Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release (opens in new tab)

On the contrary, I feel that they are just beginning to get interested in the user experience: boot process, themes, app installation, IM integration, scanning app, etc... I have high expectations for 10.10 on this side.

Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with you there. The user experience in Ubuntu is strong and consistent. Their philosophy makes sense even for power users. Users can find the all the options they normally need and power users can dig into things to customise further.

I've never hit any of these bugs (and have been using Ubuntu full time since defecting from Fedora in '05) and most of them have very good reasons for not being fixed or are a work in progress and none of them are a user experience nightmare.

Out of curiosity, do you have another distro that you feel does a better job of this, or do you feel this is simply true for most distros?

I like how you post this comment in every Ubuntu thread. Why not sit down and fix those bugs if they bother you so much?

And then, when one of those non-technical users buys a "500GB hard drive", they'll actually be "getting" 500GB [according to their computer], instead of only 465.6. That oughta make everyone's lives a bit less anxietal.

Number one distro, maybe, but no Linux distro will ever be the number one OS.

It's not Mac, for those people.

It doesn't run Outlook or MS Office, for those people. OpenOffice is not MS Office, no matter how good it is. Anything run within wine is merely a niche within a niche.

And it doesn't run whatever is the current set of MS enterprise apps and frameworks, for those people.

Linux will be a widely used server OS and a niche desktop OS, for the foreseeable future. iPads and smart phones will obliterate the desktop market before we ever see The Year of the Linux Desktop.

That doesn't make any sense. You need to be using imperial volumes.

1 tablespoonbyte is approximately 36 bits (I just counted, with couscous, the universal measure), which makes a pintbyte is 1152 bytes- about a kilobyte, but also the number of pixels across on my screen.

It also gives us a gallonbyte - just shy of 10 kilobytes at 9216 bytes. That's even more convenient, because it's square root is 96.

Of course, having a hogsheadbyte at 442368- well, I think even you will find it difficult to argue the usefulness of finally being able to use a multiple of 442368.

Finally, we've got the tunbyte: 2322432. Nobody will ever need more than about 28% of a tunbyte of memory, so you see it scales out at just the most convenient point for us here.

Using measurements appropriate to the thing you're measuring makes far more sense than trying to standardize everything into some cludgy unuseful system just so it's "standard".

FWIW, if you're basing things on imperial, you would more likely base your measurements on useful measurements that come up frequently in the domain you're measuring - file sizes etc.

For instance, you'd probably have some unit of measurement that pretty much equates to an average mp3 file of a song - say 3MB. Call it an mp3byte... etc

Then you could say "Yeah this file upload is 10mp3bytes", and people would know what you're talking about.

Easier if you think in base 10 I guess. Computers, and many programmers, don't though.

> On the other hand base 2 should've been confusing average Joe for a long time now

Base 2 became not just confusing but seemingly 'fraudulent' when it comes to buying terabyte sized storage media. A user would expect to get 1TiB but is actually getting 1TB.

   1TB  = 1000^4 = 1000000000000B
   1TiB = 1024^4 = 1099511627776B

That is quite a bit of a difference.

Am I the only computer geek who thinks that base 10 is more logical and consistent? If a byte (1B) is considered a unit, then 1KB should be 1000B, 1MB=1000^2B, 1GB=1000^3B, 1TB=1000^4B and so on?

The physical hardware involved, rather. You can write whatever you want on the box, and you can disable as many sectors in firmware as you want. Doesn't mean that NAND flash doesn't come in power-of-two units.

Because I sometimes want to do math. Lets say I want to put 6h33m of video on a 4.7 GB DVD. What bitrate do I choose? Ah, 4.7e9*8 bit / 23580 s = 1.59 Mbit/s. Now what happens if we use powers of two? I have to type a lot more into my calculator.