Comment Except other industries DO use G=10^9 (Score 1) 711
Coming from the digital video world, I'm entirely opposed to standardizing on using GB instead of GiB in any context. Because lots of other industries, like telecommunications and digital media, have long used the correct ^10 numbers. Come to think of it, Apple was the last company to use KB/sec for compression bitrates, and even they dropped it as of QuickTime 6 back in 2003.
When you get provisioned bandwith, you're getting ^10 numbers. And when you compress video, you're using ^10 values (so, 20 Mbps is really 20,000,000 bits per second, not 20,971,520)
It's a big pain to have to always convert between the real values and the erroneous ^2 values when figuring out how much video we can put on a disc/drive.
It will be a horrible thing to have GB mean different things in different contexts and to have to know when to do or not do the conversions.