der Mouse wrote:
| 
| Yes, I agree.  Who wants to spearhead the class-action lawsuit for
| fraud, or misleading advertising, or whatever the relevant offense is?
| It's not as if they don't *know* they're being misleading; I've even
| seen footnotes in some ads recently saying things like "based on 1MB =
| 1 million bytes", which I take as clear evidence that they *know*
| they're being misleading and that people mind.


it's really us wacky computer geeks who need to slapped in
the head. The entire rest of the world uses powers of 10.


recently the IEC decided it had enough of this wacky confusing
prefix overloading, and did what any self-respecting standards
body would have done (and should have done years ago), and came
up with and approved a set of alternate prefixes specifically
for powers of 2:

	power	Name	Abbr
	====================
	2^10	kibi	Ki
	2^20	mebi	Mi
	2^30	gibi	Gi
	2^40	tebi	Ti
	2^50	pebi	Pi
	2^60	exbi	Ei


see also:
	"technically speaking" IEEE Spectrum Aug 1999
	http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/techbeat/tb9903.htm


	--jeff