In rec.audio.tech Arny Krueger wrote:

"Colin B." wrote in message
...
In rec.audio.tech AZ Nomad wrote:
On Wed, 11 Jan 2006 08:34:54 GMT, Colin B.
wrote:


In rec.audio.tech Pooh Bear
wrote:

I always though that it was a missed marketing opputunity that disk
drive
manufacturers didn't claim that *their* magnetic coatings could make
your
letters read better.

Nah. The drive manufacturers have other ways of lying to the public. How
much
is a megabyte again? And how big is the cache on the drive?

You think calling 1000000000 (10^9) bytes a gig is a form of lying?

Never ascribe malice to what can be just a easily explained by ignorance
and
stupidity.

Disk drive makers call 1000000 a million. Imagine that! Not 1024*1024.
They also call 1000000000 a gig, not 1024^3.

I do call that lying, given the context. Maybe you weren't paying
attention
when they made the change.

For some decades, _all_ manufactures of computer equipment used kilo and
mega
to refer to intervals of 2^10. That was a de-facto standard before 8-bit
words were standard. Hard drives were sold in megabytes, where 1MB=2^20B.
Then when people were buying hard drives based on MB/$ and availability,
one
manufacturer changed their definition of a MB--I think it was Western
Digital, but I'm not sure--to mean 1000000 bytes. Suddenly, they were
selling
drives that were about 5-7% bigger than the competitors, for the same
price!
Who wouldn't want free space? They didn't advertise it, but if you read
the
spec sheets you discovered the truth. The computer media went after them
to
find out, and they said that the marketing department recommended the
idea,
to 'avoid confusing the consumer' (by using the same units as everyone
else?
Sure!). Of course sales went up for them and down for the rest, so almost
overnight, the switch was made.

It's not ignorance or stupidity, it was clear and deliberate malice. In
the
context of the computer industry at the time, I still say it was lying.

Grab lance, mount horse, tilt at windmills.

Oh, I never claimed I was doing anything else. :-) However, Pooh Bear was
suggesting BS that the storage industry could use for marketing, and I just
wanted to point out that they already have.

It ain't a lie when the facts are well-known and readily knowable for
everybody who cares to find out the accepted conventions.

Well it's not a lie now that the conventions have changed. It was clearly a
lie when the marketing division of one company violated decades of convention
to gain an advertising advantage--especially when they expoloited it in their
sales pitch. (5% more space than competitors!)

Colin