This has been making me think for a while...
I'm curious why a large number of people on the cpcwiki commonly use ys for microseconds instead of us. I've never seen that used anywhere except here. Most datasheets and documentation use us, a few datasheets use µs. Only here have I ever seen ys used, but it's actually really common here, maybe half ys and half us.
I know it looks typographically closer to µs and I can understand that a Greek speaker might see a u and read it as Y and type y instead (especially as upsilon on a Greek keyboard is where most countries have Y on their keyboards). But actually, most of the use of ys and us here seems to come from English or German native speakers. And I'd have thought Germans would all use µs as they all have it on their keyboards anyway and most English people would use us as that's what most of the English speaking scientific community would write (as far as I'm aware).
Just to throw in more confusion, the SI abbreviations for both millisecond and microsecond are actually both ms, so both us and ys are technically wrong! :o And ys is actually yoctoseconds (10^-24), whereas at least us isn't officially defined!
So, basically I'm just wondering if ys is actually commonly used by people outside of cpcwiki, and if so is it particular nationalities and why...
I use µs... Not right?
I mostly use us on UK keyboard, and µs on FR keyboard
Quote from: Devilmarkus on 13:15, 09 November 13
I use µs... Not right?
No, that's the only genuinely correct abbreviation! But µs does seem to be far less common than us in a lot of datasheets (probably the older ones) and when people are typing it (for the internet rather for print).
Quote from: gerald on 13:37, 09 November 13
I mostly use us on UK keyboard, and µs on FR keyboard
Interesting... is that just personal preference or does the French keyboard also have altgr-m like the German keyboard which makes it easy to type? My Windows PC doesn't have it in the UK layout, but my Linux PC does! :)
µs seems to be the only correct abbrieviation as ys for yoctoseconds regarding normalised prefixes.us is surely used for keyboards that down own µ symbol.
For easy comparaison, call this a nop or a CRTC char as they have the same value on our CPC =)
Quote from: ralferoo on 13:51, 09 November 13
Interesting... is that just personal preference or does the French keyboard also have altgr-m like the German keyboard which makes it easy to type? My Windows PC doesn't have it in the UK layout, but my Linux PC does! :)
µ is available as a regular key on French keyboard, so not using it is just laziness !
Then I mostly work with UK/US keyboard, using us seems a natural/good replacement. And datasheets mostly use it as well when not using µs.
Quote from: fano on 14:15, 09 November 13
us stands for nanoseconds
:o
did I read your n upside down ?
Quote from: gerald on 14:26, 09 November 13
:o
did I read your n upside down ?
Surely , my bad , i've been too fast ;D
Quote
For easy comparaison, call this a nop or a CRTC char as they have the same value on our CPC =)
Oh, I'd always prefer to call it 2us or 2µs as it's time that I'm measuring and its appropriate to use microseconds. I was just curious as to where the ys thing came from and whether it was cultural.
Personally, I hate labelling things as e.g. "2 NOPs" as IMHO it hinders understanding of what's actually going on. There's nothing inherently special about a NOP on the Z80 (well actually there is in that it's deliberately assigned an unused opcode point rather than just using any of the "LD r,r" that are implicitly no-op - 40, 49, 52, 5B, 64,6D, 7F). If you start thinking that instruction times are actually defined in multiples of the time for a NOP, then you will be surprised when exceptions happen. As an aside, I've also worked on CPUs where NOPs aren't necessarily the quickest instruction... ;)
nop is used for simplicity as reference too but obviously it is very CPC specific as ,due to the CPC hardware design, all Z80 instructions timing are multiples of 1µs.1 CPC nop is really equal to 1µs or 1 CRTC char, no doubt about this.
"nop" is very used in french scene to mean an µs.
Quote from: fano on 14:52, 09 November 13
due to the CPC hardware design, all Z80 instructions timing are multiples of 1µs
But this is not true. This mistaken belief is exactly why emulators designed around such a belief have to have special cases when dealing with interrupts.
I always type µf / µs etc but can you give us a link to a thread that used y? I've never seen it used here.
Bryce.
Hmmm. I've just been looking, and now the only posts I can find are TFM's, e.g. 32-character-width screen mode (http://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/programming/32-character-width-screen-mode/msg70402/#msg70402) so it clearly isn't anywhere near as common as I thought.
But I'm sure I've seen ys used here several times and each time I've thought "Hmmm, wonder why ys not us" but now I come to look, it does seem to be either TFM or people who've quoted him.
I'm still "pretty sure" that I've seen it in other people's posts too, which is why I assumed it was a cultural thing. Obviously not and I can stop wondering about it... :)
Glad we were able to clear that one up for you :)
Bryce.
Μμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμ!!!!
(surprised that French keyboards have a key with it! Vive la Grece!)
Quote from: Gryzor on 20:11, 09 November 13
Μμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμμ!!!!
(surprised that French keyboards have a key with it! Vive la Grece!)
As on every AZERTY CPCs :P
But I am wondering when this symbol appeared as its only use is as micro symbol (no french words use it)
German keyboards have it too: Alt-Gr + M
Bryce.
Behold, the power of μ. (well, in Greek it means something else entirely... ;D )
I feel like I'm raining on someones party here because I used to do tests on water quality and was using "µs" to represent microsiemens of the water and several websites seem reflect that, so I'm unsure if Microseconds is the same thing. :-[ EDIT: It's looking like that those terms share the same symbol at least with this site (http://www.convertunits.com/info/microsecond), their using "us" to represent Microseconds
Just to be completely pedantic about it (I like doing that somethings :) ). ys is the official abbreviation for a yoctosecond ie: 1ys = 0.000000000000000000000001s whereas a microsecond 1µs = 0.000001s
Bryce.
Where on earth is it used? :D
Quantum / Atomic Physics - Decay times and other states / transistions that don't hang about that long :)
Bryce.
You Scientists with your hubris, you will ultimately feel the wrath.
Quote from: ralferoo on 15:14, 09 November 13
But this is not true. This mistaken belief is exactly why emulators designed around such a belief have to have special cases when dealing with interrupts.
Sure , i remember reading something about interrupts (can not remember where) but i thought that was a very specific case.Do you have an example about time shifting ? that could be interesting to see an instruction shifted with less than 1 µs.
Quote from: Gryzor on 10:52, 11 November 13You Scientists with your hubris, you will ultimately feel the wrath.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Now excuse me, there's a storm coming, and I have to go back to the graveyard to dig up some fresh bodies to finish my newest creation.
Speakers of German preferring anything other than µ can be explained quite easily. Since the dawn of computing when ASCII was established, we've been struggling to display our special letters.
Even now, with UTF-8 there's always the problem that systems have to be configured to support it, when this should be the default value in the first place. The letter for the Euro € was not supported for a long time.
Hell, even my banking software did not allow öäüß for transactions for the longest time.
There are replacements for most of them ö->oe, ü->ue, ä->ae, and we're quite used to those. So much in fact, that some automatically type equivalent letters to avoid troubles with conversion.
Luckily, the Forüm Söpports all the speßial Charäcters :)
Bryce.
Quote from: ralferoo on 13:02, 09 November 13
Just to throw in more confusion, the SI abbreviations for both millisecond and microsecond are actually both ms, so both us and ys are technically wrong! :o
Eh? Where did you get this funny idea? In SI units seconds are 's' and the prefix micr
o is 'μ' (mu). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_UnitsIn fact, the prefix for micro appears to be the one that was fundamental in bringing about the modern prefixes for SI units. From the above wikipedia page:
Beginning in about 1900, physicists who had been using the symbol "μ" for "micrometre" (or "micron"), "λ" for "microlitre", and "γ" for "microgram" started to use the symbols "μm", "μL" and "μg", but it was only in 1935, a decade after the revision of the Metre Convention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_Convention) that the CIPM formally adopted this proposal and recommended that the symbol "μ" be used universally as a prefix for 10^-6.I don't know what ys is about either. But I have also seen it on here and thought it somewhat odd. ???
Quote from: Munchausen on 22:40, 12 November 13
Eh? Where did you get this funny idea? In SI units seconds are 's' and the prefix micro is 'μ' (mu). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units
I've no idea to be honest. I think writing that post warped my fragile little mind... :)
Quote from: Gryzor on 10:52, 11 November 13
You Scientists with your hubris, you will ultimately feel the wrath.
Indeed. ;D
(http://www.icanhazlargehadroncollider.com/img/blackhole6.jpg)
Quote from: Bryce on 14:32, 12 November 13Luckily, the Forüm Söpports all the speßial Charäcters :)
Yes, but habits are hard to break. :/
Oh damn, so that's why the server went down overnight. Damn your umlauts people...
Quote from: Gryzor on 08:20, 15 November 13
Oh damn, so that's why the server went down overnight. Damn your umlauts people...
User: .> Hêllö wörld
Server: .> shutdown sequence initiated...
User: .> wtf?!?
Yeah, you found my sikrit macros...
yeay, the design of the azerty norm was a bit strange...
ù is actually used very rarely (like... 2 words ?)
And some mathatical greek stuffs like µ are here.
é, è, ç, à...ù... use whole keys
other wise :
¨ can be added to ïöüëäÿ
^ can be added to ôîûêâ
~ can be added to õ and ã...ñ
IMO a proper keyboard would only have accents that can be added...
The spanish keyboard was nice, just this "useless" Ñ key.
Good keyboard should include all greek letters, and all sort of accents IMO.
Alzo... ümläüt mëtäl : Mötörhead...
Quote from: Gryzor on 18:07, 17 November 13
Yeah, you found my sikrit macros...
You should make it like 101 "$" symbols with a "£" symbol somewhere amongst it. ;D