Facebook Announced About Inventing a New Unit of Time
Facebook has unveiled a new time unit called Flicks. This product is like any other unit of time like the seconds, minutes or hours. When one has the social platform and that too this huge then why should one confine oneself to social connections, usage of the news cycle and the advertisements on the internet when one could control the time flow itself.
As per the GitHub that has documented Flicks, it has defined a Flick as “the smallest unit of time which is just bigger than a nanosecond”. It is further defined as 1/705,600,000 of a second, whereas a nanosecond is 1/1,000,000,000 of a second which makes it approximately 1.41723356 shorter than a Flick.
We've launched Flicks, a unit of time, slightly larger than a nanosecond that exactly subdivides media frame rates and sampling frequencies. https://t.co/w9SDBznXRE
— Meta Open Source (@MetaOpenSource) January 22, 2018
The normal question to ponder and that comes to mind is that why Facebook decided to invent this product of time and what is wrong with the regular seconds, especially when seconds is one of the few units that is universally recognized among the standard international and imperial units.
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The name itself is a blend of the phrase “frame-tick” which makes one even more eager to use this newly launched time unit.
Flick is made for assisting in the measurement of the individual frame length for video frame rates, which means no matter what is the video frequency may that be 24hz or 25hz or 30hz or 48hz or 50hz or 60hz or 90hz or 100hz or 120hz Flicks could be used to make sure that everything goes in perfect collaboration while instead of decimals, whole integers are used.
Programmers have already used built-in tools in the programming language C++ for managing these types of exact frame syncing, especially for the making of visual effects in CGI. But there is a limitation with C++ as the most accurate timing possible with it is in nanoseconds, which not even distribute evenly into most frame rates.
Last year Christopher Horvath—a developer posted about this issue on Facebook and from there the idea of a new time unit initiated as a solution for this problem.
This idea is still in theory whether it would be beneficial is yet to be seen once it is put into practice.
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