For American numbers

[Peter Hansen]

Alan Kennedy wrote:
> [Peter Hansen]
>> For the rest of the computer world, unless I've missed
>> a changing of the guard or something, "kilo" is 1024
>> and "mega" is 1024*1024 and so forth...
> 
> Maybe you missed these?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mebibyte
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibibyte

Definitely missed them, in the sense of "didn't see them
yet".  I must say I'm somewhat astounded that anyone
bothered to do this.

Don't miss them at all, in the sense of "have no plans
to use them and am not stressed in the least over the fact
that they are lacking in my life."

> kilo-mega-giga-etc-should-be-powers-of-10-ly y'rs,

Maybe, but they aren't always... that's just the way
it is.

I take a descriptive view rather than a prescriptive one.
Google for the usage of the above and you'll find the
following ratios for the numbers of pages that use
the two forms:

kibibyte vs. kilobyte: 1:60 (impressively high, I admit)
mebibyte vs. megabyte: 1:234
gibibyte vs. gigabyte: 1:2082

I strongly suspect that the vast majority of the former
set of pages are of the form "use this instead of kilo!",
but perhaps I really have been asleep while much of the
computing world converted.

I'll be one of the last holdouts, too...  it's really not
so hard to work in powers of two if you try...

-Peter