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The amazing thing to us is how many people have something to say on the "issue" of what the size of your hard drive really is. We're grateful to everyone who's emailed us for sharing your views and naturally have a few replies of our own.

As you may or may not know, there's a lawsuit in California charging that the way computer manufacturers state the capacities of their products' hard drives amounts to false advertising, in effect "depriving" consumers of their full serving of megabytes. That's just plain silly, of course.

But as we stated yesterday, it's irritating -- at least to us -- that most advertising doesn't contain a line or two of fine print explaining that disk formatting takes up a certain amount of space. And yes, we did know this already (haven't been using these things for almost 20 years without learning a little). Our "9GB" SCSI drive really only offers us 8.51GB for storing data, and despite the protestations of readers who think we're over the edge on this point, we'd prefer that to be obvious to one and all from the beginning.

Yes, this is an absurdly minor point, but it affects your editor's senstive state of mind. When we contemplate a fresh drive and envision our lovely new partitions, we go by the stated capacity. The drive formatting software uses accurate figures, thereby blowing our pretty round numbers all to hell. If the formatting apps worked from the advertised sizes, the theoretical capacities of the selected partitions, our abstract framework would remain intact, shimmering brightly in the imagination, and we would never know that we'd been duped. (We also wouldn't have to futz around with a calculator to translate our original partitioning scheme into real numbers.)

What this is, is a plea for art and symmetry. A conceptual complaint, if you will. Those California lawyers are idiots, your editor a poor sensitive soul with three planets in Virgo. Maybe we should just get out more.