Tuesday, January 23, 2018
A whole bunch of nothing special
BBC's non-news features often get things surprisingly right. Not this one! BBC clearly chose a writer who doesn't understand ANYTHING about programming or graphics or simple metrology.
A Facebook engineer has invented a new unit of time called a flick. The flick has been designed to help developers keep video effects in sync, according to a description on the code-sharing site GitHub. A flick, derived from "frame-tick", is 1/705,600,000 of a second - the next unit of time after a nanosecond.It's not "the next unit". You can't describe anything as "the next unit". Anyone can define any base unit for specific purposes.
Flicks are defined in the programming language C++, which is used to generate visual effects for film, television and other media.Two category errors in one sentence. (1) A unit isn't defined in or by any programming language. It's just an arbitrary decision to use a particular number for a particular purpose. Apparently these coders were working in C++ when they decided to set up a personal unit. They could have defined it in Cobol or Fortran or Basic or chalk on a blackboard or beads on a very large abacus. (2) C++ is used for all sorts of purposes, and all sorts of languages are used for graphics and visual effects. Ultimately, if you're working for maximum speed you're going to be writing directly in machine code or assembler for the graphics processor system.
Flicks give programmers a way to measure the time between media frames without using fractions. Matt Hammond, lead research engineer at BBC Research and Development, said this can reduce errors such as stutters in graphics. "When the numbers used are not integers, errors can gradually creep into computer calculations. These errors can build up over time, eventually causing inaccuracies that become noticeable," he said.This is common practice. Again, when you're trying for maximum speed and precision, you want to keep things integral to avoid roundoff errors and time-consuming multiplications and divisions. I've often defined custom ad-hoc base units in a similar way, finding the least common multiple. In fact the ordinary time system of 60's and 24's was developed by the Babylonians for the same purpose. Whole bunch of nothing special, treated by BBC as a new special invention.
Labels: Metrology
¶ 8:24 AM
