re: Perceivable time differences [was Re: PSA: Clock drift and pkgin]

[matthew green <mrg%eterna23.net@localhost>]

Johnny Billquist writes:
> Ok. I oversimplified.
>
> If I remember right, the point was that something sub 200ms is perceived 
> by the brain as being "instananeous" response. It don't mean that one 
> cannot discern shorter times, just that from an action-reaction point of 
> view, anything below 200ms is "good enough".
>
> My point was merely that I don't believe you need to have something down 
> to ms resolution when it comes to human interaction, which was the claim 
> I reacted to.

mouse's example is actually not the limits.  humans can tell
audio down to about 1ms or less timing in the best cases.

reaction time has nothing to do with expected time when you're
doing music things.  you can't react to the beat, you have to
be ready to go at the same time, *MUCH* closer than 200ms, so
that all the musicians in a band are in sync.

what one needs from their computer is different for each of us
and while most tasks are fine with our current tickless setup,
there are plenty of cases we can do better with it.

note that tickless and hi-res timers are not really the same
thing even if we can achieve one by implementing the other, we
*could* introduce hi-res timers on machines with it, but it
would be easier with a tickless framework to use.


.mrg.