Also, I recently discovered that despite my moans in the past, if you wanted to be a real pedant then the disc/disk manufacturers are correct – 1024 bytes are apparently 1 kibibyte, 1024 kibibyte are a mebibyte and so on. http://www.iec.ch/zone/si/si_bytes.htm explains it far better than I can.

Mind you, its a bit like the hacker vs. cracker terminology debate – it doesn’t matter how many people you tell that hackers are good people who write code for companies, and crackers are often evil, a tiny proportion of people use the phrases in that way…

Also, don’t forget that actually formatting a disk, be it floppy/optical or hard drive, will always ‘lose’ some more capacity, as the overheads from FAT/NTFS/etc. etc. (and other necessary parts like MBR in some cases) have to be taken into account.