Free Republic

A long-running California lawsuit over whether all megabytes and gigabytes are created equal may have reached its end on Friday. The class action lawsuit against Kodak, Sandisk, Lexar Media, and other memory card makers alleges that the defendants intentionally misrepresented the capacity of their flash memory devices by using decimal definitions, in which a megabyte is 1,000,000 bytes. The suit says a binary definition is appropriate, meaning that one megabyte equals 1,048,576 bytes and that the memory card sizes were overstated by 4 percent to 5 percent. When memory capacity was smaller, the difference didn't mean much. A decimal kilobyte,...