AFAIK, nearly everything uses KiB and calls it kB unless it was specifically written not to, specifically written to conform to "KiB" standards, or if it was written by a hard drive manufacturer.
History lesson: Other than scientific "prefix purists" (not pejorative, just the best term I could think of), prior to about 15 years ago, the only serious "KiB vs kB" debate was originated by hard drive manufacturers. They began using a 10^4 kilobyte to convince a predominately 2^10 kilobyte world that their hard drives were bigger than they really were, for marketing purposes. I honestly don't remember which manufacturer started it, but Seagate often gets the bad rap for having used "unformatted" numbers on its drives way back.
I'm not making any judgment about the debate, or taking a side...just pointing out that without the hard drive manufacturers taking the lead in using "10^4" kilobytes, we'd likely still be overwhelmingly using the definition of "kilobyte = 2^10" today, and the "proper" definition would be completely marginalized.
Back to today: The usage persists today, with most software, unless specifically done so to conform to standards (especially a lot of free/open source, including GNU stuff), using the 2^10 definition. My guess is that it's easier to shift a number 10 places to the right and get kB that way. Either that, or some common APIs (possibly Win32/64) might be hard-coded to give such answers. |
