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1. Comment - Creative settles over MP3 player capacities

   (May 2, 2008 - 5:37 AM)

   No, the problem is simply that hard drive manufacturers (and companies using those hard drives in their products) use the not-used-by-anybody-in-real-life definition of "1GB=1000000000 bytes" (not even Windows itself uses it), while everybody else expects "1GB=1073741824 bytes", as would be logical to expect when dealing with a hardware which "thinks" in binary. So when somebody buys a hard disk which says "500GB", he will get - even though correct when using SI units nobody cares about in real life - about 34GB less than he expects to get (_before_ formatting, even less after formatting). There's a reason nobody uses that artifical definition of GB, reality does not fit to it. Just think of memory sticks, where so far nobody (not even advertising) uses the SI units. Simply because the memory sticks always come in these 2^x sizes, for technical reasons, and so each ad for a computer with 4GB memory would have to state "computer with 4.294967296 GB of RAM". Initially, some hard drive manufacturers opted for the 1GB=1000000000 bytes" thing because it made their hard drives look bigger than they actually were, but by now all hard drive manufacturers have jumped onto the bandwagon, so the advantage is gone and they might just as well use the more suitable for real life numbers again.