Ubuntu Policy: prefixes for multiples of units

[Neal McBurnett]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 01:57:51PM -0600, Neal McBurnett wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 08:28:36PM +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> > I'm quite happy to agree on using Giga consistently to mean 1x10^9,
> > however I was mindful of your comment that RAM manufacturers (and
> > standards!) still build in powers of two.
> > 
> > I'm not sure how desirable or worrying it is for an Ubuntu machine to
> > report 2.1GB of RAM when a user just bought 2GB, and it quite clearly
> > said 2GB on the box.
> 
> I'm just saying it should be reported as 2 GiB, as the majority of
> standards bodies suggest.  Reporting 2.1 GB is a bug.  Whether to wait
> for upstream to fix the bug, or to fix it and carry a diff, will
> depend on various other things.

Sorry - I got twisted up there while rephrasing and retyping things.

The *box* should not say 2 GB - that is a bug, but I don't usually
know where to report it :)

I'd suggest software would want to report it as 2 GiB.  Saying 2.1 GB
will probably confuse users more than saying 2 GiB, and thus may be a
bug, though the context could make a big difference in all that.

Neal McBurnett                 http://mcburnett.org/neal/
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