short random notes about things that I see, hear and do.
I hope this will get people to think - I mean, there must be a reason why “Made in China” = cheap …
Mattel Inc. (MAT.N), the largest U.S. toy company, recalled millions more Chinese-made toys on Tuesday due to hazards from small, powerful magnets and lead paint, sending its shares down as much as 6 percent.
[Mattel recalls millions more Chinese-made toys - Yahoo! News ]
Just testing something here, so don’t bother reading on …
Travelzoo Announces 2007 Travelzoo Award Winners
Let’s see if this comes up on PR Newswire/Technorati now …
Out of memory
… but nobody seems to have noticed.
Ok, so Hitachi and Seagate both announced hard drives with sizes of 1 TB (or possibly bigger). But how can they say 1 TB when it’s not really 1 TB at all? Hard drive manufacturers have been overstating the capacity of their drives for years. They are the only people who define “1 MB” as “1 million bytes”, “1 GB” as “1 billion bytes”, etc. (see for example the small print in http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_internal_sata.pdf). I doubt that the TB drives will be any different. So what happens is that you will go and buy one of those fancy new 1 TB drives, put it in your computer, format it and then the OS will tell you that you really only have a 931 GB drive - because the OS calculates it properly - where 1 GB = 1,073,741,824 bytes.
See also this Wikipedia entry:
As of 2006, most consumer hard drives are defined by their gigabyte-range capacities. The true capacity is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most hard disk manufacturers’ definition of GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes (however, computer memory has a natural inclination towards units that are powers of 2), most computer operating systems use the 1,073,741,824 byte definition. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, especially for people from a non-technical background, as a hard disk with a capacity of 40,000,000,000 bytes would have a reported capacity of only 37.4 GB.
[ via neuerdings.com, CrunchGear & Endgadget ]
This is an extract from the actual email:
The link takes me here:
And then when you click on http://www.chasepayyourtaxes.com/united, you get:
Technorati Tags: united | mileageplus | email
