[USMA:27975] RE: Binary prefixes--not strictly and SI topic

[Chimpsarecute]

If the suit is silly wouldn't that be for a court to decide?  But if the court decides not to throw it out then it must have some merit.    Sometimes you have to light a fire under someone's backside to get changes to be effected.     I'd still be curious to see if such a suit is still going to proceed and if it does what outcome will result.  Hopefully one that will  force the industry to either choose binary or decimal prefixes or both for their products, but not a mixture of both.  As in the case of the 90 mm floppy disk.   Euric ----- Original Message ----- From: Bill Potts To: U.S. Metric Association Sent: Thursday, 2003-12-25 13:09 Subject: [USMA:27974] RE: Binary prefixes--not strictly and SI topic That would seem to be a rather silly suit, in that disk drives don't come in small capacity increments anyway. The choice isn't between, for example, 21 and 22 gigabytes. More typically, it's between 20 and 32 or something like that. If, in estimating the eventual size of a database (for example), someone doesn't allow an extremely large margin of error, s/he's fooling her/himself.    Historically, too, disk capacities have been stated in kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes (based, in other words, on powers of 10). If a specification is actually gibibytes (but incorrectly labeled as gigabytes), the manufacturer is understating the capacity, rather than overstating it (e.g., 20 gibibytes is more than 20 gigabytes).   In addition to all that, the full specification of a disk drive usually shows the total number of bytes, without any prefixes. Any supplier or manufacturer who is bidding on a contract should be required, by the potential customer, to provide a full specification. Someone buying a single drive or a few drives, retail, is only going by a recommended approximation.   Finally, the competition among drive manufacturers is for real capacity, not perceived capacity.   As an aside, I don't think anyone would get anywhere suing a car manufacturer because his nominally 2.7 L car only had an engine capacity of 2.69 L. Bill Potts, CMS Roseville, CA http://metric1.org [SI Navigator]