Re: [Duplicity-talk] man page, bits and bytes

[duplicity-talk]

<snip>

"Mega" has always been 10^6 - even in computers.  The only exception
is in RAM capacity, where everything (inevitably) happens in powers
of 2, and first "kilo", and then "mega", and so on, became convenient
shorthand for powers of 2 that started off close to the stated power
of ten, but became more and more divergent.

If you have a clock frequency of 1MHz, that's 10^6.  If your bus
is two bytes wide, then your bandwidth is 2MB/sec.  And if you want
to know how quickly your 100MB storage device will fill up, it
helps if it's also in SI units.

Of course, the confusion has given the world some wonderful hybrid
units, such as the "floppy megabyte": "1.44MB" was actually 1,440 KiB,
or 1.47 MB or 1.41 MiB.