[Thunar-dev] Thunar shows wrong size

[Stefan Stuhr]

lør, 24 01 2009 kl. 14:53 +0100, skrev Preben Randhol:
> On Sat, 24 Jan 2009 13:22:50 +0100
> Nick Schermer <nickschermer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > http://foo-projects.org/pipermail/thunar-dev/2006-January/001838.html
> > 
> > Discussion continues in feb 2006.
> 
> I don't find this discussion relevant. What I'm saying is that one
> should show file sizes based on base 10 and not base 2 for the users
> sake. When a user wants to buy a new harddisk and have to choose between
> 750 GB or 1 TB it makes a difference whether one calculate using the SI
> system or not. The difference between 1 TB and 1 TiB is 7% capacity and
> it will only get worse. As all harddisks are in GB I don't see why
> Thunar should use GiB and label it as GB. I don't want Thunar to write
> GiB, but rather to give the correct GB size based on the SI system.
> This makes it easier for us users to calculate what size of harddisk we
> need to expand our system with.

The fact is that the de facto standard in software is to use base 2.
Just as harddisk producents have a long history of using base 10, in
software there's a long (longer?) history of using base 2.

This situation is far from ideal, kilo is 1000, not 1024, but kibibyte,
while perhaps more correct, feels more like a stopgap solution to me.

Sure, Thunar could use base 10, but that would not help with the
confusion, making Thunar inconsistent in this from pretty much every
other piece of software on users systems.

Stefan