Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)

[Andrew Sayers]

That "grab a friend" experiment is one of those posts where my inner 
science geek betrays me.  I chose "kilo" and "mega" instead of "mega" 
and "giga" so that I would be less likely to skew the experiment by 
asking the same exact question twice in a row with different phrasing. 
A more robust methodology would allow for valid comparison between 
"million" and "mega"... I don't suppose you know any identical twins 
with a penchant for answering simple maths questions? ;)

When I asked my father, he understood that a kilobyte was less than a 
megabyte, which was less than a gigabyte.  But he had no idea how much 
less - he would have believed me if I said a gigabyte was 10 or 10,000 
megabytes.

I actually like your MP3 player example by the way - if I told my dad 
that his MP3 player had a capacity of 4 billion bytes, and an average 
MP3 was 4 million bytes, he'd be able to do exactly the calculation you 
described.  With MB and GB, he'll need a pencil and paper no matter how 
many times I explain it.

	- Andrew