Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)

[John McCabe-Dansted]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Christopher Chan <
christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:

> Besides, I have already made clear in later posts in this thread that I
> really do not care what is used so long as it is uniform across all
> operating systems. If Ubuntu wants to do its thing while other operating
> systems keep convention, be my guest. You bet that I, for one, will not
> be installing it anywhere on school campus because the school has more
> important things to do than preach Ubuntu is right and all other
> operating systems are wrong which is why you have different numbers for
> GB on Ubuntu and XP, Solaris and Mac OS X and I will not risk looking
> like a fool or an Ubuntu/Linux fundamentalist for something the school
> may or may not care about.


Opinion noted.

But how will you explain that you can't burn a 4.5GB file onto 4.7GB DVD?

Preach that Microsoft is right and TDK, Verbatim, Western Digital etc. are
all wrong?

For my myself I don't much care what Microsoft does. But I do have to read
hardware labels, and the DVD example caught me. At first I thought k3b was
being ultra-conservative in case it needed an absurdly large 200MiB index
for some reason.  YMMV.

I do broadly agree that it would be best to discuss this with other OS
vendors, or at least other OSS vendors, before making such a change.
However, my hunch would be that users wouldn't be too scared by "GiB". I'd
imagine at first that they would see GiB where they expect GB and figure
they look much the same, so they probably mean something similar. But maybe
it would still provide a useful clue as to why they can't fit 4.5 GiB file
onto a 4.7GB disk. We'd really have to test this on real users though to be
sure (and this test may be relevant to the other vendors and standards
bodies too).

-- 
John C. McCabe-Dansted
PhD Student
University of Western Australia
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/attachments/20090610/258bb5e8/attachment.html>