Units are wrong and internally inconsistent

Bug #421177 reported by Endolith
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This bug affects 1 person
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nautilus (Ubuntu)
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Bug Description

Binary package hint: nautilus

Nautilus continues to use the wrong definition for units like megabyte and gigabyte, following the broken Microsoft convention of units like MB = 1024×1024 bytes instead of the standard 1000×1000 bytes.

The power-of-two convention needlessly confuses users, contradicts the standard meaning of the prefixes, and serves no logical purpose. (It only simplifies calculations in the context of memory, which naturally comes in powers of two. For anything else, like a file manager, it just adds an extra layer of complexity.) It's inconsistent with other apps, with the way hard drives, flash drives, DVDs, and other media are measured, and even inconsistent with itself, as shown in the attached image.

A 160,041,885,696 byte hard drive should be displayed as "160.0 GB".
A 4,700,372,992 byte DVD should be displayed as "4.7 GB", and you should be able to fit 1,000 "4.7 MB" files on it.
A 328,000 byte file should be displayed as "328 kB".

Even Apple has started doing it right. (http://blog.macsales.com/1852-snow-leopard-changes-they-way-we-look-at-gigabytes-and-megabytes-and-kilobytes-as-well) This is the *file manager*. It should show file sizes using the correct, intuitive units that users expect.

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Endolith (endolith) wrote :
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