I was just reading a post relating to the size of a megabyte, whether it was 1000*1000 or 1024*1024. I saw that some people started to refer to things as MiB rather than MB. MB being 10^6 and MiB being 2^20. I went and searched on google for information relating to it and found a site which said things like a mebibyte (MiB) is 2^20, gibibyte (GiB) is 2^30 and a megabyte (MB) is 10^6 and a gigabyte (GB) is 10^9. Now im confused in relation to the whole system. 1. What is the standard for measuring stuff? 2. Which should be used? 3. Which do you use? 4. Which do you agree with, using 2^x or 10^x. 5. Should we refer to 1024 bytes as being a kibit, or kilobit. 6. What the hell is going on??? 7. Also not related, what is the standard for the difference in people refering to bits and bytes, MB being a million bytes, does Mb with a lowercase b mean that it is in bits? Thanks for any help.

1: This is the problem, Hard drives are measured in giga, when the rest of the computing world uses gibi. The trouble is, almost no-one uses the proper -bi prefixes because they are new. So people say giga, and mean gibi when talking about anything other than the size of their hard drive.

Consistency is the important thing. Back in the old days, when applied to bytes, the prefixes always meant powers-of-two. Then people started using them to describe powers-of-ten in some situations. As a result, we have confusion. I have no problem with using the old prefixes for powers-of-two, as long as we are consistent.

7: Yes. This is the norm when referring to data transfer (kbps). Partly an example of manufacturers making their product sound better, but mainly because there is no dispute on the size of a bit, whereas a byte is a platform-dependent measurement.