use binary prefix instead of decimal SI prefix
Bug #135065 reported by
Shirish Agarwal
This bug affects 1 person
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
gwget(2) |
Expired
|
High
|
|||
gwget2 (Ubuntu) |
Won't Fix
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Binary package hint: gwget2
gwget uses the old decimal prefix (base 10) which leaves room for ambiguity while the newer IEC standard (base2) is more accurate & consistent. Please look at http://
description: | updated |
Changed in gwget2: | |
status: | New → Triaged |
Changed in gwget: | |
status: | Unknown → New |
Changed in gwget: | |
importance: | Unknown → High |
Changed in gwget: | |
status: | New → Expired |
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Ubuntu has explicitly decided *not* to use the IEC prefixes.
They create user confusion by introducing a new unit, with no particular value.
When prefixes are used, numbers are inherently being rounded - indeed, due to the multiplicatory nature of the prefixes, they are being rounded to factors of 1,000. The error of the difference in prefix notation (10^3 vs. 2^10) is only 2.4%, a variance of only 0.24 on the final rounding.
While proponents of the Binary Prefixes claim that at the point you are dealing with Terabytes of data, this 2.4% error can be hundreds of megabytes of data - the fact that you are attempting to display sizes in Terabytes means you inherently don't care -- since the Terabyte rounding itself means your answer can be out by as much as five hundred gigabytes!
The simplest way to restore precision where it matters is to use a smaller unit, with larger numbers. If the number of megabytes matters to you, then you should view the size of the container as 1,048,576 MB not as 1 TB (since if it were actually 1,400,000 MB it would still just be 1 TB when rounded).