Ubuntu has explicitly decided *not* to use the IEC prefixes.
They create user confusion by introducing a new unit, with no particular
value.
When prefixes are used, numbers are inherently being rounded - indeed,
due to the multiplicatory nature of the prefixes, they are being rounded
to factors of 1,000. The error of the difference in prefix notation
(10^3 vs. 2^10) is only 2.4%, a variance of only 0.24 on the final
rounding.
While proponents of the Binary Prefixes claim that at the point you are
dealing with Terabytes of data, this 2.4% error can be hundreds of
megabytes of data - the fact that you are attempting to display sizes in
Terabytes means you inherently don't care -- since the Terabyte rounding
itself means your answer can be out by as much as five hundred
gigabytes!
The simplest way to restore precision where it matters is to use a
smaller unit, with larger numbers. If the number of megabytes matters
to you, then you should view the size of the container as 1,048,576 MB
not as 1 TB (since if it were actually 1,400,000 MB it would still just
be 1 TB when rounded).
** Changed in: gwget2 (Ubuntu)
Status: Triaged => Won't Fix
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use binary prefix instead of decimal SI prefix
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/135065
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