William ChopsWestfield wrote:

>> So whoever knew about micro knew about milli (or could and should have =

>> known), and also that 'm' was the agreed-upon abbreviation for =

>> 'milli'. Which made it pretty obvious IMO that 'm' was, even at that =

>> time, a bad choice as abbreviation for 'micro'.
> =

> Look, you're arguing about what things SHOULD be, and I'm just
> trying to deal with the way they ARE.

No. I'm not saying how they should be, I'm saying how they are. You can
turn and twist that as you want, the international standard says that 'm'
/is/ 'milli', not that it should be 'milli'. The few who don't care about
international standards just don't make enough of a difference, especially
since they don't really care about communicating themselves (if they did,
they'd use standards :)


> Do a web search for "mf capacitor."  Restrict the search to your
> favorite metric country if you want.  Check out how often it means
> micro, and how often it means milli...

Search for 'mf kondensator' and set language to German. (Restricting to a
country, e.g. '.de' domains, doesn't help much, because what you get are
English texts from .de domain sites -- with the same problem.) I didn't do
an exhaustive search, but I didn't come up with much 'micro' hits (some,
but they were generally inconsistent anyway, like one who uses both mF and
uF for microfarad on the same page). What I found though are quite a number
of 'MF's that seem to mean microfarad. I guess this means that sellers
can't necessarily be trusted to be experts in what they are selling -- they
mostly are experts in how to make money out of it. I'm not sure I want to
start basing my spec nomenclature on 'commercial literature' of this sort.

There seems to be this problem that a few programs seem to insist in
displaying the '=B5' (lower case mu) as 'm' (instead of displaying a square
or whatever is displayed when the character can't be displayed). I don't
know which ones this are; this was claimed in a previous discussion here.
Anyway, to follow this logic, one also would have to stop speaking about
milliamperes, and assume that everything 'ma' or similar is meant to be
'microampere' (since it could be a properly written mu that got wrongly
converted to an 'm'). =


If one can't sensibly distinguish (abbreviated) millifarad from microfarad,
how can one distinguish milliampere from microampere? Or, the other way
'round, if one can distinguish milliampere from microampere, why can't one
distinguish millifarad from microfarad? It is correct that capacitors in mF
ranges (or F ranges) were rare twenty (or fifty) years ago, but so were
SOIC cases. I just use them, and call them what they are. =


Gerhard

-- =

http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist