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(Seeing as this is ASKUBUNTU and not ramble ramble blogspot, the question comes at the end, I'm just laying down the foundation at the beginning, so just bear with me)

When you get into IT, you gradually get obsessive compulsive disorder. Numbers must be correct and paintings must be straight.

In Windows, when I want 1G of partition space I will tell it to use 1024MB, which in-turn becomes 1000MB. In Ubuntu, you type 1000MB, and you'll get exactly 1000MB.

The thing is, I grew up with Windows, so I seriously believed that 1024 bytes equalled 1000 bytes because of the whole binary business. You know, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc.

It only came to my attention that for all these years, SOMEONE working in Microsoft was constantly telling Windows to display the incorrect term.

When you click on a hard drive in Windows, let's say it's 320 gigabytes, it'll show up in Windows as 305GB. And for years IT diploma people above me stated, "Oh, that's just system overhead, that's why it looks smaller"

I only just figured out that this is, in fact, wrong.

Windows, for god knows how long, (I went through XP, Vista, 7, and even 8.1) is actually using Mebibytes and Gibibytes, but displaying the incorrect terms, MB and GB, which should be MiB and GiB.

320 gigabytes = 305.17578125 gibibytes <-- This is what Windows is showing.

When I first used Ubuntu 14.04, I made a swap partition of 1024MB, later finding out that Ubuntu literally gave me 1024MB of swap space, and in my OCD ways I wanted 1GB.

I redid the partitions, creating a 1GB swap space, and in return Ubuntu said that I have 953.67431640625 MiB of swap space, which is the correct size and term.

My question is, how many people using Ubuntu actually know of this?

I've looked up articles over the years, one example is how to make a ramdisk using the ramfs and tmpfs commands.

Most, if not ALL of the articles all over the internet, especially ones specializing in Linux distros, will use terms such as, "mount -t tmpfs -o size=512m tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk"

Does "512m" in that command actually equal 500MB, or has Windows ruined everything with years of being wrong, and everyone NOW has a habit of using the wrong term?

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From the results of running: man mount : The tmpfs mount options for sizing (size, nr_blocks, and nr_inodes) accept a suffix k, m or g for Ki, Mi, Gi (binary kilo, mega and giga) and can be changed on remount. Binary refers to the base-2 units, not base-10 units, e.g. 1 Ki = 1 KiB = 1,024 bytes.

This a more complete explanation of which file size units do which applications in Ubuntu use see this question: What file size units do applications on Ubuntu use? For more information about Ubuntu units policy see Ubuntu Units Policy wiki.

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    I didn't know what suffixes the command accepted, so that was a lot of help, thank you. I'm glad that Ubuntu follows the IEC and SI standards. I'd email Microsoft about it but I doubt they'd listen. Jun 28, 2014 at 6:28

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