use binary prefix instead of decimal SI prefix

Bug #135065 reported by Shirish Agarwal
8
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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix for guidance

description: updated
Changed in gwget2:
status: New → Triaged
Changed in gwget:
status: Unknown → New
Revision history for this message
Scott James Remnant (Canonical) (canonical-scott) wrote :

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).

Changed in gwget2:
status: Triaged → Won't Fix
Revision history for this message
abePdIta (abepdita) wrote :

Sorry for my bad English.
This is not correct: speaking about Terabytes you have a 10% error because 10TiB are 10'995'116'277'760 bytes. They're 11 and they'll be displayed as 10!
In my opinion there's more confusion when you try to put a 1.87GiB in your 2GB USB stick and you came out with no-enough-space failure.

Revision history for this message
Endolith (endolith) wrote :

Yes, the confusion is caused by using one term as if it had the meaning of another term, and is solved by using the standard prefixes.

Changed in gwget:
importance: Unknown → High
Changed in gwget:
status: New → Expired
To post a comment you must log in.
This report contains Public information  
Everyone can see this information.

Other bug subscribers

Remote bug watches

Bug watches keep track of this bug in other bug trackers.