Thursday, September 18, 2003
Solving The Riddle Of Spatial Anomalies
Posted by Kati Compton in "THOUGHT" @ 06:00 PM
When is a 256MB SD card not a 256MB SD card?
When manufacturers use an "alternative" form of math. For as long as I can remember, storage such as hard drives and flash cards have been marketed counting 1,000,000 bytes as one megabyte, when computers actually consider it to be 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. In other words, your 256 marketing MB SD card is actually about 244 real MB (less any space needed by the file system).
On PPCT we get a lot of users asking about this, confused when their device reports a capacity different than they thought they purchased. Is there anything that can be done about this? Well, somebody is trying. A class-action lawsuit has been filed by a number of computer users, seeking to force manufacturers to provide restitution, surrender any profits made by these practices, and to be more honest in packaging.
Are any computer users going to get significant money from this? It seems like the only ones to monetarily benefit from class-action lawsuits are lawyers. But it would certainly be nice if capacities had to be listed properly so buyers would know what they're getting.
When manufacturers use an "alternative" form of math. For as long as I can remember, storage such as hard drives and flash cards have been marketed counting 1,000,000 bytes as one megabyte, when computers actually consider it to be 2^20 bytes, or 1,048,576 bytes. In other words, your 256 marketing MB SD card is actually about 244 real MB (less any space needed by the file system).
On PPCT we get a lot of users asking about this, confused when their device reports a capacity different than they thought they purchased. Is there anything that can be done about this? Well, somebody is trying. A class-action lawsuit has been filed by a number of computer users, seeking to force manufacturers to provide restitution, surrender any profits made by these practices, and to be more honest in packaging.
Are any computer users going to get significant money from this? It seems like the only ones to monetarily benefit from class-action lawsuits are lawyers. But it would certainly be nice if capacities had to be listed properly so buyers would know what they're getting.
