units are for values. and you should pick up reasonable units
depending on the context, not depending on the audience (IMHO).
choosing units depending on the audience is what brings in all the confusion...
1 k = 1000. Always. 1 M = 1000000. Always.
Where is the dependence on the audience?
and when talking about transfer rates e.g. from disk through modem/network
to disk, or from disk to tape for backups I have to convert from 10^6 to 2^20
and back ? sounds _very_ consistent and reasonable :-((
What a bad reader you are.
You are the one who wants to use binary units, and possibly have to convert.
I am telling you to follow the standard, where 1 MB always is 1000000 bytes.
Always.
But it seems you are fighting a losing battle.
We all know what the SI standard says. We have learned that IEEE decided to
follow the SI standard. The ATA standard follows SI. Disk manufacturers
follow SI. Now I read on a Phoenix web site:
CMOS setup in older ROM BIOSes will show drive capacity in binary megabytes.
CMOS setup in most newer ROM BIOSes will show drive capacity in decimal megabytes.
So it seems also BIOS manufacturers decide to follow the SI standard.
(And of course that is the only way to get rid of this confusion.)
I suppose it is about time to educate Linux fdisk a bit as well :-)
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