I used to hold on dearly to the "1024-based" view, and it's only now
that I realize that I don't actually care about it any more. I think
what happened is that internally many things care about power-of-2 sizes
for technical reasons (there are very good reason why mass storage block
sizes are always powers of 2, for example), but that has no bearing on
manipulating multiples of those things (e.g. most likely nobody/nothing
will notice/care if your HDD has a number of blocks that's prime, not
even the HDD's internal controller), and once you're far away from the
low-level details and start interacting with a human, base 10 makes
a lot more sense.
When the humans looking at it were in majority tech-versed, using
a 1024-based view to interact with humans made some sense (once you've
integrated the technical advantages of using powers of 2 at the
low-level, it feels natural to do so elsewhere as well), but it was not
really necessary since in most cases the numbers become approximate
anyway (as in the original HDD size that motivated this thread, where
various elements are glossed over, like the size of metadata).
Now, I feel compelled to go back to my code and find all those places
where I displayed k/M/G units by dividing by 1024 and change it to 1000.
Thank you, people, for this discussion.
Stefan
