Ubuntu Desktop Unit Consistency (LP: #369525)

[Christopher Chan]

John McCabe-Dansted wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Christopher Chan 
> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk 
> <mailto: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?
The same as how we are currently explaining things about hard disks. I 
just say they use different standards. No, I am not going to make an 
issue unless the teacher is one that actually wants to know and learn.

>
> Preach that Microsoft is right and TDK, Verbatim, Western Digital etc. 
> are all wrong?
:-D. I don't go into that. I just say operating systems use 1024 and 
hardware use 1000. Tada.

>
> 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.

Yeah, just as you don't care what Redhat, Sun Microsystems/Oracle, and 
Apple do. Oh, oh, and HP and IBM too.

>  
> 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).
>


Nah, they won't be scared by the GiB. It is just that GiB won't meet the 
wants of certain ones here. All in favour of the 1000 kB/MB/GB/TB? 1+