(no subject)

Kevin Rose builds a PC into a Mac mini's case. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a cheat -- he used a motherboard that isn't available to the public yet, and he couldn't find a way to put in an internal CD-ROM drive.

Latency paranoia

I notice a lot of people have wireless controllers for their game consoles. Don't those have problems with latency?

Latency is one thing keeping me from getting a wireless mouse. I figure it's hard enough to aim a mouse into the tiny spaces we're expected to hit these days, so a few milliseconds of lag could throw my reflexes out of whack. Most user interfaces require that I target tiny little buttons, and if I stop moving the mouse 40 milliseconds too late, I have to take a beat to aim once again. Multiply that micro-frustration over an entire day, and I can't say it's that much better than having a mouse with a tail.

Granted, new Macs come standard with wireless everything, and Apple's supposed to be the great leader of UI. Their adherence to the one-button mouse has allowed them to avoid the tyrrany of the context-sensitive menu, right? But, they're hardly infallible, and it wouldn't be the first time industry leaders have charged ahead while overlooking some important aspect of interface design.

Remember, of the five easiest pixels on the screen to target with the mouse, four of them are the corner pixels. And yet, Windows 2000's Start button is actually two pixels away from the corner, "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Mac's a little better about it, with its menu at the very top, and its dock at the very bottom. But I haven't bought a Mac just yet.

Look at what's happening to our peripherals: the input devices are becoming wireless, and the output devices are becoming LCD instead of CRT. And both of these switches add a little bit of latency, and for games, this is very bad. The information on the screen is already 20 milliseconds older than it would be on a CRT, and your brain has to interpret that information and twitch your hand a certain way. And when you do twitch, the message doesn't reach the machine for another 20 milliseconds. So, your hardware has made you 40 milliseconds slower.

I haven't found any benchmarks on wireless mice, but I have learned from recent benchmarks (Sep 2004) that a given CRT like mine can have a latency range of 35 μs to 825 μs, while any given affordable TFT can have latency ranges between 18 ms and 28 ms.

Not that that matters too much -- I use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible anyway.

(no subject)

I was looking at the program listing for the Travel Channel, and it reminded me why walking tours are a hundred times better than bus and even boat tours.

Because: I don't care about hotels that I'm not staying in.

Really. No need to point them out, nor to produce shows about them. I'll just take it as a given that any city I visit will have places where tourists can isolate themselves from the outside world in varying degrees of luxury.