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| 2002/1/6-8 [Computer/HW/IO] UID:23476 Activity:high |
1/5 Dvorak keyboard, yey or ney?
\_ Do you plan to carry your own keyboard with you? Do you ever
have to use other people's computers?
\_ What the hell are you talking about? Why do you need to CARRY
your keyboard around? It's the same bloody keyboard, just a
different layout. A kinesis on the other hand, that is a
different keyboard.
\_ Let's hear what nweaver has to say, he uses Dvorak.
\_ A: I can still type (but not as fast) on QWERTY.
B: Most OSs these days support soft remapping. Once you
can touchtype dvorak, it is a simple matter of mapping
and unmapping the keyboard layout.
C: No wrist pain since I switched. -nweaver
\_ My wrist pain disappeared after I used a wrist pad with
my QWERTY keyboard.
\_ My wrist pain disappeared after I got a girlfriend and
cut down on my frequent masturbation. This course of
action might be a little difficult for some CS types,
but I heartily recommend it!
\_ Also, do other people ever have to use your computer?
\_ Not an issue, at least not on Windows, as it supports
switching between the two quite easily.
\_ When you learned a foreign language, did you forget how to
speak English? The answer is Yay.
\_ When I learned French I didn't forget English but I didn't
have to bring my French keyboard with me to France. Your
analogy is false. Good try though. The first answer is
still the questions above which imply "no".
\_ how is the analogy false? if you're on your normal
keyboard, you "speak" your normal "language". if you're
using someone else's, you speak theirs. Big fuckin'
deal. -tom
\_ I'm sure this is fine for someone who types 20 wpm on
your shitty Dell keyboard but some of us are used to
better which makes it a "big fuckin' deal".
\_ can you actually touch-type at similar speeds on both
qwerty and dvorak keyboards, or are you talking out of
your ass? I would think that "muscle memory" severely
would limit any kind of "keyboard fluency." I'm not
saying it can't be done, but it's also not easy to be
TRULY fluent in multiple languages, without requiring
concentration.
\_ a friend from work, who came to the US from Germany for his
post-doc, travelled back for a conference. another German
asked him where he learned German, because it sounded better
than most American's accents!
\_ My mother (who is Dutch) gets this when she goes back to
visit from the USA. "You speak Dutch so well..." --dim
\_ Dvorak! I can't type on a qwerty keyboard anymore for > 1 hour
without my wrists hurting / going numb for the next two days.
I can type 80-100 wpm all day and never have my hands complain
when using the dvorak layout. Learning the keymap takes about
2 hours to memorize, about a month to get faster than the qwerty
layout. If you are the sort of person who thought it was fun
to spin in circles until falling over as a kid, you will probably
enjoy the experience of remapping your neurons! All this
questioning of linguistic memory- its crap. I can type qwerty
at exactly the same speed as before, after a good 2 years of
dvorak. Spend the effort. Use dvorak. People will freak when
they try to type something into your keyboard, but there are
some nifty programs that let you switch layouts ala hotkey.
When you start learning- make sure that you don't have a
termpaper due during the 1st month or so- it will only be a
frustrating experience. -joshk
\_ How do you know the change to Dvorak isn't just delaying the
inevitable: the day that you can't type qwerty -OR- Dvorak
without wrist pain? Maybe you just have destroyed your
wrists Dvorak style yet? How many years of qwerty did you
use?
have before it was a problem?
\_ I am sure Dvorak is good for the hands of regular people,
but is it any good for programmers who use a lot of all
those funny characters which normal people don't usually
use? Because I don't find typing English much of a
problem. It's those !~@#$&*() that is a pain in the
... fingers and wrist. Maybe someone should design
a keyboard standard for programmers. Remember to
name it after me.
\_ Very good point! (Though I don't know the answer.)
\_ "TYPING ERRORS
The standard typewriter keyboard is Exhibit A in the
hottest new case against markets. But the evidence has been
cooked."
http://www.reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.html
"Typing Tangles"
http://www.reason.com/9611/ltr.sl.html
-- yuen
\_ Finally listened to nweaver...and have never looked back.
Haven't had wrist pain in 4 years. Doubled typing speed.
How long until I see wrist pain? Does it matter? I would
rather put it off than get it now! Does it hurt
programming? No. Was the muscle memory hard to re-learn?
A little. Can I type qwerty? When needed, and yes, the
muscle memory is still there, too. I would give the
original question a whole-hearted YES! In a production
environment, it has been no problem. We're using WinBloze,
and I set my machine up to switch seamlessly (by setting it
up under multiple languages) with a hot key. When I use
other machines, either I use QWERTY or, if I'm going to be
at it a while, I get the drivers off my shared drive and
set their machine up with dvorak as an alternate without a
hot key, so they can't accidentally switch to it (and tell
the machine owner). -djyoung |
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| www.reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.html -> reason.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.shtml The answer is that it is the centerpiece of a theory that argues that market winners will only by the sheerest of coincidences be the best of the available alternatives. By this theory, the first technology that attracts development, the first standard that attracts adopters, or the first product that attracts consumers will tend to have an insurmountable advantage, even over superior rivals that happen to come along later. Because first on the scene is not necessarily the best, a logical conclusion would seem to be that market choices aren't necessarily good ones. So, for example, proponents of this view argue that although the Beta video recording format was better than VHS, Beta lost out because of bad luck and quirks of history that had nothing much to do with the products themselves. This conclusion is hard to quibble with, although it also seems to lack much novelty. But path dependence is transformed into a far more dramatic theory by the additional claim that the past so strongly influences the future that we become "locked in" to choices that are no longer appropriate. This is the juicy version of the theory, and the version that implies that markets cannot be trusted. The success of Intel-based computers, in this view, is a tragic piece of bad luck. To accept this view, of course, we need to ignore the fact that DOS was not the first operating system, that consumers did switch away from DOS when they moved to Windows, that the DOS system was an appropriate choice for many users given the hardware of the time, and that the Mac was far more expensive. Also, a switch to Mac required that we throw out a lot of DOS hardware, where the switch to Windows did not, something that is not an irrelevant social concern. A featured result of these theories is that merely knowing what path would be best would not help you to predict where the market will move. In this view of the world, we will too often get stuck, or locked in, on a wrong path. Most advocates of this random-selection view do not claim that everything has been pure chance, since that would be so easy to disprove. After all, how likely would it be that consecutive random draws would have increased our standard of living for so long with so few interruptions? Instead, we are told that luck plays a larger role in the success of high-technology products than for older products. A clear example of this argument is a 1990 Brian Arthur article in Scientific American. Arthur there distinguishes between a new economics of "knowledge based" technologies, which are supposedly fraught with increasing returns, and the old economics of "resource based" technologies (for example, farming, mining, building), which supposedly were not. Traditional concepts of scale economies applied to production--the more steel you made, the more cheaply you could make each additional ton, because fixed costs can be spread. Much of the path-dependence literature is concerned with economies of consumption, where a good becomes cheaper or more valuable to the consumer as more other people also have it; This sort of "network externality" is even more important when literal networks are involved, as with phones or fax machines, where the value of the good depends in part on how many other people you can connect to. What Arthur and others assert is that path dependence is an affliction associated with technologies that exhibit increasing returns--that once a product has an established network it is almost impossible for a new product to displace it. Thus, as society gets more advanced technologically, luck will play a larger and larger role. The logical chain is that new technologies exhibit increasing returns, and technologies with increasing returns exhibit path dependence. It would be only reasonable to expect, for example, that panels of experts would do better at choosing products than would random chance. Similarly, to address the kinds of concerns raised in Frank and Cook's Winner-Take-All Society, the inequalities in incomes that arise in these new-technology markets could be removed harmlessly, since inequalities arise only as a matter of luck in the first place. It does not seem an unimaginable stretch to the conclusion that if the government specifies, in advance, the race and sex of market winners, no harm would be done since the winners in the market would have been a randomly chosen outcome anyway. Theories of path dependence and their supporting mythology have begun to exert an influence on policy. Last summer, an amicus brief on the Microsoft consent decree used lock-in arguments, including the QWERTY story, and apparently prompted Judge Stanley Sporkin to refuse to ratify the decree. Carl Shapiro, one of the leading contributors to this literature, recently took a senior position in the antitrust division of the Justice Department. Almost no one uses DOS anymore, and many video recorder purchasers thought VHS was better than Beta (as it was, in terms of recording time, as we have discussed at length elsewhere). The theories of path dependence that percolate through the academic literature show the possibility of this form of market ineptitude within the context of highly stylized theoretical models. But before these theories are translated into public policy, there really had better be some good supporting examples. After all, these theories fly in the face of hundreds of years of rapid technological progress. Recently we have seen PCs replace mainframes, computers replace typewriters, fax machines replace the mails for many purposes, DOS replace CP/M, Windows replace DOS, and on and on. The typewriter keyboard is central to this literature because it appears to be the single best example where luck caused an inferior product to defeat a demonstrably superior product. It is an often repeated story that is generally believed to be true. Interestingly, the typewriter story, though charming, is also false. The Fable The operative patent for the typewriter was awarded in 1868 to Christopher Latham Sholes. Sholes and his associates experimented with various keyboard designs, in part to solve the problem of the jamming of the keys. The result of these efforts is the common QWERTY keyboard (named for the letters in the upper left hand row). It is frequently claimed that the keyboard was actually configured to reduce typing speed, since that would have been one way to avoid the jamming of the typewriter. Remington added further mechanical improvements and began commercial production in late 1873. Other companies arose and produced their own keyboard designs to compete with Remington. A watershed event in the received version of the QWERTY story is a typing contest held in Cincinnati on July 25, 1888. Frank McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City who was purportedly the only person using touch typing at the time, won a decisive victory over Louis Taub. Taub used the hunt-and-peck method on a Caligraph, a machine with an alternative arrangement of keys. McGurrin's machine, as luck would have it, just happened to be a QWERTY machine. According to popular history, the event established once and for all that the Remington typewriter, with its QWERTY keyboard, was technically superior. So, according to this popular telling, McGurrin's fluke choice of the Remington keyboard, a keyboard designed to solve a particular mechanical problem, became the very poor standard used daily by millions of typists. Fast forward now to 1936, when August Dvorak, a professor at the University of Washington, patented the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. Dvorak claimed to have experimental evidence that his keyboard provided advantages of greater speed, reduced fatigue, and easier learning. Navy conducted experiments demonstrating that the cost of converting typists to the Dvorak keyboard would be repaid, through increased typing speed, within 10 days from the end of training. Despite these claims, however, the Dvorak keyboard has never found much acceptance. The dimensions of performance are few, and in these dimensions the Dvorak keyboard appears to be overwhelmingly superior. The failure to choose the Dvorak keyboard c... |
| www.reason.com/9611/ltr.sl.html -> reason.com/9611/ltr.sl.shtml Liebowitz and Margolis claim that they "discovered" this support, as if it were somehow hidden from public view. They claim the 1944 Navy study was difficult to find, and the author's names were concealed. My publisher has had copies of the report available for 15 years. Liebowitz and Margolis's coup de grace, though, is the General Services Administration's 1956 study by Earl Strong. They conclude that because there has been "no attempt todiscredit the GSA study," academics and journalists are not living up to their high standards when writing about the Dvorak. Harvard's Richard Land said the GSA test was "poorly designed," that "the conclusions are overstated," and that the data actually showed "great promise" for further improvement by the Dvorak typists which Strong ignored. When other researchers wanted to see the raw data so they could draw their own conclusions, they found that Strong had destroyed it all! This is an example of the high standards Liebowitz and Margolis aspire to? Further, Strong was clearly biased: In 1949, he wrote, "I am out to exploit the present keyboard to its very utmost in opposition to the change to new keyboards," and there is evidence of a personal animosity between Strong and Dvorak. I agree with Liebowitz and Margolis on another thing: There is a need for good, unbiased studies on Dvorak. The best raw data I have access to at present is from Keytime, a Seattle-based company which uses keyboard instructional technologies they developed in house. In the past nine years, they have trained several hundred typists on Dvorak and several thousand on QWERTY, using the exact same equipment and teaching methodologies. They have "repeatedly found" that after 15 hours of training and practice time, existing QWERTY hunt-and-peck typists can touch type at an average 20 words per minute. After 15 hours of training and practice on Dvorak, similarly able (QWERTY) typists consistently average 25 to 30 words per minute touch-typing on Dvorak. Further, Keytime reports that the Dvorak typists continue to improve at a higher rate. Forbes's point, it has never been our position that the QWERTY keyboard was the best of all possible keyboards. We would argue, however, that economics does demonstrate that competition leads to the least-cost methods of achieving a particular goal. A Toyota Corolla might not be the best car that can be imagined, or even produced, but for the money, it does its job about as well as anything that we can currently produce. Otherwise some smart entrepreneur would put those inefficient auto companies out of business. It is not Panglossian to say that competition leads to efficiency, since efficiency is not sufficient to achieve the best of all possible worlds. We are perfectly willing to acknowledge this limitation of economics. Argiro we would note that the mathematical simulations of typing, which show no advantage for Dvorak, do not have the drawback that he cites. Also, Dvorak did claim that QWERTY typists would also benefit from his technique. His own Navy study compared retrained QWERTY typists, appropriately mimicking the decision that faced actual typists (who already knew QWERTY). Nevertheless, we agree that it would be interesting to have a controlled experiment starting with new typists. Argiro, however, we cannot claim with certainty what the results will show, although we believe that he will be proved wrong. Armstrong, the myth of Dvorak superiority is promulgated precisely because it is a wonderful example of an alleged market failure. Also, academic theories (and theorists) do not compete in a free and open for-profit marketplace. If they did, a lot of them might well never come to exist. More seriously, it is an important part of our argument that entrepreneurs are the key players guiding markets toward efficient paths, and we regret it if our article did not make this point forcefully enough. While we acknowledge free-riding as a possibility for some network externalities, we do not regard it as a central issue for the typewriter story. Large corporations with typing pools could fairly easily have internalized sufficient gains from switching to a better keyboard to make the switch worthwhile, if the advantages of Dvorak were anything like those that Dvorak claimed. Hutchings introduces an old debate that usually asks whether Apple is guilty of some misappropriation. But it is abundantly clear that Xerox had done much work on the idea of using a mouse with menuing systems well before Apple (even if others not at Xerox were working on the same ideas, and even if they later worked at Apple) and that Apple was influenced by what Xerox did. This doesn't mean that Apple did not improve on the ideas, or that Apple didn't invest much of its own energy trying to optimize its interface. But the major ideas that separated graphical from text interfaces were born at Xerox, not Apple. Cassingham must be, that his 1986 book cannot be found in our university libraries. Nor is it to be found in the on-line catalogs at Harvard, the University of Michigan, Duke, or the University of Texas at Austin, all of which are thought to have substantial collections. We did contact his publisher (Freelance Communications, Pasadena) and discovered that they offer only three titles, all of them by Mr. Cassingham to refer to his publisher in the third person. This type of exaggeration by Dvorak advocates helps fuel our doubts regarding their claims. Cassingham's possession of the Navy study is no evidence of its general availability. Even if it were easy to find a copy of the Navy study, our claim that Dvorak's role is hidden from view is hardly changed by noting that the title page says the study was prepared by the Training Services Division of the Navy. By way of comparison, Strong does not hide his role in the GSA study. Our academic writing, by the way, cites the Navy study in full, crediting the Training Services Division. The book to which Dvorak was willing to have his name attached does read like an infomercial to us, as we think it would to any unbiased reader. By itself, this hardly proves that it is wrong, since infomercials might well be selling worthwhile products. Boosterism, even for worthwhile products, however, cannot be a substitute for scientific objectivity. Charts and tables by themselves are not scientific unless they report results that are produced in accordance with generally accepted scientific methods. This means, among other things, proper controls, which was not the case in the Dvorak book (Dvorak hardly claimed otherwise). We are certain that the Psychic Friends Network could offer charts and tables as testimonials to its value. Cassingham, although admittedly unknown to us, smack of typist self-selection and thus lack of controls, since Mr. Cassingham reports far more QWERTY typists than Dvorak typists. Finally, we are aware that some Dvorak boosters claim that Strong was biased. But serious ergonomic studies, and other studies comparing QWERTY and Dvorak (even those put forward by Yamada, a Dvorak advocate) tend to match the results of Strong, and not the Navy studies. It is the preponderance of evidence, together with the reasonableness of the reported method, that causes us to believe Strong's results. We have seen no convincing evidence that Strong's results were biased, but we are willing to entertain any contrary evidence that is other than just hearsay. |