A recent television advertisement for the Apple PowerMac G5 claimed it was "the world's fastest, most powerful personal computer". However, if you missed it, you may not see it again. Following complaints from viewers, the Independent Television Commission has ruled that the ad was misleading and that "it should not be re-shown in its current form". Apple isn't required to show equivalent ads to correct the misleading impression it has spent vast sums creating, but it is better than nothing.
I just hope the sight of a watchdog taking action doesn't make you think you can believe what is said in other computer advertisements, or editorials. There are lots of "factual" statements that could be considered misleading.
Most of us are familiar with this sort of thing from computer monitors. If you buy a 17-inch model, that's probably the size of the cathode ray tube, measured diagonally. You'll be lucky if the viewable picture area is 16in. Sometimes, there isn't much practical difference between a 17in CRT and a 15in LCD.
Hard drive manufacturers are worse. They almost always quote their storage as a multiple of 10, whereas computers store data in multiples of two. It's the difference between decimal units - where k stands for 10 cubed or 1,000 - and binary computer units, where K stands for 2 to the power of 10, or 1,024.
A hard drive that claims to store 40GB of data actually stores 37.35GB, and a "160GB drive" probably stores about 149GB.
It is true to say that such a drive stores 160 billion bytes of data. To say the same drive stores 160GB of data is just a lie, but everybody does it.
Mobile phone suppliers also seem to lack a clue about the difference between decimal and binary numbers. A mobile phone screen, for example, may display 64K of colours, which is 65,536 colours, or roughly 65k. To refer to this as 65K colour is not just wrong, it's nonsense. If they described it as 16-bit colour, it would at least help the PC users who often have the choice of setting their monitors to use 8-bits (256 colours), 16-bits, and 24- or 32-bits to get 16.7 million colours.
(In case you didn't know, 32-bit colour only uses 24-bits, but it is handier to have the three bytes of data lined up in four-byte format.)
Networking and communications are also awash with misleading numbers. Ethernet networks nominally run at 10 megabits per second: the real-world speed is more like 4.5mbps. This is also true of Wi-Fi wireless Ethernet links. Indeed, users are now being sold 802.11g wireless with a claimed speed of 54Mbps, but given the usual problems of obstructions (such as walls), the fall-off with distance and losses to encryption, they'll be lucky to get 15Mbps.
Of course, if you are using Wi-Fi to talk to a 512K ADSL internet connection, it really doesn't matter whether your wireless card can send data at 4.5Mbps, 54Mbps or 100Gbps. Only 0.5Mbps is going anywhere.
Apple ruling
www.itc.org.uk
