41–50 of 52 posts
I don't really care whether base-10 or base-2 is used to measure data as long as it's standard for all hardware and software.
I'm amazed at the depth Canonical are going into in order to make the user experience for Ubuntu as simple and stunning as possible. It's this kind of attention to detail is making Ubuntu the number one OS out there.
IMHO, this is the kind of attention to detail that could make Ubuntu the number one OS someday.
It's not Mac, for those people.
It doesn't run Outlook or MS Office, for those people. OpenOffice is not MS Office, no matter how good it is. Anything run within wine is merely a niche within a niche.
And it doesn't run whatever is the current set of MS enterprise apps and frameworks, for those people.
Linux will be a widely used server OS and a niche desktop OS, for the foreseeable future. iPads and smart phones will obliterate the desktop market before we ever see The Year of the Linux Desktop.
This is like the half metrication of the UK. You end up with 2 systems, and twice as much confusion. Base 2 is far more logical and useful IMHO :/ Wouldn't it be so much simpler if humans had evolved to have 16 fingers instead of 10...
Yeah I never really felt comfortable with this base 10 thing. Maybe because I believe base 2 representation is the way to express what it actually is. On the other hand base 2 should've been confusing average Joe for a long time now and the operating systems that want themselves to be average Joe understandable.
Base 2 became not just confusing but seemingly 'fraudulent' when it comes to buying terabyte sized storage media. A user would expect to get 1TiB but is actually getting 1TB.
1TB = 1000^4 = 1000000000000B
1TiB = 1024^4 = 1099511627776B
Am I the only computer geek who thinks that base 10 is more logical and consistent? If a byte (1B) is considered a unit, then 1KB should be 1000B, 1MB=1000^2B, 1GB=1000^3B, 1TB=1000^4B and so on?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I never really felt comfortable with this base 10 thing. Maybe because I believe base 2 representation is the way to express what it actually is. On the other hand base 2 should've been confusing average Joe for a long time now and the operating systems that want themselves to be average Joe understandable.
> On the other hand base 2 should've been confusing average Joe for a long time now Base 2 became not just confusing but seemingly 'fraudulent' when it comes to buying terabyte sized storage media. A user would expect to get 1TiB but is actually getting 1TB. 1TB = 1000^4 = 1000000000000B 1TiB = 1024^4 = 1099511627776B That is quite a bit of a difference. Am I the only computer geek who thinks that base 10 is more log…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And then, when one of those non-technical users buys a "500GB hard drive", they'll actually be "getting" 500GB [according to their computer], instead of only 465.6. That oughta make everyone's lives a bit less anxietal.
So, since HD manufacturers use inflated numbers the solution is for everyone else to change? Does this mean we're going to stop using base 2 for things like network speeds as well? What will users think when they have lets say a photo management program, that says that their library is 495 GB (base 2) and then they try to transfer that over to a disk that has 500 gb (base 10) available, only to find 495 doesn't fit i…
This is like the half metrication of the UK. You end up with 2 systems, and twice as much confusion. Base 2 is far more logical and useful IMHO :/ Wouldn't it be so much simpler if humans had evolved to have 16 fingers instead of 10...
Maybe it's my physics background, but I never understood the "base 2 is more logical" argument. The only time I care about file sizes is "how many files can I fit on this {DVD,external drive,iPhone}?" It's so much easier to translate GB to MB by multiplying by 1000 and vice versa.
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Compared to OS X or Windows, I'd say Ubuntu gets a lot of details wrong. The window button positioning was a recent example, but it's by no means the first. Below are some bugs that I have experienced while using 9.10 or 10.04 beta. I also noted the year they were filed. Lots of redundant fonts: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/18666 (2005) Copy-pasting text is broken in some apps. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ub…
Sorry but I have to strongly disagree with you there. The user experience in Ubuntu is strong and consistent. Their philosophy makes sense even for power users. Users can find the all the options they normally need and power users can dig into things to customise further. I've never hit any of these bugs (and have been using Ubuntu full time since defecting from Fedora in '05) and most of them have very good reasons…
It is very hard to understand how to pander to such people - but Windows is, unfortunately, a good starting point....
There are lots of problems with the ux on ubuntu that makes it problematic for a lot of people.
Snow Leopard uses base-10 units in some places, base-2 units in other places. It isn't really confusing because when I go check how much free space I have on my hard-drive I'm just looking for a rough value, it can be base-10, base-2 or just "lots", "enough" or "almost out". The same happens to files and directories, I just want to know if they are "huge", "big" or "reasonable". The problem is that the "old way" of r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe it's my physics background, but I never understood the "base 2 is more logical" argument. The only time I care about file sizes is "how many files can I fit on this {DVD,external drive,iPhone}?" It's so much easier to translate GB to MB by multiplying by 1000 and vice versa.
Easier if you think in base 10 I guess. Computers, and many programmers, don't though.