Month: August 2006

Western Digital Settles Lawsuit Over How to Count Bytes

The Associated Press reports that Western Digital reached an agreement in late June to settle a lawsuit involving how it counts the number of bytes that its hard drives can store.

The basic problem is that OS companies like Microsoft and Apple use a binary system to count bytes, meaning a gigabyte is 1.07 billion bytes. Western Digital and most hard drive companies, however, use a decimal system so a gigabyte is 1 billion bytes.

Unlike a lot of companies, however, Western Digital apparently never bothered with a disclaimer that the actual storage space might be less than the listed capacity once installed and formatted. As part of the settlement, it will start including just such a disclaimer.

In addition, Western Digital is giving away backup and recovery software to anyone who bought a WD drive between March 22, 2001 and Feb. 15, 2006.

Of course the real winners are the idiot lawyers, Adam Gutride and Seth Safier, who brought the suit and get $500,000 from Western Digital in legal fees.

Consumers would be better off having Western Digital use that money for further research rather than handing it over to lawyers.

Source:

Western Digital Settles Capacity Dispute. Associated press, June 27, 2006.

ComicBase

With my comic book collection growing a bit out of control, I needed something to track all the issues I’ve got and, more importantly, the issues I still need. It’s not perfect, but ComicBase was the most full-featured, complete comic book collection tracking system I could find.

The main drawback with ComicBase is the price. On the one hand, they do offer a relatively low-cost ComicBase Express version for $39.95. For that price you get a fairly slick interface to the program’s database of several hundred thousand comic books, plus free database updates for a year. From my usage of it so far, the database is fairly exhaustive (a bit too exhaustive sometimes for those of us who could care less about crap like variant covers — but if that’s your thing, this is your program).

Unfortunately, the main difference between the Express and the Professional version — aside from the Professional version being $129 — is that the Express version lacks most of the export features. You have to upgrade to or buy the Professional version if you want to export your comic book collection as a text or HTML file, or transfer your collection to Pocket PC/Palm-based platforms.

I’ll probably spring for the professional version at some point just for the HTML export, but that’s a lot of extra money for such a basic feature.