They put the Class in Class Action

Tired of seeing the little guy get ripped off, some brave class action lawyers have stepped up to protect the binary impaired. At a fee of only $900K (that's decimal), they have acquired coupons -- yes, real, bona fide coupons -- for fools who bought 40GB MP3 players, having been defrauded into thinking they were 40 GB.

The fraud allegation hinged mainly on two different definitions of gigabyte. According to the decimal definition (the only one I knew until today), a gigabyte is 1 billion (10⁹) bytes. According to the binary definition, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (2³⁰) bytes. While Creative used the decimal definition in its advertising, the settlement says, "certain computer operating systems report hard drive capacity using a binary definition." On those systems, a 20GB Creative Zen player would register as only 18.6GB or so, about 7 percent less than advertised.

Glad they cleared that one up. Those people really got ripped off!

Hat-tip: Galley Slaves. Jonathan V. Last points to a comment:

Just goes to show, there are only 10 types of people that understand binary. Those who do, and those who don't.

Posted by jk at May 12, 2008 7:26 PM