What is Digg?94 Comments
- lordsandwich, on 10/12/2007, -2/+56By $500,000, did they actually mean $465,000?
- chaosmachine, on 10/12/2007, -2/+40class-action lawsuits are a joke. the end-users get a coupon for half-off their next purchase, or in this case, some free backup software, and the lawyers make off with hundreds of thousands of dollars..
- chaosmachine, on 10/12/2007, -0/+20"Western Digital has agreed to pay $500,000 in fees and expenses to San Francisco lawyers Adam Gutride and Seth Safier, who filed the suit last year."
- Loonacy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20Oops, my bad... It does say $500,000. My eyes must be blurring up from the sadness of losing 5 gigs on my hard drive.
- Kaioshin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+14...aren't there binary prefixes? I know some programs use it, but I've never really seen them used by a disk manufacturer.
You know,
1 KB = 1000 B
1 KiB = 1024 B
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
In fact, come to think of it, I had to explain this to SO many people at my school. The sad part is that it's a computer school. They were all convinced the filesystem eats up all the "missing" space for its own needs. - elook, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13The lawyers get richer, the consumers who got hosed get squat, as usual.
- MikeEnIke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Well let's see. The units are both called 'Gigabytes', so that makes it a little harder to see why there would be a chunk of space missing. Seriously, if I had no knowledge that 160GB was about 152GB in reality I would be a little pissed seeing as I thought i was getting 160 Gigabytes but I'm getting 152ish. I believe that HDD Companies should start using the 1024 that the OS's do so we can have a happy standard.
- greggish, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Great! Now how do I file a class action lawsuit against the lawyers Adam Gutride and Seth Safier for stealing a half million dollars of our money?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12No, that's a crap deal. Why would you pay $215 for a 500gb drive when you can get three 250gb drives for $225 on the same website?
- MikeEnIke, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10I want my 8 gigs back. Not the ability to back up my hard drive. Hell the program alone would take up space that they shorted me. I don't really mind the missing 8 gigs I have but I'm sure when I've almost filled my HDD I'll be thinking other wise.
- WailOS, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8The_Decryptor:
Bits and Bytes are by definition base 2. Meters are not. - chrono13, on 10/12/2007, -3/+11So they short you several gigs.
So in turn they give you free software that does what most anyone can do on their own.
And there is already freeware, and free/open source software solutions that do this with ease.
Like "giving away for free" a bit of software that facilitates the changing of your time in your OS.
How is that compensation? - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9I've got a weight-loss plan that will help you trim 40lbs from your body in one month.
* Note, 1lb == 1,000 calories - SuperSloth, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Yes, this is stupid because the HDD manufacturers are *correct*. A KB is 10^3 bytes, not 2^10. A MB is 10^6 bytes, not 2^20. The PC industry doesn't get to redefine 'kilo' just because they do math different than the rest of the world.
The problem here is the OS manufacturers. They are using non-SI units. They are the ones to blame. HD manufacturers are getting attacked for using the correct units because the incorrect ones have more bytes per unit. - Kajico, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8So is this Software for Mac and Linux users too, or just for Windows? And where am I gonna supposed to backup my software too? Go out and get another HD, as WD hopes, another WD HD perhaps....
- jasqwerty, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Well, considering they estimate that there are about a million consumers who can claim the software, you would have to split the $500k amongst yourselves, leaving each of you a paltry 50 cents. So, if you want to claim your 50 cents, please send a self-addressed stamped envelope to his secretary.
- jboi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Loved those 1mb = 1.000.000bytes labels.
i hope its the end of the "i'm getting screwed here" feeling when u buy a harddisk. - Yez70, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Call Action legal fees should require the CLASS' approval and/or the Public's approval.
People wonder why our legal system is so broken, it's run by lawyers... - pixelface, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I've bought a couple WD hard drives. The 250GB drive shows up in Windows XP as 232GB and the 120GB drive shows up in Windows XP as 111GB.
I know why that is, and it's been explained in the thread.
Who's at fault? Microsoft? Western Digital? Technically, 120GB IS 111GiB, but Microsoft doesn't use the term GiB in "My Computer", it says GB.
The hard drive manufacturers know what they're doing. They're using consumer ignorance to their advantage in order to maximize profits. You see the same thing with broadband companies. OMG! 8Mbps download!!!
I think it would be good if Western Digital and other hard drive manufactures were required to advertised their hard drive capacities in GiB ON THE BOX. Maybe Microsoft should also be required to use the term GiB in Windows. This $30 "backup software" thing is a joke.
7% does seem large when speaking of the difference between gigabyte and gibibyte.
If someone doesn't know about GB/GiB (a majority of first time buyers I would say) and buys a 500GB drive and take it home and XP says it's 476.83GB, yeah, they're going to be pissed. The term "GiB" has only existed since 1999 when it was suggested to be put into use by the IEC. I guess it's a problem with language, as people typically say "Gigs" and not "Gibs", but we really shouldn't have to. I personally found out about the discrepancy when I bought an 8GB hard drive in the end of 1997, took it home, and it showed as 7.6 "GB" in Windows 95. Those who have been "burned" have gotten wise to it and now do the math, but they are evidently tens of thousands who also got tricked.
I'm familiar with the "some storage capacity might not be fully accessible" warning, but it's god damn lawyerspeak. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -8/+13There's nothing to "get back". The discrepency is not the manufacturers fault. Sure, they could be clearer on the packaging for those who aren't familiar with the discrepency but this complaint really boils down to nothing more than people not being willing to do the math.
Really, if I give you $100 USD and you give me 60 Brittish Pounds in return (or whatever the exchange rate is today) -- am I going to get pissed, because "100" is more than "60"? Of course not, because it doesn't take a brainiac to understand that they are different units. Just like the tonne is a completely different weight in metric than imperial. - rhsjr7, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8I prefer the binary system; since when did the USA give a damn about the metric system anyway?
They need both #'s on the label. - Acill, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6How lame, I actually qualify for this I see, but I am a Mac user and that deal is of no use to me.
- Asterus, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6If I were to sell you, say, a water heater, and claim that it has 1/2" hookups, you would rightly expect it to have 1/2" hookups as defined by accepted usage in the plumbing industry. And standard 1/2" fixtures do not measure 1/2" on any expected dimension, despite the fact that inches are precisely and consistently defined units.
Likewise, the binary definitions of 1 KB = 1024 bytes, 1 MB = 1024 KB, etc. have been used as established practice in the computer industry for decades. The binary-specific units of kibibyte, mebibyte, etc. were not even proposed until 1998, and have so far had negligible acceptance. (In fact, Digg's spell-check utility flagged both of the above unit names as errors.)
The fact is that every OS denominates storage space in binary units; all RAM and solid-state storage devices are measured with the binary units; file sizes are universally reported in binary units; and all of the above are expressed with the traditional, SI-derived unit names.
Hard drives are the only exception to the pattern. - shteve, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5You misunderstand - this is about the discrepency between binary and decimal prefixes.
Drive manufacturers consider a megabyte to be 10^6 = 1,000,000 bytes, but operating systems report a megabyte to be 2^10 = 1,048,576 bytes. So for example, if you buy an 80 gigabyte drive it will show in the OS as considerably less that capacity. - fabbers, on 10/12/2007, -3/+7Formatted capacity has always been less than a drives stated capacity no matter which manufacturers drives you buy. Another instance of suing for the sake of it.
Oh hang on my 32" TV only has a 30" viewable area, quick get my lawyer on the phone..... - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Decimal prefixes on storage values is recommended by the IEC, the IEEE, and ISO.
Other prefixes (Gibibyte etc) are used in a number of places to refer to 2^10 stuff.
Get with the times? - FRAGaLOT, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4what the hell are you talking about? mebibyte? kibibyte?
- CoolWind, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3More legal system extortion. When are we going to fix our government?
- Hawk2007, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4cheaper than replacing all the sold HDs.
- fernando26, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4In response to Seumas,
There are several reasons why someone would be willing to do that. If the user only needs 500gb and doesn't want to have the additional power/heat/noise associated with 2 or 3 additional drives, or doesn't have the spare ports on his mobo, it it well worth it. Would you buy 15 50gb HD's or a single 750GB HD even though the 750 gigger was say $50 or $60 more? - somerandomnerd, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"Really, if I give you $100 USD and you give me 60 Brittish Pounds in return (or whatever the exchange rate is today) -- am I going to get pissed, because "100" is more than "60"? Of course not, because it doesn't take a brainiac to understand that they are different units. "
How about if you sell me something for 100 dollars, and I then pay you 100 dollars, not mentioning that I'm using Australian dollars?
By your logic, it doens't take a braniac to work out that "dollars" and "dollars" are different units... - aplardi, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Does anyone else find it ironic that, they admit they didn't give you the storage space that you wanted, so to make up for it they are going to give you software you don't want to take up space on that already smaller hard drive?
- Hawk2007, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4They should also go after DVD disc makers as well. They say 4.7 GB on the label, but you actually get 4482 MB. CD's do a lot better though. They advertise 700 MB, and you get a few hundred kilobytes short of 700. It's something like 699.57 MB. close enough for me.
- kabewm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"This is ridiculous, they way HDD manufacturers measure their capacity makes sense, but because OSs measure it differently is in no way the HDD manufacturers fault."
The tech industry has been measuring data since before hard drives were in computers. The HDD manufacturers used to actually label their drives correctly (not counting formatting) but changed it as gimmick to make their drives look bigger.
It's blatent false advertising. The only ones in tech that do this are HDD makers and DVD media makers. Everyone else in this industry is on the same page. - Tek12, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This really only became a topic of discussion when these large drives started shipping. Back when drives were no bigger than say 10GB, you only lost about 700MB. Now with drives reaching 750GB in capacity, now you're losing out on almost 52GB. No one cared when they lost a few hundred MB, but when you start losing amounts more than the size of your older drives, it becomes very significant.
- PacoBell, on 10/12/2007, -4/+6That's 1 million idiots who don't know the first thing about computers. The gormlessness factor is astounding!
- neko, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3The KiB, MiB, GiB.. notation seems to have only risen in popularity recently, with the world of computers hitting the rest of the metric system. I don't blame people for assuming a 'kilo'byte is 1000 bytes.
But I'd much rather hard drive manufacturers used the binary suffixes. It's a piece of equipment for a computer. My computer counts in binary. The filesystem I put on that drive uses a cluster size of 4K - yes, 4096 bytes. To do so otherwise would be a complete waste of resources. - lancebaldwin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2152?! Damn, I knew I was getting ripped off! Mine is only 149 GB..... Can I sue seperately?
- geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2"Anyone here ever bought a 17" CRT monitor and 'discover' that its really only got a 16" display area?"
At least they have it marked clearly on the package "VIEWABLE AREA 15.7 INCHES", and in most cases LCDs are actually the size advertised. When you take your nice 160GB hd home and install it to reveil you're only getting 149.6GB, and NOWHERE on the package does it even mention "We define gigabytes on base 10 instead of base 2", that's fradulent advertising, and they believe they can justify it because "everyone's doing it".
These hard drive companies just don't want to be honest. It wouldn't hurt them a bit to simply label the disks as "149.6GB" instead of "160GB", and the only difference would be the way it rolled off the tongue. If they had started the practice 10 years ago, nobody would even know the difference anymore. Hell, they do it on SCSI drives, why NOT do it for IDE? A 73GB SCSI drive could have an identical platter in it to an 80GB ATA drive, and yet they're still marketed opposed to each other. It's fradulent, and it should stop, plain and simple. - geminitojanus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2What I don't get is, how does it solve the problem the lawsuit addressed in the first place? Class action lawsuits are supposed to solve the problem of the class, by returning value to the customer they unrightfully took.
So, they could either give me the amount of money I paid extra on my HDs, or they can trade my HD for one that has the right volume amount on it; their software holds zero value to me, as I am not a consumer of their software products and use DD for my backup purposes. The lawyers in this case completely failed to find a solution, and simply took the first offer Western Digital threw at them so they could make away like bandits. "We're sorry we didn't give you the 4.6GB you're missing on your drive, here's a nice keychain, please buy our HDs again!"
..should sue the damned lawyers for collusion. - Nadare, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I don't even see how such a thing caught these people by suprise, seeing how every HD manufacter that I know of uses the same system. So they had to get 'shorted' 6 gigs before they noticed and instead of reading some information about this difference they call up their lawyers.
- Magistrate, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I knew this was going to come back and bite hard drive manufacturers in the ass. When I worked in retail, customers would always complain about how their hard drives never stored as much as the box said. When I explained it, they understood, but were still pissed about not getting a full capacity drive.
- bf01, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4"Western Digital Corp. is offering free software to about 1 million consumers"
Is that 1,000,000 consumers, or 1,048,576 consumers? - Zapf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1From what I remember, the lawsuit was over the coffee being way too hot and get very severe burns through her clothing (with similar events happening repeatedly previously with McDonalds coffee). I'm not going to go further into it however, as it has been argued to death (and reported by many nowadays as just an urban legend).
- tmcdigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The only way they can make it up to users is give them a FREE 750gb hard drive, just to be nice guys!
;-) Seriously, they need to start chopping the prices on their 500/750gb hard drives!! - master_of_fm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1why would you buy a 500GB drive for $215, when you can buy e 250GB for $225? for RAID knucklebrains, duh.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Still sucks though. I have several WD 320Gb drives, each with a capacity of 298Gb.
Thats 66Gb I paid for but didn't receive.
Now I'm well versed on the 1000 Vs 1024 thing, but it still sucks that the manufacturers (WD, Seagate, IBM, etc) can legally lie about the real capacity of their products, though its not without precedent of course. Anyone here ever bought a 17" CRT monitor and 'discover' that its really only got a 16" display area?
How about that PMPO crap that less-than-honest speaker makers use? Now I really wish someone would do a class action thing about that! I'm totally sick of seeing "120W" stamped on crappy little PC speakers that are only 2W when you pull them apart and take a look at the actual speaker driver itself!! - superal1394, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thats windows you dumbass. If it isn't an NTFS partition, windows can't read past 127 gigabytes. Unless it is a machine older than windows 2000, there is nothing you can do about it.
- XStatic, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1EMC® Retrospect® Express Edition is available exclusively with leading hardware manufacturer backup devices and is designed for home environments. It protects a single Windows or Macintosh desktop or notebook computer by backing up to internal and external hard drives and CD/DVDs. Retrospect Express delivers proven data protection capabilities in an easy-to-use software package.
http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/homeandoffice/retroexpress/ - MikeEnIke, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Hmm, my 160 is 152.xxx in windows. Haha, suckers and you're damn 149's!
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