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...and offers free backup/recovery software for damages to customers

In a class-action lawsuit against hard drive manufacturer Western Digital Corporation, the company agreed to settle and offer any customers who apply to the lawsuit data backup software valued at about $30 as well as pay $500,000 in legal fees and expenses incurred by the prosecuting lawyers.

The class-action lawsuit against Western Digital Corporation involves the way the company reports hard drive capacity. For example, an 80GB model reported by the hard drive manufacturer will only hold 74.4GB of data, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. This is a known fact throughout the storage community and is no news to those of us who have ever bought or used a hard drive.

The reason for the difference in capacity is the way operating system vendors and hard drive manufacturers report the values for storage capacities. OS vendors usually use the binary system for calculating file sizes and drive capacities while hard drive manufacturers like to use the decimal system which makes a drives capacity seem higher on paper than it really is.

Apparently, a lawsuit of the same caliber is pending against Seagate Technology which has been filed by the same lawyers but we have yet to see how that one plays out. We wouldn't be surprised if the same results came from that case.

For now, owners of Western Digital hard drives purchased between March 22, 2001 and February 15, 2006 can register to claim the backup software at WDC's website by providing the serial number of the drives they own.

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Système International d'Unités
By Tyler 86 on 6/29/2006 4:15:14 PM , Rating: 2
The French didn't realise at the time that the Holy Decimal System is not the be-all end-all of standardization when they came up with their standards, they pretty much just said 'We are ze french, and we are changing ze definition. Ten is ze number of fingers on deu hans so, and now everything is ze ten... We do not care, Hau hau. Now we take ze 4 hour lunch break.'

The '1024' in decimal is 10 physical places in binary.
That means '1024' is '10000000000' in binary. It's not 9 places like a million, it's 10 places, and for fairly good reasons... for one you don't have 2s in binary, you just have to trust me, it's an intelligent representation.

People more intelligent than the those at SI developed these methods of storage with these names for a friggin' reason.

The SI is overstepping it's "authority", which is in itself an oxymoron, when it re-defines units of data storage.
They say whatever they want, and expect people to adhere to it.

We of the world, meaning everywhere except france in this case, don't work that way.

Hell, even in france, french programmers don't run around saying, "pas mebibit! pas mebibit!"... They know what the hell a megabyte is supposed to be.


RE: Système International d'Unités
By Le Québécois on 6/30/2006 3:19:18 AM , Rating: 2
I know i'll probably get a bad rating for saying this but on this one you're right and wrong at the same time.

First of the French came whit this system while they were the biggest Empire (hence around Napoleon frame of time). Like many empire tends to do when they are an empire is to force their rules on other peoples ( a little bit like the US is trying to do now and then ). If you thing about it the SI is almost perfect in every way. Take the freezing temp of the water, in SI "celcius" it's 0, why because water is one of the most basic element surrounding us, in the "english" system I don't even know at what F the water freeze. Another exemple, density, the density of water is 1 g per cm^3. To my knowledge only a couple of nation don't use it complitly and those happen to be english speaking nation.

Now to the you're right point. 1024 does in fact come from the BIT aspect of computing where 10000000000 is in fact 1024. Quite confusing to someone who don't know jack about computer or binary.
That's why in french we( here I say we because I'm french Canadian, please not to be confuse with French, it's almost an insult sometime ) use two very different words to talk about bit and byte to not confuse them. Basicly for byte in french we use "octet" so we never confuse Kb and Kb...

Here's a quote from wikipedia:
On most computers the smallest unit of memory addressing—or byte—is 8 bits, so the terms "byte" and "octet" are often used interchangeably. However, the size of a byte is determined by the architecture of a particular computer system: some old computers had 9, 10, or 12-bit bytes, while others had bytes as small as 5 or 6 bits. An octet is always exactly 8 bits. As a result, computer networking standards almost exclusively use "octet" to refer to the 8-bit quantity.

So excuse me if I'm rude but let's come back to the part where you are wrong. First in french we use Mo of Go for megabyte so it is not to be confuse with bit. Second nobody is wrong here. In fact in a perfect world where a normal person would not pays 50$ to Bestbuy so they can have their new ram stick install evereybody would know that in computing M or G means x1024. But we don't live in a perfect world and the company take advantage of that fact by missleading consumer.

Now to the part where you say WE OF THE WORLD...I hope by that you mean the US, England and their colonies (or former colonies) because open you eyes for a sec and you'll see that everywhere else they use the SI.

So yes in France you are right, they go around saying pas mebibit (what ever you meant by that because mebibit is not even a word). They say MegaOctet or GigaOctet.

Hope this open your eyes a littles and teach you that there is a world outside the USA.

Probably going to get a lot of bad rating from this but at least I have made my point...and if you don't belive me do a little searching around.

Why did I see all this, probably because I'm Quebecois and I live every day in this raging war between the SI and the "english(USA)"system.


RE: Système International d'Unités
By TomZ on 6/30/2006 9:18:52 AM , Rating: 2
quote:
pas mebibit (what ever you meant by that because mebibit is not even a word).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibit


RE: Système International d'Unités
By Le Québécois on 6/30/2006 1:55:03 PM , Rating: 2
Thx, I'll be less dumb when I go to bed tonight(a Quebecer idiom) but never the less it isn't a French word at all.

I have never used it or heard it in all the time I did study binary in my electronic course( which I did in french ).


RE: Système International d'Unités
By Tyler 86 on 7/3/2006 3:33:04 PM , Rating: 2
Many measurements in non-english speaking countries exist too.

'Metrication' implements purely new standards of measurement, the meter, the gram, etc...

The issue is that they're redefining bytes, and even octets.

The SI overstepped it's supposed authority on this one, unless you're telling me they came first -- and had a concept of data storage in the Napoleonic era...


RE: Système International d'Unités
By Tyler 86 on 7/3/2006 3:43:23 PM , Rating: 2
On a note of agreement, the byte is too close to the bit in it's abbreviation; I proposed the C++ term 'character', as this represents a minimum storage unit of binary data, while leaving it open to changing from 8 to 16 to however many bits are needed.

An octet is very definitively 8 of something, commonly bits. I have an octet of non-opposing fingers... Supposedly, a bit could be re-interpreted, from it's origin, b inary dig it , as just a digit. I have 5 digits on my hand...

When nations accepted the SI units as their national standards, although they converted from their previous method of measurement, they didn't overwrite their originals.

They also defined the decimal system to work by representation on paper, and in a human mind - ignoring binary. This 'holy' decimal system was the one system to rule them all.

As you are implicitly aware, there had to be units measurement opposed to the metric system previously in every nation that 'converted', and I'm certain that's a heck of a large number of non-metric measurements.


RE: Système International d'Unités
By Tyler 86 on 7/3/2006 5:04:55 PM , Rating: 2
Oh, and if you really think about it, like, break out the calculator, the laws of physics, and study existentialism, binary and powers of 2 are even more perfect in every way than decimal and powers of 10. O_o


By Tyler 86 on 7/3/2006 5:06:16 PM , Rating: 2
^ and tack on programming.


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