Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)

[Nils Kassube]

Christopher Chan wrote:
> Nils Kassube wrote:
> > Christopher Chan wrote:
> >> That stupid IEC standard is at complete odds with the way
> >> computers operate. I don't want to have to miscalculate just
> >> because tools started following stupidity and gave me numbers that
> >> were rounded up or down. Take this MB/Mib nonsense and stuff it.
> >> As a system administrator, I am having NONE of it.
> >
> > Why do you refuse to learn something new?
>
> Ha! Why should I learn something that is NOT STANDARD? Yap all you
> like about IEC and whoever else but until this thing is consistent
> not only across all Linux distributions but also across other
> operating systems like the BSDs, Mac OS X, members of the UNIX family
> (Solaris, OpenSolaris, AIX) and Windows I am not having any of it.
>
>
> A bunch of academics gets together and says, no, you cannot call that
> whatever, call it crumbybyte and nobody has paid much attention for
> the last decade. Great.

The misuse of decimal prefixes for binary multiples is confusing for 
everybody who knows decimal prefixes but is not a system administrator 
or programmer. As Ubuntu wants to be a distribution for "normal users" 
the units should be used according to international standards, IMHO. As 
there seems to be no international standard which uses k/M/G/T for 
binary prefixes but there is a standard for Ki/Mi/Gi/Ti for binary 
prefixes, the latter should be used for binary units. It may be 
debatable if e.g. the disk size should be calculated in binary or 
decimal multiples, but please don't use a wrong prefix.


Nils