Forum Moderators: not2easy
Here's an example of why flicks are useful in video game programming. In a game that displays at 60 frames per second, software gets a time budget of 16.667 milliseconds (rounded to the nearest microsecond) to figure out how to paint thousands of pixels worth of moving aliens, race tracks, tanks or trolls onto the screen. It's not just games: web browsers, word processors and other software need to pay attention to these slices of time to make sure scrolling and animations stay smooth.
But it's a pain talking about 16.667 milliseconds, and even with slivers of time a billionth of a second long, programs can suffer from rounding errors. The flick is a 1/705,600,000th of a second, which Facebook concluded is a convenient is a nice foundation for many different measurements. For 60-frame-per-second refresh rates, for example, a computer has 11,760,000 flicks to create each new screen frame.
Flicks are useful round numbers even with the much shorter slivers of time, too. For high-end audio, which measures varying sound levels every 1/192,000th of a second, that duration is 3,675 flicks.
