Bug#684128: false advertising

[<ian_bruce@fastmail.net>]

On Tue, 7 Aug 2012 14:11:05 +0200
Christian PERRIER <bubulle@debian.org> wrote:

>> So if the partitioner invites people to specify their swap space, or
>> any other volume, in units of "gigabytes", which JUST ABOUT EVERYBODY
>> understands to mean 2^30 in that context, and instead it uses the
>> hard disk manufacturers' phony units which are seven percent smaller,
>> WITHOUT EVEN TELLING YOU THIS,
> 
> I think you probably have a strange definition of "just about
> everybody". In reality, I think that just about nobody cares about
> gigabytes being 2^30, or 1000000000. This is basically splitting
> hairs, which "wishlist" perfectly fits.

    $ bc <<< "scale=6 ; (2^40) / (10^12)"
    1.099511

The difference between a binary and decimal terabyte is ten percent, or
one hundred gigabytes.

I would have thought that a lot of people would care about that, but
maybe I'm just strange.

    $ bc <<< "scale=6 ; (2^30) / (10^9)"
    1.073741

    $ bc <<< "scale=6 ; (2^20) / (10^6)"
    1.048576

Clearly the hard disk manufacturers care about differences of even five
and seven percent, or they wouldn't have been deliberately ripping
people off for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix#Legal_disputes