I am thinking that you almost need to know everyone's age who is in this discussion to have it really makes sense. I'll start by saying that I am not going to lose sleep over this, and I think it is nuts to alter SL to make it calculate things different than the way it was designed. I'd rather myself have confusion than the OS.
There are a couple of concepts going on in this discussion that are missing the point. Everyone is arguing about the definition of "giga" throughout this, and no one has looked at the definition of "byte". The reason that the way SL is now doing it is wrong, has nothing to do with "giga" and everything to do with "byte". I've worked in the computer industry for nearly 30 years, and other than disk manufacturers, no one has used based 10 because it makes no sense. The hard drive makers did the same thing that the display makers did... found a way to exaggerate the size of their product, so they did it. Display makers used to do the same thing prior to the LCD days.
So a "byte", according to the all knowing Wikipedia is, "most often consists of 8 bits in modern systems". Adding "kilo", "mega", "giga", and "tera" to "byte" yields a base 2 result, not a base 10 result. While the number of bits in a byte does vary, it is never "10", and this goes back to how computer storage is constructed. I worked in chip manufacturing plant for 5 years early in my career and it is ridiculous to even suggest that any thing in computer storage is, or has ever been, based on 10 anythings. All counting internally in computers is done in base 2. So the only conclusion I can make here is that Apple wants to match what the hard drive makers say the size of a drive is, so that is what they are doing. Since they sell drives with their systems, it may be simply a legal issue to try and avoid someone complaining legally that the space they have is now what was advertised. Whatever the reason, it is really awkward and silly for anyone that has been around computers for any length of time. If you try to count things up from bytes, it will completely get messed up every time.... can't get there from here. If you are a systems engineer putting together a storage farm for a big project, this is the kind of crap than can completely screw up project... of course I'm sure they are smart enough to figure out how to work around it.
And to respond to the reply that said the "rest of the world = microsoft"... um no. There are a lot of other companies that make computers and operating systems than microsoft. If anything, this is the kind of stunt I would expect microsoft to pull, more than Apple.
