Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)

[Andrew Sayers]

Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-06-02 at 08:57 +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> 
>> Max Bowsher [2009-06-01 23:41 +0100]:
>>> To my mind, the power-of-2 grouping is sufficiently intrinsic to the
>>> nature of bytes, whilst the "kibi mebi gibi tebi" stuff not only sounds
>>> and looks stupid, but loses a great deal of clarity by making all of the
>>> prefixes differ only in a single syllable.
>> As far as I can see, the predominant opinion seems to be to fix "701.2
>> MB" to be "735.2 MB", not "701.2 MiB".
>>
> Agree.
> 
> That way we show a correct figure, and nobody needs learn a new unit.
> 
> It also happens to match the standard for storage and bandwidth, and is
> what other operating systems are also tending to use (thus it's more
> likely this is what packaging will use).
> 
> Scott
> 

This is perhaps a bit heretical, but how about correcting "701.2 MB" to 
"735.2 million bytes"?  As well as the heat produced by the MB/MiB 
debate in the computer community, laypeople only seem to understand 
"mega" and "giga" by mapping them to "million" and "billion".

Using the longer term meets Scott's criteria, makes Ubuntu more 
accessible, and saves us all a bunch of time explaining what a terabyte 
is when our parents start getting them.  Even in a small dialogue box, a 
size of "735.2 mln" doesn't take many more pixels.

	- Andrew