> you just have to ask for 16 GiB of RAM, as per the proper definitions. If you walked in an asked for 16 "gibibytes" of RAM they would just look at you funny.

> you just have to ask for 16 GiB of RAM, as per the proper definitions. If you walked in an asked for 16 "gibibytes" of RAM they would just look at you funny. Or think you were non-native speaker. I work in the hardware software boundary, and I have never once heard someone use the term kibibyte, mebibyte, or gibibyte in real life. Occasionally I will see KiB, MiB, and GiB in an academic paper, but that's about it. When I am talking with people and they say kilobyte, they always mean 1024. Trying to pretend otherwise would just cause unneeded confusion. That's what it meant went the term was coined, that what it meant when IEC tried to change the definition 25 years ago, and (unless you are selling hard drives) that's what it means to most people today. I agree that it is unfortunate that they reused the terms from SI prefixes, since they are not SI prefixes. And if I had a time machine I would tell them to use different prefixes. But they didn't and those are the terms the world has adopted. It's also unfortunate that hard drive manufactures played fast and loose with the definition to pretend like their drives were bigger then they really were. Words are democracy, and they mean what people say they mean, not what the IEC says they should mean. > As for JEDEC, standards bodies are made of people and people are fallible. Exactly, so why is the IEC redefinition somehow more valid?