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News Seagate lawsuit concludes, settlement announced

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by CardJoe, 26 Oct 2007.

  1. CardJoe

    CardJoe Freelance Journalist

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  2. MiNiMaL_FuSS

    MiNiMaL_FuSS ƬӇЄƦЄ ƁЄ ƇƠƜƧ ӇЄƦЄ.

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    Is this avalible to people in the UK? Because I've got a couple of new segate drives and wouldn't say no to 5% back for no reason other than the stupidity of some whiney americans.
     
  3. quack

    quack Minimodder

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    Will we now be going out and buying 465GB drives instead of 500GB?
     
  4. Guest-23315

    Guest-23315 Guest

    Grrr... Why must it be US only...
     
  5. Lord_A

    Lord_A Boom baby!

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    Retarded, Seagate should sue them back for being such stupid moronic crap for brains.
     
  6. chrisuk

    chrisuk What's a Dremel?

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    A gigabyte should be (and is, technically speaking) 1024^3 so this is a good ruling - the use of 1000^3 is a misrepresentation of the truth.
     
  7. Delphium

    Delphium Eyefinity enabled

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    Ughhh, this has been known for years!!! Dam morons, Seagate should have used that money to educate those morons, not encourage them, pfft.
     
  8. mclean007

    mclean007 Officious Bystander

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    No. Giga- is the SI prefix for 10^9, so I would say it is fair to say a GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes. There is an argument that GB in popular usage means 2^40 bytes, following the logic that 1kB is almost exclusively considered to be 2^10 (1024) and so on. Each has its merits and I don't think either argument can be comprehensively rebutted.

    The binary prefixes (kibi/ki=2^10, mebi/Mi=2^20, gibi/Gi=2^30, tebi/Ti=2^40) were meant to resolve the ambiguity, but haven't really been widely adopted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

    Given HDD manufacturers have AFAIK always used decimal prefixes, surely that is established market practice. It is no less correct to say 1GB=10^9 bytes than to say 1GB=2^30 bytes, so I think Seagate have come off quite badly out of this case. That said, how much will it _actually_ cost them in cash rebates? How many people will actually go to the bother of digging out the receipt (assuming they still have it) for their $100 HDD and posting it to Seagate for the sake of a 5% rebate? Not many I'll bet. Bear in mind the "$40" software actually costs them nothing but bandwidth (if, as I assume, it is downloadable) or packaging (if physical media).
     
  9. sotu1

    sotu1 Ex-Modder

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    would hear if this ever affects UK users (and the rest of the world for that matter) the few GBs certainly do make a difference, and it irritates me when they aren't accurate.

    should affect other manufacturers surely...maybe seagate could pay a member of the public to sue samsung, toshiba, et al....
     
  10. Shadow_101

    Shadow_101 Minimodder

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    Dam Americans. This attitude ****es me off.
     
  11. pendragon

    pendragon I pickle they

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    i always found the difference in advertised space vs. useable space under FAT to be annoying, so I'm okay with this ruling, however I can understand people thinking it's retarded. In the end, hopefully manufacturers and software developers will all adopt the same standard.
     
  12. E.E.L. Ambiense

    E.E.L. Ambiense Acrylic Heretic

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    Well, being one of those "dam stupid whiny Americans", I can say I don't agree with this ruling. People, regardless of locale, should understand the concept of overhead when it comes to HDD's. 500GB looks better than 465GB on a box anyways ;).
     
  13. cyrilthefish

    cyrilthefish What's a Dremel?

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    This is a VERY good thing and should have happened from day one really with all drives and flash memory.

    Gah, just thinking of the amount of time over the years i must have spent trying to explain to less technically minded people why the device they just bought does not have the space it was advertised as having, makes me annoyed :duh:

    People generally can understand why the filesystem uses up space (i tended to explain it as think of a warehouse, but with a small section of it used to note down the name and location of everything in said warehouse)
    But explaining the 1024mb vs 1000mb difference just leaves people thinking they've been cheated out of space.

    *looks at his 1GB SD card that has 982mb capacity*

    imagine if the RAM manufacturers did the same thing, there'd be all kinds of oddly-sized memory amounts in people's PCs ;)
     
  14. Firehed

    Firehed Why not? I own a domain to match.

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    It's not an overhead issue. They're using a technical error in order to effectively falsely advertise legally - it's not a matter of the OS using that extra 24 bytes per kibibyte as the FAT (or new-age equivalent). Yes, it's the fault of the OS for using one unit and labeling it another, but that doesn't stop a difference approaching 10% as we hit terabyte drives. Manufacturers could use this as a marketing tool, selling all of their TrueSpace(tm) 1TB drives at a premium, and people get a drive that actually reports as having a terabyte in their OS. In actuality, they're selling you a 1TiB drive which would be about 1.1TB, so big deal. It wouldn't kill them to do it "right".
     
  15. Brett89

    Brett89 Minimodder

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    I'm one too, and I think this lawsuit is like the article said, a load of bologna. This is just another dumb lawsuit by someone looking to get rich quick. Sadly, Seagate had to take the brunt of it.
     
  16. E.E.L. Ambiense

    E.E.L. Ambiense Acrylic Heretic

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    Sure.. I see both sides of the argument. I guess I just don't sweat the small stuff like that. An HDD is just that; an HDD. I use it till it goes poof, then get another. I can see why people would get upset that they aren't getting what is on the box; at least in its entirety. I dunno. Personally, I always compensate for what I need when buying drives, and always shoot higher than what I'm targeting to make up for that 'deviance' in space versus advertised space.
     
  17. DarkLord7854

    DarkLord7854 What's a Dremel?

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    Meh.. the offer isn't anything great.. 5%.. woo.. that's what.. 5$? Prolly costs more to have the check written to you and sent :hehe:
     
  18. noobarino

    noobarino What's a Dremel?

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    poeple will do anything to sue somebody these days. morons.
     
  19. HellRazor

    HellRazor What's a Dremel?

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    lawsuits like this piss me off....
    Its been known for a long time that this is what you get when you formatt a hard drive. I'm a huge fan of Seagate, and only purchase their drives, so I would be "entitled" to pretty decent chunk of change from this lawsuit as I've purchase many, many drives in that time frame. However I will be punish Seagate for ignorance of retarded consumer and a messed up court system.

    I'm standing by Seagate!
     
  20. C-Sniper

    C-Sniper Stop Trolling this space Ądmins!

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    Welcome to America... home of the Sue happy lawyers and legal system.
     
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