Re: Meg vs. MB vs. M
The audience/customer is always right. When you are trying to communicate, why not use terms that your customer understands and in the same way they use them?
In general, I agree with that philosophy. But you can't apply it here. You won't find any consensus among your customers as to exactly how to count bits and bytes. The only way to avoid confusion is to pick one convention and stick to it. But which one?
The problem is not that different people use the same words in different ways (as with Sarah's hardware and software engineers). That's true for every single word in the dictionary. The actual problem is that people don't *believe* in this ambiguity, and insist that their particular usage is "correct". If you don't do it their way, they will give you a hard time, until you show them some authority that says you're doing it the "right" way. ("My style book says that the correct usage is 'Boldly to go where no man has gone before.'") That rules out slang words like "meg". You need something official,
You can't get more official than the International System of Units (known as SI, for its French abbreviation). SI is very specific: "mega" means 1,000,000 and nothing else. The official abbreviations are M for "mega", b for "bit" and B for "byte". So it's "1 megabit (Mb)" or "1 megabyte (MB)".
I see three ways of implementing this convention. One is to translate all your numbers into decimal so you can use the familiar SI units and abbreviations. This totally gets you off the hook in terms of "correctness". However, this might be confusing to people who are used to the binary definitions of "mega" And the marketeers might feel you're low-balling their capacity claims.
The second choice (my personal preference) is to modify the SI convention in the way everybody (well, everybody outside the physical sciences) has been doing for years. Problem is that they don't do it consistently: sometimes "mega" means "1024 times 1024" and sometimes it means "1024 times 1000". So you better be explicit about what convention you're using: ("1 MB equals 1,048,576 bytes"). Come to think of it, you should probably do that even if you follow the strict SI approach ("1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes") or people will accuse you of padding your figures.
The third choice is to use the new terms and abbreviations that have been introduced to cover binary values. In this system, 1,048,576 bytes is a "mebi (Mi)". This is short for "mega-binary" and is pronounced "meh-bee". This totally covers you on the technical correctness front, but you run the risk of people making fun of you!
Resource: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/prefixes.html.
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