it redressing the balance? Are such actions the odd case of satisfaction or is it an industry. When those predatory vanguards for “justice” are driving the train, it’s an industry. Unless you can see a real change in attitide from indifference, sloppiness, etc [which there won’t be where money is concerned], you are merely talking about jacking up the cost for the “rest of us”. One reason why everything is indexed to greed and not to real costs. And these “entrepreneurial” chosen-few habits are being entrenched here in the UK. The likes of Creative will never suffer. It’s one’s attitude that suffers. What the individual has become. A never-ending combative greedy idiot-cum-nut. The fact that the zero-sum game wheel will always spin is not the point. It is how many it hoovers-up is the point, which in overall terms means a step-down for all whilst not forgettng that momentum is everything. One step here and there and you’ll soon be talking about saving the world, tree-stumps and animals too.

@first "unbelievable" poster...


WTF are you talking about? Since the very first electronic computer, no one has EVER used base-10 denominations in specifying memory/storage capacity. NEVER. In all cases throughout the history of the computer, until hard drive manufacturers started trying to decieve the public within the last few years, it was always base-2.

Pull your head out.

Like brokers, always being paid for doing useless things. Presuming the class action extends to customers in Canada, which it in 99.99% likelihood does not, all that Creative are getting from me is another "job well done, lads". I bought my MuVo V100 1GB, last November. It sounds great, it's easy to use, the earbuds it ships with approach audiophile quality, and the thing is so energy efficient that I sometimes wonder if they've rewritten classical mechanics. I'm gonna complain about a few MB here or there? Idiots.

Hard drive manufacturers have been placing "1 GB = 1 000 000 000 bytes" on their boxes for years now. I don't know anyone who actually expects that new 500GB drive to contain 500 x 2^30 bytes of storage space on it. What's next? Is Apple going to be sued for the same thing? What about every hard drive manufacturer? What about every system builder that advertises the size of the hard drive in the system? If the precedent is set, most computer hardware companies are in a bit of trouble just because the unwashed masses are unaware of how binary works.

They were sued because they gave the customers MORE storage space than advertised?

What about all of the computers that are sold with 120GB hard drives that do not inform you that "Storage capacity reduced due to installed Operating System and software"?

The customer purchased an item that advertised 1,000MB and received 1,024MB. That sounds to me like the customer got a better deal than anticipated.

I know what you are saying; on the face of it you actually seem to get MORE storage, but when you think about it, this isn't the case.

The hard drive is advertised as 30GB (decimal), but windows (or whatever) reads it in binary, and 30GB binary is about 221,225,472bytes (~222MB) more than 30GB decimal.

[3 x (10^9) = 3 000 000 000 <- decimal]
[3 x (2^30) = 3 221 225 472 <- binary]

So to the operating system this apparently 30GB hard drive isn't really 30GB, it's about 222MB short of 30GB binary, so it gets shown as 29.78GB or about that.

Hope this helped.

Despite the confusion this causes, and I'm all behind the newish IEEE GiB naming system to clear it up, I cannot for the life of me see why creative over all other companies have been successfully sued! hard drive manufacturers have been naming in decimal since time immemorial, and what about that much more successful fruit flavoured music company?!

Ben, you've got it backwards. Creative made the mistake of not putting the verbiage that has been on hard drives for years, and apparently left that loophole open for people to sue.

To Motoman:

In my college years, I used an IBM 1420. Later I worked on operating systems for Burroughs B-2500 / 3500 / 4500 series mainframes.

All of these computers used base 10 memories.

You've got it backwards, people lost 24 MB per GB they "bought" from Creative by getting 1000 MB instead of 1024 MB. As if people would sue over getting more storage...even in the USA!

For what it's worth, I agree with the spirit of this lawsuit. It's high time storage manufacturers started representing their capacities correctly (again) rather than misleading customers. If you buy a "1 GB" mp3 player, you darn well ought to be able to fit 1 GB of music on it - in the same unit of GB as your operating system reports it.