Who to blame for K = 1024?

The use of the Binary Digit is natural in Information Theory, and the use of powers of two that lead to K, M... naturally stems from it. No one is to blame if not the educative system for letting students believe that counting in base 10 is always the best solution.

In the subject line, "praise" is misspelled as "blame".

The approximation that 2^10 == 10^3 is incredibly useful in many contexts. The "kilo" prefix just makes it clearer and easier to remember.

I am reminded of a movement by some government agency perhaps 15 years ago to regulate what people called a 2x4 (two-by-four). Since it wasn't exactly 2" by 4", there was some punitive-sounding regulation attempt at acting on this. This is a basic element in every wooden building, and everyone involved with buildings knows that it is not exactly two inches by four inches after planing. Fortunately, the idea did not go very far.

Let's not make our own individual confusion into some rule of law.

I find it an excellent shorthand. I don't need to use much brain juice to remember that:

2^10 ~ thousand

2^20 ~ million

2^30 ~ billion

2^32 ~ 4 billion

Is it Friday already? :-)

Its binary short hand for 2^{10/20/30/40/50/60/...} where 10 bits stands in for 3 decimal orders of magnitude.

And since 2^10 comes closest to 10^3 we get kilo.

Don't expect if you ask for 50K salary as a programmer that you'll be paid $51,200 / year :-)

Another interesting unit is the Kusec used for Wi-Fi beacons. 1 Kusec is 1024 micro-seconds and the default value is usually 100. So you end up with 102.4 milliseconds for your typical beacon interval.