If you’ve noticed, lately there’s been a lot of buzz about Snow Leopard showing file sizes “correctly.” There’s a great article on Lifehacker by Gina Trapani which explains this in greater detail. I’ve decided to do a little comparison on the three most used OS platforms with a Sandisk 4GB USB Flash drive. Here are the screen shots:

OS X - Snow Leopard

OS X - Snow Leopard

Ubuntu Linux - Karmic Koala (Almost Beta 1)

Ubuntu Linux - Karmic Koala (Almost Beta 1)

Windows Vista

Windows Vista

If you look at Windows and OS X they each use a different method of calculating disk sizes. Windows uses base 2 and OS X just transitioned to using base 10. Although, It looks like Ubuntu Linux uses both, and has some inconsistency going on in the same window. If you look at the screen shot above, you’ll see that the volume is 4.1GB and the capacity is 3.8GB for the flash drive. It seems like this would be confusing to some people, does it not? I’m wondering if this was intended or possibly a bug. At the end of the day, some people don’t mind, don’t notice, or really just don’t care. Now that Apple is using base 10 with Snow Leopard, I’m curious to see what the future holds for operating systems and these numbering systems.