Pissed Off!

I just spent the past hour blogging to give you lots of useless information when the power went out. Grrrrr!!!! So I will try to give you as much useless information in as short of a space as possible this time. I was having a winge about corporate ethics (or the apparent lack thereof). Do we blindly accept what we are told to the point that they are filling our heads with so much crap that we don't see a con when it's staring us in the face?

Wow, you know there seems to be an accepted practice of truth stretching in our world. If we say an hour, we really mean over an hour. If we say a megabyte, we really mean 1 million bytes (1mb is in fact equal to 1024 bytes) Ever wondered why Windows says your 40Gb Hard Drive is only 37Gb??? Well I do feel sorry for all the suckers who bought into Dell's 1.5 Terabyte storage claim on their XPS gaming rigs. They will open up their windows disk manager only to be confronted with the disturbing truth that what they thought was 1.5Tb is in fact closer to 1.39Tb, One billion and one hundred million less bytes than they have paid for.

Sure it sounds like nit picking when its 2 or 3 Gb less on your 40Gb HDD, but we are talking in Terabytes! It suddenly starts to leave a bitter taste in your mouth. Yes folks, HDD manufacturers report the size of one mb by rounding it to the 1000, leaving 24 bytes unaccounted for. This accumulates to the point where storage space disappears at an alarming rate when the storage devices are increasing in volume. One Terabyte is one trillion bytes. Thats 24 billion bytes (or 24Gb) that are ommitted from the equation. Thats enough to fit the entire contents of the average computer user's hard disk drive. Enough music to fit on around 34 compact disks, or over 5 DVD movies or about 16,600 floppy disks...

So there you go. It's no wonder that people are confused about computer technology, when the very people they percieve to be in control of the industry misrepresent the products that they sell... I would have thought that we should aim to make computers easier to understand for the benefit of all humankind.