Copied out of Wikipedia article <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_network_throughput>. I am sure this is no news to most of you. I am intrigued at how a binary technology emulates SI but with a unique assortment of prefixes.
Kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, and pebi prefixes Main article: binary prefix <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix> Kibi, mebi, gibi, tebi, pebi, and exbi are binary prefix multipliers that, in 1998, were approved as a standard by the International Electrotechnical Commission <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Electrotechnical_Commission> (IEC) in an effort to eliminate the confusion that sometimes occurs between decimal (power-of-10) and binary (power-of-2) numeration terms. At present, the prefix multipliers kilo- (k or K), mega- (M), giga- (G), tera- (T), peta- (P), and exa- (E) are ambiguous. In most of the physical sciences, and when describing quantities of objects generally, these multipliers refer to powers of 10. However, when used to define data quantity in terms of bytes, they refer to powers of 2. The following table denotes the most often-used prefixes and their meanings. [A table follows that is difficult to display in e-mail.]
