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Yet Another True Story About Stupid Studies:

Posted 3:44 PM

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A group of [idiot] computer owners has filed a lawsuit against some of the world's biggest makers of personal computers [deep, deep pockets], claiming that their advertising deceptively overstates the true capacity of their hard drives. [Were these morons actually able to read advertising? Note they're referred to as owners not users]

The lawsuit, which seeks class action status [which means only LAWYERS get money], was filed earlier this week in Los Angeles Superior Court against Apple Computer Inc., Dell Inc., Gateway Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Sharp Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. The lawsuit brought by Los Angeles residents Lanchau Dan, Adam Selkowitz, Tim Swan and John Zahabian [straw men] centers around the way that computer hard drives are described by manufacturers. [b.s. - it centers around the way clever fat bastard lawyers find niggling ways to extract huge settlements] Representatives of the eight defendants were [sadly astonished by the gall] not immediately available to comment.

According to the lawsuit, computer hard drive capacities are described in promotional material in decimal notation, but the computer reads and writes data to the drives in a binary system. [And that's because almost everyone who ever learned anything about computers knows that a kilobyte is not 1,000 bytes, it is 1024 bytes. A Megabyte is NOT 1,000,000 bytes, it is 1024 kilobytes (1024 X 1024=1,048,576 bytes). Finally, a Gigabyte is not 1,000 Megabytes, it is 1,024 Megabytes. (1024 X 1,048,576=1,073,741,800 bytes). We, users and manufacturers alike, just find it easier to pretend its a round 1,000,000,000.]

The result is that a hard drive described as being 20 gigabytes would actually have only 18.6 gigabytes of readable capacity, the lawsuit said. [Yes, this is true. Its also a convention, universally accepted by users since the dawn of computation.] The plaintiffs said [No, some lawyer thought this up, and said...] this difference in convention is deceptive and leaves buyers with less storage than they thought [less money than the lawyers could have] they were getting when they purchased their computers. [Well, yeah, and a year doesn't really have exactly 365 days in it, so I'm not really as old (or is it young?) as I think I am. Hey, maybe I'll file a class action suit against the Roman Catholic Church! I mean, gall-durned it, the Gregorian Calendar is another lie foisted upon us by those pedophiles! And how come I can't check in until 6PM and have to be out by 11 AM and I PAY for a DAY??? Watch out Marriot, Hyatt, Hilton, Best Western, Motel Six, and especially you, Tom Bodett! And then I'm going after the Motion Picture Association of America! That video was NOT resized to fit MY TV. They don't even know what TV I have!!!]

For example, say the plaintiffs, when a consumer buys what he thinks is a 150 gigabyte hard drive [he should know enough about computers to understand what this means], the plaintiffs said, he actually gets only 140 gigabytes of storage space. That missing 10 gigabytes, they claim, could store an extra 2,000 digitized songs [pirated] or 20,000 [kiddie porn] pictures. The lawsuit asks for an injunction against the purportedly unfair marketing practices, an order requiring the defendants to disclose their practices to the public, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten profits and attorneys' fees."

Oh, yes. That's what I want to see. Hard drives advertised as 1.0737418e09 bytes.

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