Re: [PATCH] Display binary prefix filesizes instead of decimal prefix filesizes (344296)

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2006-06-20 at 15:24 +0200, Raphael Bosshard wrote:
> > For what its worth I very much agree with Patrick. The binary prefixes
> > are silly and nobody but anal-retentive ultra-geeks will understand
> > them, thus confusing the general userbase (who haven't seen them
> > before).
> 
> Well, that's strange. I never considered myself a "anal-retentive
> ultra-geek". And I certainly never thought that my sister would fit into
> the category of "anal-retentive ultra-geeks". And yet she was the one
> who brought up the topic when we upgraded her computer with a new hard
> disk last week. The disk was labeled "250 Gigabyte". Yet when we
> installed it,"only" 238 Gigabytes were available. I explained her that
> the disk manufacturer interpreted the term "Giga" in a other way then
> the software manufacturer. Being an "anal-retentive ultra-geek", she was
> bothered by this.
> 
> My sister is by no means a technical person. But to her european
> decimalised mind "Kilo" means "a thousand" and not "a thousand and
> twenty four", just in the way that "Mega" means "a million" and not "one
> million four hundred forty nine thousand six hundred sixteen".

I'm well aware of the problems with 1000/1024 multipliers. However,
consider your sisters case if we used 238 gibibyte instead of 238
gigabyte. 
1) We'd still show 238 instead of 250 which is listed which would cause
your sister to wonder where the space went. 
2) There would be a strange acronym in the UI that she had never seen
before and didn't match what is commonly in use in ads, docs, hardware
specifications etc.

Its unfortunately true that terms like gigabyte and megabyte are very
widespread and in active use by people who don't really know exactly
what they mean. Changing this use is slow and hard.

> It doesn't bother me, mind you. I know that in IT "Giga" doesn't mean
> "Giga". But I always thought that only "anal-retentive ultra-geeks" know
> that and I recently noticed it confuses the the general userbase (who
> haven't heard of that before).
> 
> The strange thing is that almost everyone seems to agree (even Patrick)
> that binary prefixes are a good Idea. However; everyone seems to wait
> with the adaption of binary prefixes until everyone around has adapted
> them. Funny thing.

This is almost always the case with such large (in terms of number of
places/organizations it has to be changed) changes. I think its partly
because the net gain of doing the change isn't really that large.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a one-legged soccer-playing rock star who hangs with the wrong crowd. 
She's a plucky goth nun from Mars. They fight crime!