I agree. I don't care how technically correct they are if I sound like an idiot when I'm saying it.
The best I've seen is just to have the base as a subscript, like `kB_2` (2 is subscript) or `kB_10`. Though in practice I have yet to come across a situation where the difference a) matters and b) isn't clear from the context.
You're just used to the common prefixes. Kibi is not any weirder than yotta, pico, or deci. They all sound silly if you think about it - so we just don't.
No, its definitely not silly. Why make comments like this? I'll take the repercussions, but passing judgement on language by how things sound is doodoo behavior.
Not really. It's important for introduced language to sound appealing and appropriate for its use, or it will fail to catch on. If Apple has called the iPhone the gibiFon it'd have been far less likely to turn into the success it was.
Do you not remember all the people making fun of eye-phone? And all the sanitary pad memes for iPad? There were so many people who thought those were silly - they got over it with time.
Another route might be inspiration from exponential math notation. Traditional kilo/mega/giga/tera-bytes are just 2 to the power of 10, 20, 30, 40, etc.
So perhaps a terabyte could be a "bin fourty", or a "two-to-fourty", etc. (Although as it linguistically relaxes into Tootafortie, it'll sound goofy too.)
You're saying that units-of-10 in English (and using Arabic numerals) will "not work" for other languages, when the international status-quo we're complaining about is already powers-of-1000 in Greek which are then mutated with Latin?
eg. Long Kilobytes, LKB or KKB