&gt; <i>Consistency trumps correctness.</i><p>Then why does computing need a special case and redefine standard prefixes? A kilosomething is <i>always</i> 1000 something. (Unless it&#x27;s reported by Microsoft Windows, apparently.)<p>&gt; <i>Until hard-drive manufacturers started trying to deceptively market smaller drives with larger sounding base-ten capacities, everything in computer-land was base-2 and things were simple.</i><p>Ah yes, like the IBM 53FD, a &quot;1.2 MB&quot; floppy that had 1200x1024 byte storage?<p>That was in 1977, by the way. All later floppies also didn&#x27;t adhere to the arbitrary prefix redefinition. Nor did hard disks. Nor optical disks. Nor do USB sticks. Nor do bandwidths. Nor do SSDs. RAM incidentally does, but only because it naturally happens to have power-of-twos capacities. NVRAMs probably won&#x27;t.<p>What kind of &quot;consistency&quot; are you trying to defend by pretending that kilo=1024?<p>&gt; <i>How is this a step forwards?</i><p>Once everyone unfucks themselves and we use binary IEC and metric SI prefixes like we should, everything will be <i>less</i> ambiguous than <i>at any arbitrary point in the past 50 years</i>.