"What? A 'megabyte' isn't a million bytes? What is a megabyte, then?"

Many people have rude awakenings around the definition of a 'megabyte' or 'gigabyte'. People will buy a 120 gigabyte hard drive, only to discover that the available storage space is 5% less than advertised. Why is this? Why do computer manufacturers confuse us with 'megs' and 'gigs'? Well, the confusion is around base 10 math (how most people think) versus base 2 math (how computers think) Mark Kyrnin explains how megabytes and gigabytes are calculated in their true base 2 form...