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Facebook Announces That It Has Invented a New Unit of Time (theverge.com)
Facebook has announced a new unit of time, called Flicks. "According to the GitHub page documenting Flicks, a Flick is 'the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond,' defined as 1/705,600,000 of a second," reports The Verge. (For comparison, a nanosecond is 1/1,000,000,000 of a second, making a Flick roughly 1.41723356 nanoseconds long.) From the report: Now, you may be sitting there wondering what was wrong with regular seconds that Facebook had to go and invent its own unit, especially since the second is one of the few units that is universal across SI and imperial units. The name itself is a portmanteau of the phase "frame-tick," which is also why you might want to use them. Flicks are designed to help measure individual frame duration for video frame rates. So whether your video is 24hz, 25hz, 30hz, 48hz, 50hz, 60hz, 90hz, 100hz, or 120hz, you'll be able to use Flicks to ensure that everything is in sync while still using whole integers (instead of decimals). Programmers already use built in tools in C++ to manage these sorts of exact frame syncing, especially when it comes to designing visual effects in CGI, but the most exact timing possible in C++ is nanoseconds, which doesn't divide evenly into most frame rates. The idea to create a new unit of time to solve this problem dates back to last year, when developer Christopher Horvath posted about it on Facebook.
Isn't a Hz effectively a measurement of time? (1/60'th of a second for example?)
Why not measure them in their fractions of a second? Programmatically, simple.
There's no 'l' in either Frame or Tick. The name should be Frick or Frack,
Because programmers are bad at math?
Or, why is a technique programmers have used since computers were born news again?
Not that terrible summaries are anything new on Slashdot, but really. "Smallest unit of time greater than a nanosecond?"
Too lazy to do the math right now, but it appears what they have defined is the largest unit of time that divides the frame-periods they're talking about by integral amounts, so you can synchronize video in these different rates with an integral number of "flicks" for each of the different frame-periods.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
...(not knowing a helluva lot, but enough) that this does seem like a pretty innovative thing. Anytime you can shift the perspective of thinking, whether it ends up working or not, is always a Good Thing(TM).
Pretty much what I expect out of idiot millenials
Shouldn't that be "frick"? Nah, I guess that would be too confusing...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
I'm a little surprised that this came from FB and not Google/YouTube but I can definitely see its value.
Does it make sense to clock hardware and GPUs at this rate? A 3GHz GPU would run at 2,822,400,000 Hz and would synchronize to any video (incoming or outgoing) refresh rate allowing for no missed pixels, pixels that are sampled at transitions or maybe some FLICKer.
Depending on the application, media and its refresh rate, this may not offer a lot of tangible advantages. For instance, in gaming, I don't see a lot of advantages with basing the clock speed on the Flick.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
They gave a name to something that already exists. That is about as much 'inventing' as that kid that 'invented' a clock radio a few years ago. Then again, if that's their definition, it explains a lot. So stupid.
I measure frames in clocks. A frame is always an integer number of clocks.
If you want to deal with just refresh rates, the LCM of 144, 120, 100, 90, 60, 50, 48, 30, 25, 24 is 3600.
If you want to deal with lines for common video modes (480, 720, 768, 1080, 1200, 1440, 2160) at those frequencies. LCM = 207360000
$ for a in 480 720 768 1080 1200 1440 2160 ; do for b in 144 120 100 90 60 50 48 30 25 24 ; do echo $[$a*$b] ; done ; done | sort | uniq | tr '\n' ' ' ; echo
103680 108000 110592 11520 12000 120000 129600 14400 144000 155520 17280 172800 18000 18432 19200 194400 207360 21600 216000 23040 24000 25920 259200 27000 28800 30000 311040 32400 34560 36000 36864 38400 43200 46080 48000 51840 54000 57600 60000 64800 69120 72000 76800 86400 92160 97200
plugging all that into lcm.c and I got 207360000. Which is substantially lower than 705600000, and has some factors not present. (705600000/207360000. is
3.402778)
If you have to use floating point values to store a number, it has inaccuracy. For example a simple penny counter algorithm that needs to break out of a loop when pennies remaining is less than 1 will misbehave when you're trying to check if .01 .011 if you stored .01 as a float. It will actually store 0.01 as 0.0999999999995 or something and that will cause the loop logic to fail. If you store in whole integers of pennies, you won't have this problem. So this concept of using Flicks allows you to use precise integers to describe frame rate instead of some funky float value that is imprecise.
The name (flick) itself is a portmanteau of the phase "frame-tick," ...
No it isn't as there's no "l" (ell) in either word.
Apparently, they rejected the following (from :Portmanteaur):
and "steve".
Personally, I would have chosen one of: frack, frak, frick, or time - but not sage or rosemary.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The name itself is a portmanteau of the phase "frame-tick," which is also why you might want to use them.
No it's not! It's a word chosen to sound cool and look *roughly* like those words smooshed together, but where did the 'L' come from?
It's an engineered one. The portmanteau equivalent of a backronym.
Also, I don't want to use them, even if they do change the name to "Frick".
But thanks for asking.
Did Zuckerberg just invent time travel?
Facebook did not "invent" a unit of time. They defined a non-standard unit of time based on the already existent S.I. system.
the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond ... For comparison, a nanosecond is 1/1,000,000,000 of a second, making a Flick roughly 1.41723356 nanoseconds long
I'm confused - why is a flick 1.41723356 ns and not 1.3 ns or 1.41723354 ns? Does this have to do with time being quantized and Planck time? I thought planck time was on a scale much smaller than nanoseconds, but I'm possibly remembering wrong.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
... when they think they are so self-important that they invent new measurement units.
that someone posted 5 days ago, just becuase some dumbarse 'liked' it today?
Bullshit. Complete unadulterated bullshit.
Guess they didn't care that the Flick was already a unit of measurement used in radiometry?
1 Flick = 1 Watt per steradian cm^2 micron.
23.976Hz or 29.97Hz?
They're both industry standard frame rates.
Based on feedback from Simon Eves, who pointed out that the NTSC variations are all actually approximations of 24 * 1000/1001, and 30 * 1000/1001, I dropped support for those variations.
A unit that claims to make measuring video frame time easier and then goes on to ignore the most common framerates?
could you go f*ck yourself with the daily news about facebook? much appreciated.
Facebook does not provide or implement a video player. That is done by a client o/s. So why is Facebook wasting its time with such nonsense?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Until a hardware vendor starts talking in flicks and designing circuits to match, this is meaningless.
The French, when inventing the metric system, created a decimal circle, calendar, clock: The clock and calendar soon disappeared. People talk about decimal circles (Gradians) but no-one uses them.
There was Swatch Internet Time (1 beat = 86.4 seconds, 1 Kbeat = 1 day) but nobody else measured time with it, so it's dead.
A femto-fortnight is larger than a nanosecond and less than the flick. It is 1.2096 ns.
Pickles the kitten learned an important lesson today, find out what after the break.
lose != loose
Nonsense.
We already have two terms, frequency and period. Period is the time interval of one cycle at a given frequency. The refresh period for a display with a refresh rate of 60 Hz is a little over 16 ms.
Period is the reciprocal (not inverse) of time. Time is the reciprocal of period.
This is nothing more than a news anchor standing on the streets live on camera with a Facebook walking behind waving and making faces like a spoiled 14-year-old brat until someone clocks him in the face. BeauHD can relate and thus posted this "story."
Consider all the presentations we'll see where a slide capitalizes the unit as FLICK. Great fun!
Dammit, I'm still trying to get used to Swatch "beat time"...
There is no fucking "L" in either of the originating words.
Basic English fail. Get this shit off Slashdot.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
In English, it means, "fried rice, with extra spit, please". (Note that some restaurants may substitute other bodily fluids, or even other substances entirely, at their sole discretion.)
Well said.
Light travels about 42 cm in one flick.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
"Large" implies x*y or x*y*z, "takes longer than" or "is longer" implies only x or y or z.
> Flick is 'the smallest time unit which is LARGER than a nanosecond,'
FB and YT will be in trouble as soon as some otaku uploads the next Hatsune Miku "live" concert 8K rip (where her avatar is projected as a quasi-hologram using femtosecond lasers).
Nanoseconds is big in Japan, so we need a smaller unit for practical time measurements. What about Planck time? She is flat as a plank anyhow. That would make one frame 5.39 x 10^-44 seconds.
For more info:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoWi10YVmfE
Flick is what I do with my middle finger. In this case, in the direction of Facebooks claim to having invented a unit of time.
Just another day in Paradise
"the most exact timing possible in C++ is nanoseconds"
Utter bullshit! Are these people actually developers?
Portmanteau? Frame Tick = Flick? Uh, no. Where the fuck is the L coming in from?
Facebook are welcome to their stupid, ad-hoc names for subdivisions of seconds. The unit of time is a second, and facebook won't ever change that.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
There is the idea of a picosecond (one trillionth of a second).
Three if you want to make this more fun they forgot about shakes that already existed from nuclear physics.
Any and all content posted above may be ignored, considered irrelevant, or otherwise dismissed.
In search of a problem
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
That would be "Frick" or Frack" There is no "L" in either "Frame" or "Tick".
... no flicks were given
It is very common when writing code that needs to support multiple units, whether it be various framerates, metric vs. imperial measurements, dpi settings, etc. that the units be stored as an integral LCM of the various units. This allows easy conversion back and forth without rounding errors. There's nothing new here, just their selection of framerates, which doesn't even include the ubiquitous xxx/1001 rates.
it's called "Waste of".
It's pronounced J IFFY like the peanut butter, not Giffy like, uh, the baseball player.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Why is 1.41723356 nanoseconds the next largest time after one nanosecond? This makes no sense at all.
...They used to make a hardware crystal oscillator which was an integer multiple of the rate they needed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_oscillator_frequencies
and didn't call it an invention...just design.
*yawn*
yet another software company reinventing the wheel.
Facebook is starting to remind me of a ninety year old bikini model, trying to show the world she's still sexy. She might look good for her age, but she'll never be confused with an eighteen year old. Add in eighty years of hard drinking, and you're almost at the average facetard.
Of course you can get more precise than a nanosecond in C++ (as well as in any other turing-complete language). Double precision is roughly down to 10^-16, so a 1-second video could be processed with a precision of femtoseconds. Storing time as a fixed point value in a long long would get you 19 digits of precision, so you could do femtoseconds for an hour-long video. If that's not good enough, grab an arbitrary precision math library and store it down to the yoctosecond or smaller. Hell, if you really wanted to you could implement this new "unit" of time in C++ using either of these techniques and get exact precision for most common frame rates.
Finding the common multiple (of frame rate, equivalent to common divisor of the frame period) of all of these different frame rates (including the slightly-off ones like 23.9, etc...) is clever. Calling it a new unit is hyperbole, although it is convenient for wide adoption to have a name for the common multiple. Saying it's important because you *can't* do higher precision in C++ is laughable, and whomever said that should be ridiculed.
Very useful for measuring the attention span of Facebook users.
This SMACKS OF HUBRIS so hard I'm nearly unconscious.
Seriously? Facebook did a little basic math related to display refresh rates? And they say it's a NEW UNIT OF TIME?
Of course!!
But wait! The Facebook article says this truly amazing new unit is a fucking PRODUCT as well!!!
Ah-ha AH-ha.. ah-HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!! Ha! Ha! Ha!... Ha ha... Ha. Ha ha... ha.
Sorry for shouting but seriously, WTAF? (A for absolute)
Facebook needs to invent a unit of time called the Suck, as in Time Suck.
"Where were you?"
"I caught up for 5 Sucks with my FB Friends."
Same as the old time. Only we think we get to say we invented something.
Hey, stupid people might believe it.
Patent to follow... Now they can sue us all for using the same time we've always used.
This is what I expect from all you young, hipster geniuses in Silicon Valley.
This will surely garner both the Physics and Economics Nobel Prizes.
Keep pushing that envelope, you geniuses, you.
Back in the 80's, if memory serves, Digital Equipment Corporation used something called a "klunk" which was 100 nanoseconds. I see that the word means something entirely different today.
Oh, great, now eery casual who thinks he's savvy will scream about a revolution while I, a layman myself for the most part, can't think of a single practical use for this flick bull. https://droidinformer.org/Stor... Damn the hype and the Internet, they make everything stupid.