I got one when I was having problems with wrist pain at work in '99, and it worked a treat. My one was branded as an 'Anir'; I gather 3M are marketing them now, hence the appearence of being 'new'.
While a lot of so called RSI symptoms are typically stress related (and I've experienced plenty of that) I was finding that moving my wrist left and right on an ordinary mouse eventually became fatiguing and painful. I never do that with this mouse, and I use my thumb for left and right clicking, which is also good. So good in fact, that when I started using a regular mouse on my home machine, the pain came back, so I got one for home, too.
The good stuff:
- It's fairly easy to get use to. I have no patience, even for MS natural keyboards, but I was into this mouse in a few hours. Your bandwidth may vary...
- They come in left and right versions in a few different sizes.
- All three buttons work in X:-). I use 'MouseMan' and Emulate3Buttons.
Cavaets:
- No roller button thingy. Never used one anyway, but they're pretty cool and I'd like one.
- No wireless optical. I can dream, can't I?:-)
- They're not too good to use if you're standing. I use a regular mouse when I'm noodling around with playlists at parties.
- They're not too good for gaming, but only because the mounting that holds the left/right mouse buttons can break under abuse. In my case this was a particularly, uh, 'exciting' moment playing Theif. I fixed it with 24hour araldite and a bit of metal tube from a hobby store, but it's never been quite the same since. Being 'ergonomic' it cost me 5 times as much as a regular one, so I'm reluctant to throw it out and get a new one just yet:-)
Overall, it's definitely the least worst piece of ergonomic equipment I've bought.
Conventional hydridized crops at least _breed_. Conventional crops in fields neighbouring fields that had the terminator genes would end up with a massively decreased yeild of fertile seeds as a result of cross-polinization(sp?) with the terminator gene carriers. It's fine to condem yourself to continually buying seed form the company, but you should force others to do so by screwing their environment.
Of course, if they just made plants that wouldn't breed in the first place, this wouldn't be a problem, but that wasn't Monsanto's objective...
If you're a serious quality fiend, don't bother with 8hz, bladeenc or any of the other ISO derivitives. Typically, they only improve on the speed of the encoder, not the quality - and the standard ISO psycho acoustic model has a number of errors.
Go and download LAME. Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder, it's a patch against the distribution 10 ISO example source which replaces the psycho acoustic model with GPSYCHO, adds variable bit rate support, joint stereo and a host of other goodies. I tested it out the other day, and it was consistantly encoding as fast as bladeenc and at a much better quality - less 'brittle' sounding in general, and without the high pitched sound artifacts that other encoders produce in about 20% of the things I've encoded (at 128 kbit, admitedly).
There are user space programs to switch discs - I just ripped the code at the end of the cdrom text in the kernel docs and hacked it into cdtool.
I wouldn't recommend the NEC 4x4 for hard use, however - I have one and it's only taken a years use as a primarily audio drive to wear out the changer mechanics. It works as a single tray, now, but even then it will spit out the CD after a reboot, or jam up inside, sometimes. And they completely suck for ripping audio - not even cdparanoia can do it reliably. The consolation is that it plays audio CDs without a hitch that expesive componet hifi's barf on. Handy if you store your CDs in a box of gravel.
I presume the 'security issue' that the guy in the second article is talking about is the one in the disadvantages section on his web site. If so, it's a little unreasonable to expect Slashdo to publish it when Bruce Pernes(?) has already done so in a feature article that also proposed solutions to the problem (the problem being that anyone can maliciously alter software with open source code, so how do you go about establishing trust in a given set of source code).
If it was something else he was refering to, he didn't bother to say, and I didn't see any discussion of it on Bugtraq. Anyone else got any idea?
That's pretty much what the survey I did found. Personally, I think the authors of these projects should have a go at talking to each other to try to develop a single decoder library so they can all get on with designing UI's that suit the myriad of uses people have.
I beleive the freeamp developers were looking into doing this at some point, though freeamp still needs plenty of work to catch up to the likes of winamp.
Actually I've put together an informal survey of a number of mp3 player engines, and I'd like some feedback before seriously testing them all with a proper set of mp[123] streams. Check it out.
Slashdot Mirror
I got one when I was having problems with wrist pain at work in '99, and it worked a treat. My one was branded as an 'Anir'; I gather 3M are marketing them now, hence the appearence of being 'new'.
:-). I use 'MouseMan' and Emulate3Buttons.
:-)
:-)
While a lot of so called RSI symptoms are typically stress related (and I've experienced plenty of that) I was finding that moving my wrist left and right on an ordinary mouse eventually became fatiguing and painful. I never do that with this mouse, and I use my thumb for left and right clicking, which is also good. So good in fact, that when I started using a regular mouse on my home machine, the pain came back, so I got one for home, too.
The good stuff:
- It's fairly easy to get use to. I have no patience, even for MS natural keyboards, but I was into this mouse in a few hours. Your bandwidth may vary...
- They come in left and right versions in a few different sizes.
- All three buttons work in X
Cavaets:
- No roller button thingy. Never used one anyway, but they're pretty cool and I'd like one.
- No wireless optical. I can dream, can't I?
- They're not too good to use if you're standing. I use a regular mouse when I'm noodling around with playlists at parties.
- They're not too good for gaming, but only because the mounting that holds the left/right mouse buttons can break under abuse. In my case this was a particularly, uh, 'exciting' moment playing Theif. I fixed it with 24hour araldite and a bit of metal tube from a hobby store, but it's never been quite the same since. Being 'ergonomic' it cost me 5 times as much as a regular one, so I'm reluctant to throw it out and get a new one just yet
Overall, it's definitely the least worst piece of ergonomic equipment I've bought.
The lameness filter appears to be lame. How about that.
2001-03-15 15:34:30
Conventional hydridized crops at least _breed_. Conventional crops in fields neighbouring fields that had the terminator genes would end up with a massively decreased yeild of fertile seeds as a result of cross-polinization(sp?) with the terminator gene carriers. It's fine to condem yourself to continually buying seed form the company, but you should force others to do so by screwing their environment.
Of course, if they just made plants that wouldn't breed in the first place, this wouldn't be a problem, but that wasn't Monsanto's objective...
If you're a serious quality fiend, don't bother with 8hz, bladeenc or any of the other ISO derivitives. Typically, they only improve on the speed of the encoder, not the quality - and the standard ISO psycho acoustic model has a number of errors.
Go and download LAME. Lame Ain't an MP3 Encoder, it's a patch against the distribution 10 ISO example source which replaces the psycho acoustic model with GPSYCHO, adds variable bit rate support, joint stereo and a host of other goodies. I tested it out the other day, and it was consistantly encoding as fast as bladeenc and at a much better quality - less 'brittle' sounding in general, and without the high pitched sound artifacts that other encoders produce in about 20% of the things I've encoded (at 128 kbit, admitedly).
Can anyone tell me whether printscreen, Sys Rq, Scroll Lock, Pause and Break actually do anything under Linux? I've never found a need to use them...
:-)
OTOH, I have configured my win95 keys to act as meta under X. All I need to do is paint on penguins
There are user space programs to switch discs - I just ripped the code at the end of the cdrom text in the kernel docs and hacked it into cdtool.
I wouldn't recommend the NEC 4x4 for hard use, however - I have one and it's only taken a years use as a primarily audio drive to wear out the changer mechanics. It works as a single tray, now, but even then it will spit out the CD after a reboot, or jam up inside, sometimes. And they completely suck for ripping audio - not even
cdparanoia can do it reliably. The consolation is that it plays audio CDs without a hitch that expesive componet hifi's barf on. Handy if you store your CDs in a box of gravel.
Of course, the 6x4 might be better.
I presume the 'security issue' that the guy in the second article is talking about is the one in the disadvantages section on his web site. If so, it's a little unreasonable to expect Slashdo to publish it when Bruce Pernes(?) has already done so in a feature article that also proposed solutions to the problem (the problem being that anyone can maliciously alter software with open source code, so how do you go about establishing trust in a given set of source code).
If it was something else he was refering to, he didn't bother to say, and I didn't see any discussion of it on Bugtraq. Anyone else got any idea?
That's pretty much what the survey I did found. Personally, I think the authors of these projects should have a go at talking to each other to try to develop a single decoder library so they can all get on with designing UI's that suit the myriad of uses people have.
I beleive the freeamp developers were looking into doing this at some point, though freeamp still needs plenty of work to catch up to the likes of winamp.
Actually I've put together an informal survey of a number of mp3 player engines, and I'd like some feedback before seriously testing them all with a proper set of mp[123] streams. Check it out.