Not Really a Swindle....
Heres a explanation from wikipedia.
"Hard disk drive manufacturers specify disk capacity using the SI prefixes mega-, giga- and tera-, and their abbreviations M, G and T. Byte is typically abbreviated B.
Most operating-system tools report capacity using the same abbreviations but actually use binary prefixes. For instance, the prefix mega-, which normally means 10^6 (1,000,000), in the context of data storage can mean 2^20 (1,048,576), which is nearly 5% more. Similar usage has been applied to prefixes of greater magnitude. This results in a discrepancy between the disk manufacturer's stated capacity and the apparent capacity of the drive when examined through most operating-system tools. The difference becomes even more noticeable (7%) for a gigabyte. For example, Microsoft Windows reports disk capacity both in decimal-based units to 12 or more significant digits and with binary-based units to three significant digits. Thus a disk specified by a disk manufacturer as a 30 GB disk might have its capacity reported by Windows 2000 both as "30,065,098,568 bytes" and "28.0 GB". The disk manufacturer used the SI definition of "giga", 10^9 to arrive at 30 GB; however, because the utilities provided by Windows, Mac and some Linux distributions define a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30 bytes, often referred to as a gibibyte, or GiB), the operating system reports capacity of the disk drive as (only) 28.0 GB."
See Pyrre explanation...thats better than wikipedia....good one!
. I couldn't be bothered to do the math.
