Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)

[Neal McBurnett]

On Mon, Jun 01, 2009 at 09:23:25AM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Remco [2009-06-01  5:15 +0200]:
> > I have a file here of "701.2 MB", which is "735270912 bytes". Now, if
> > it really *were* 701.2 MB, then it would be 701200000 bytes. So that's
> > clearly base 2, which should be MiB.
> 
> Indeed this is a bug which we should fix. It should say "735.3 MB".
> 
> > While that may be true, the most useful thing about base 10 is that
> > normal humans can actually understand it. We cannot calculate using a
> > binary number system. Base 2 is not useful for anything, except
> > sometimes in programming.
> 
> I'm still inclined to keep the exception for RAM size, though, since
> they consistently come in multiples of MiB/GiB. Everything else should
> use MB/GB, though.

I agree.  More details and discussion are at this ifconfig bug report,
which came to the same conclusion:

 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/net-tools/+bug/240073

Neal McBurnett                 http://neal.mcburnett.org/