Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)

[Chan Chung Hang Christopher]

Derek Broughton wrote:
> Max Bowsher wrote:
>
>   
>> Chan Chung Hang Christopher wrote:
>>     
>>> Benjamin Drung wrote:
>>>       
>>>> On Mon Jun 1 04:15:19 BST 2009 Remco wrote:
>>>>   
>>>>         
>>>>> 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.
>>>>>     
>>>>>           
>>>> That is what the bug report is about. Using MiB for values, wich are
>>>> base 2.
>>>>
>>>> So is there anybody who wants to keep the old confusing behaviour?
>>>>
>>>>   
>>>>         
>>> /me raises hand.
>>>       
>> Ditto.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>     
> How can _explicitly_ naming units be less clear than making people guess 
> whether units are 10**2 or 2**10?
>   
I don't know...like I only found out that there is this thing called 
kibi, mebi, gibi, etc?

> I've argued with Christopher about this before, and don't want to continue 
> it here, but I really think it's hypocritical for a distribution based on 
> _standards_ to ignore the fact that we _have_ standards for this, simply 
> because real geeks count in binary.
>   
Yada yada bitrates. Hey, I did submit in a post in this thread that I 
was wrong and that network equipment/bandwidths actually go by  base10 
whateverbits.

> As for "stupid", "kibi" only looks or sounds stupid to people who've never 
> used the units.  To the average user, "kilobytes" is equally stupid.
>   

Dunno, never seemed to be a problem with all those users I taught in 
Windows classes before.


Posting in a local Linux newsgroup this kibi,megi,gibi nonsense drew 
blanks. Nobody knew what I was talking about. Don't you love standards 
that are not known to exist?


Anyway, I will join you chums in kowtowing to the users and unheard of 
standards...once this across the board. How nice it would be to scp a 
file over and get a different size report. Get this into POSIX or 
something or be the oddball.