Well, actually Megabytes really are 1000000 bytes. According to NIST, it's Mebibytes that are 2^20. Although I also prefer Megabytes meaning 2^20, it looks like NIST disagrees and that's the standard so we'll have to live with it. :-)
Maybe for you but my old digital electronics lecturer hammered into us that it was 1024*1024 (as in a million is 1000*1000 by similar means).
He even put a trick question on it in our exam :). Its a shame this was before 1998 when this new standard came out. I too initially believed it to be wrong :). To quote the referenced page:
The result is that today "everybody" does not "know" what a megabyte i
+s.
That makes me laugh so much :P. However, I think the arguments for it are valid (read the bottom half of the page) so I guess I'll have to shift my opinions somewhat.
Sorry for the off topic reply but I thought it might be a nice distraction on an otherwise ugly node.