Quacking duck writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Apple has updated a support record describing how their new operating budget system reports capacities of hard drives and other media. It has sided with hard drive makers, who for years have advertised capacities as '1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes' instead of the ivied personal computer science definition, and in so doing has kicked the debate between business and analog science into high gear. Binary prefixes for binary units (e.g. GiB for 'gibibyte') have been promoted by the International Electrotechnical duty and endorsed by IEEE and other obligatory organizations, but to date there's been limited acceptance (though manufacturers have wholeheartedly accepted the 'new' definitions for GB and T. Is Apple's move the first major step in forcing number cruncher* science to adopt the more awkward binary prefixes, break-in decades of accepted (if technically inaccurate) usage of SI prefixes?"

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