However, only advertising "usable size" is truthful, everything else is misleading.
It is sad that the legal system tolerates such cheating because it makes it harder to find the actual properties of the product. Or even makes it impossible to actually know how the product will actually work.
It's shockingly common nowadays to advertise things with an upper limit, rather than something like expected value. They're just saying, "we won't tell you what it is, but there's no way it's more than this". Bizarre that it seems to be effective.
Sure sounds better than "some amount of MB/s"! :D
But, the cable company doesn't disappoint -- since I can't find the price of an upgrade without calling, nor mention of upload speeds.
It’s estimated because they don’t know exactly how many tickets will be sold leading up to the next drawing. I’ve not tracked it, but the times I’ve seen, were under 1-2 percentage points. If it bothers you that they said “estimated $55M” and instead you win $54,333,187.42, is it really that bad?
If you don't know the answer, underestimate and overdeliver. Or consider whether you should be doing it in the first place.
We are talking about a state government backed lottery, not a business.
> If you don't know the answer, underestimate and overdeliver.
Make up your mind, is estimating bad or not? The example I gave isn’t the only possible outcome, some times it’s 1-2% more than quoted when more tickets were sold.
And even then, it's perfectly consistent to say that estimating is only OK if it doesn't make you look better than reality.
It's anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products. Markets can't optimise if you allow misinformation.
This overestimates support because you're vague on what the policy actually is, so everyone thinks that it's going to be their preferred variant being implemented. See: the brexit vote which got a majority vote for "yes", but in reality the none of the individual proposals got majority approval.
Brexit was only a policy question if you combined two different questions. “Should we stay in the EU?” and “What kind of foreign policy should we have?” People answering Yes to the first question also had plenty of diversity in how they wanted to answer the second question.
Yes, if you're only allowed to vote for a single option. If you're allowed to vote yes/no for each option, or rank them from best to worst, then this problem doesn't happen.
Well, you can ask your representative to represent you, right?
I live in a place with direct democracy and it's much less regulated than the UK. Therefore the link between having the ability and actually regulating more is not obvious to me.
> anti-democratic, and anti-capitalist to allow misinformation on products
Is it though? I mean, it might be bad, but I don't see how it's necessarily anti-democratic, as it has little to do with the governance model.
Otherwise, probably not wonders at all.
0 - https://news.uchicago.edu/story/us-prison-labor-programs-vio...
5%+ of missing capacity is definitely large enough for the actual expected capacity to be used for marketing.
This is also something that should find its way into smartphones. Samsung's are notorious for using significant amounts of the advertised storage for bundled marketing apps that cannot be removed.
I think the original reason for that disclaimer was due to filesystem formatting, not for the GB -> GiB discrepancy or providing less usable bytes on the block device than advertised.
It is annoying though. They should just sell it as a 15GB drive.
Sadly, this is extremely common for smartphones. 64 GB iphone, who knows what usable storage it has?
> It is sad that the legal system tolerates...
Just because it's not prosecuted doesn't mean it's not illegal.
In the sandisk case, at least from what I understand, it that 16Gb used to mean like a 17Gb module, with 1Gb used for system functions, now it's a 16Gb module with 1Gb used for system functions
Phones are actually worse in that a mere OS update can decrease the amount of free space, which is something that presumably does not happen with USB drive firmware updates.
Still, a 16GiB module would be 17 billion bytes. No need to combine different sizes. Unless you're saying a single module would have a decimal capacity?
If you take a 16GiB module and sell it as 16 billion bytes then that gives you 7% overprovisioning. Overprovisioning 10% would give you a 15.4 billion byte drive. If you want 16GiB then it's a quantitative change of how much you lose. But if you go by their promise of 16 billion bytes then it's a qualitative change that they broke the promise.
As the user I care about how much storage I can use, and how durable it is. If the storage is used by the OS it isn't helpful to me, other than the "runs iOS" feature point.
(This does get slightly complicated if the OS space changes with updates, what number is best to explain to the user in this case. It isn't entirely clear but I can ensure you that if an OS update takes 30GiB more space users aren't going to care that that storage is still in their phone)
Damn man, don't give them ideas.