Gear

Tebi Vs. Tera Battle To Eternally Recur?

What’s a few kilobytes between friends? A massive class-action lawsuit, is what. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, if you count up the traditional byte multiples from 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on. But a megabyte is also only 1,000,000 bytes, if you decide that decimals will do.

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What's a few kilobytes between friends? A massive class-action lawsuit, is what.

A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, if you count up the traditional byte multiples from 2, 4, 8, 16 and so on. But a megabyte is also only 1,000,000 bytes, if you decide that decimals will do.

The people who sell hard drives love decimals, but the people who buy them don't. On Friday, the matter will be decided once and for all in court. From News.com:

"The class action lawsuit against Kodak, Sandisk, Lexar Media, and other memory card makers alleges that the defendants intentionally misrepresented the capacity of their flash memory devices by using decimal definitions, in which a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. The suit says a binary definition is appropriate, meaning that one megabyte equals 1,048,576 bytes and that the memory card sizes were overstated by 4 percent to 5 percent."

If it seems silly, remember that with each generation, the gap widens markedly. The difference between a binary Terabyte and a decimal
Terabyte is almost 100 Gigabytes. As a result, the larger of the two gets a new name, Tebibyte — who are engineers to tell marketing departments what words to use, anyway?

Gigabytes vs. gibibytes class action suit nears end [News]