Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)

[Christopher Chan]

Nils Kassube wrote:
> 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.
>
>   

Yeah, fine. Get this into posix or whatever. This has to be across the 
board. Not just Ubuntu only. Get this into some relevant computing 
standard related to operating systems. Then implement. Then bash all 
them chums who grew up on 1024 kilo/mega/whatever into submission.