[LINK] Solitaire

[grove at zeta.org.au]

On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:

> Just curious ..
>
> Has anyone noticed that when you get to the end of a game of Solitaire
> (the version that comes with Windows) and the cards 'waterfall' one at
> a time, your mouse effects the speed & bounce of these cascading cards?
>
> . or, is it my imagination?

It is all to do with interrupts and ioctl algorithms.

Your mouse is hooked into a buss and is probably interrupt driven,
occasionally when you move the mouse the interrupts have to tell 
the screen when to update the cursor posn and so on.

I can do this on my Sun workstation if I run a film on youtube and 
grab the browser or scrollbar with the mouse and move the window
around like mad.   The interrupts will run and the screen will 
take time to refresh and the video playback will be jerky.

I can do it on my Mac by adjusting the latency of my audio 
device and type madly into the keyboard and wave the mouse 
around.   It will cause the audio to break up when the settings 
are at stupid defined levels.

I am speaking in very broad, newby, nontech brush strokes 
here so someone who is more anal^H^H^H^Htechnically interested 
can give a better explanation.

Computers are still using basic concepts from 20 years ago 
where there are probably much better ways of doing things
that do not impact the system as much.


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis                 Kingswood, Greater Western Sydney, Australia
grove at zeta.org.au                http://www.zeta.org.au/~grove/grove.html
 		The price of greatness is responsibility.