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Facebook invented a new time unit called the 'flick' and it's truly amazing
So what is a flick? A flick is one seven hundred and five million six hundred thousandth of a second — 1/705,600,000 if you prefer the digits, or 1.417233560090703e-9 if you prefer decimals. And why is that useful?
As a hint, here's a list of numbers into which 1/706,600,000 divides evenly: 8, 16, 22.05, 24, 25, 30, 32, 44.1, 48, 50, 60, 90, 100, 120. Notice a pattern? Even if you don't work in media production, some of those numbers probably look familiar. That's because they're all framerates or frequencies used in encoding or showing things like films and music. 24 frames per second, 120 hertz TVs, 44.1 KHz sample rate audio.
[...] Even the weird NTSC numbers in use due to certain technical constraints divide nicely. 23.976 (technically 24*(1,000/1,001)=23.976023976230 with the last 6 digits repeating) becomes exactly 29,429,400 flicks. It's the same for 29.97, 59.94, and any others like them. No more fractions or decimals needed whatsoever! How great is that?!
There is more detail and background information on GitHub.
Do you give a flick? How many flicks do you feel you have wasted on this article?
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:46PM (2 children)
Why would memory be addressed in powers of two? Memory is addressed linearly. Addresses can represented in any adicness you like. The address space up to know has always been bounded by a number that is a power of 2. Apart from that, powers of 2 are just in the brain of the developer.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday January 24 2018, @03:09PM
Because the amount of addressable memory increases in power of two with the number of address lines available.
8 address lines? You can only address 256 memory locations. 32 address lines let you address 4,294,967,296 locations.
Similarly, all the internal logic of the memory controller is governed by the same power-of-two limitations. If you want to access 4,294,967,297 (2^32+1) addresses, then you're going to need at least 33 address lines and bits of computational horsepower, which increases production costs and means you're now capable of addressing a full 8+ (2^33) billion locations, so you may as well make all those addresses usable.
There were a LOT of years in the early days of computing where the incremental cost of such things were a considerable expense. The original IBM PC almost certainly used the 8088 rather than the nearly identical 8086 because it halved the number of physical address lines - even though that meant multiplexing the addresses and halving memory access speed. Even today it's not negligible - most PC's usually can only address memory moderately in excess of what a typical user is likely to employ - e.g. depending on model a "high capacity" i7+motherboard can only access 64 or 128GB of ram - 2 or three more address lines than needed for the typical upper-end 16GB consumer PC, and considerably less than some specialty applications would desire. And as you venture into considerably lower-powered microcontrollers, the incremental cost of each additional line becomes proportionally greater.
(Score: 3, Informative) by requerdanos on Wednesday January 24 2018, @07:43PM
Here you go.