[Gllug] Bytes to Megabytes

[Tethys]

Julian Somers writes:

>Can anyone confirm for me a definition of a Megabyte that is correct for
>measuring volumes of traffic?

Depends on your definition of "correct". A megabyte was always 2^20 bytes.
But then, in a breathtaking display of revisionist history, mostly driven
by the marketing departments of hard drive vendors, a megabyte was redefined
to be 10^6 bytes, and 2^20 bytes was declared to be a "mebibyte", apparently
to avoid confusion with SI prefixes. In reality, all it's done is increase
the amount of confusion.

1MB is 2^20 bytes. Anything else is just marketing or pointless pedantry[1].

Tet

[1] Yes, I know. I'm normally supportive of pointless pedantry. But in
    this case, it's even exceeded the bounds of what I consider sane...
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