Uhhh I've done that with with almost every Amiga and Mac install I've used. Please tell me this isn't unusual when it comes to Linux...

> So we've had a defined standard that was, arguably, not the easiest to understand.

> THEN harddrive manufacturers started their fraud. And THEN people started complaining.

> So what, and please think about this, would be the right decision here?

As far back as I know, and this goes back before the 1970s, C.Sci boffins picked up a defined pseudostandard (that 1024 was close though to 1000 to use K, etc) for concepts that required *only* direct binary addressibility like RAM and CPU registers/caches, and all else used a base 10 definition of K right from the start - that includes tape drive storage, hard drive storage, bandwidth rates, CPU frequencies, display frequencies, screen resolution, sampling rates and so on.

The idea that 1K = 1024 for "everything in a computer" is relatively new. The old guard knew exactly when it was appropriate to use, and did not use it for concepts outside that domain. It's only since the mid 1990s that geek kids fresh out of school want to use it everywhere. Hell, go into a geek IRC channel (usually a bastion of relatively conservative C.Sci geeks) and ask how many Hertz in a 1GHz processor, and a fair number will insist it's 1073741824Hz, or that 10Mbps ethernet is 10485760bps. They'd be wrong, too.

I expect it's a metal related to these, http://www.indium.com/TIM/solutions/liquidmetal.php which are used as thermal interface materials in machines like Apple's 8 core Mac Pros. The heatsinks on those are wetted with a little of the liquid metal in place of stuff like arctic silver. While working on Mac Pros I found it's like mercury, but sticks to the processor heatspreader and heatsink base. It's liquid even in a cold room. There's toxicity info on that site somewhere, but I'm in a rush at the moment. No doubt someone else will find it and post.