<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Christopher Chan <<a href="mailto:christopher.chan@bradbury.edu.hk">christopher.chan@bradbury.edu.hk</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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.</blockquote><div> 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). </div></div>-- John C. McCabe-Dansted PhD Student University of Western Australia