krw wrote in
t:

Likewise for hard disks, where the size is often reported as
unformatted, which is completely useless, of course. Then depending
on what file system it is formatted in (NTFS for example) you get a
big chunk devoted to the file system and not available for your
stuff.

No, there is no difference between formatted and unformatted disk
size (unformatted disk drives don't exist in the wild). The issue is
that disks are sold by the decimal megabyte (10^6 bytes) rather than
binary "megabytes" (2^16 bytes) as memory is.


hmmm, OK. But the consumer sees 300GB and gets 286GB, less is less
whatever the reason.


Same thing could be said for FSB (front side bus) speeds and the
like.

What "same thing"?


Same thing = putting forth 'good' numbers that are not really a true
indication of what you are getting.


Once consumers became more computer literate and learned what
'numbers' to shop for, manufactures built machines that 'looked'
good.

Celeron. Need I say more?

Celerons aren't horrible anymore, unlike the original.


Because people stopped buying them. Those old Celeron had some very
impressive MHz ratings, but ran like molasses. Same thing.


So in this case I don't blame wally world.

Of course not. WallyWorld doesn't know any more about computers than
the average reader of these groups. ;-)

Hence the point, consumers learned just enough about the 'number' game
and advertisers took advantage of that limited knowledge to sell what
looked like impressive machines cheaply.

Old saying still applies: You get what you pay for (no matter how pretty
the package.)

YMMV