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I've collected several links to dvorak keyboard sellers and dvorak ressources.

Due to the US-english dvorak layout is only different in the positions of the keys on the board, you may create your own dvorak keyboard by just switching your key caps around. And for X11 you can use xkeycaps and xmodmap to tell your computer that you've done that... :-) You'll find an dvorak-xmodmap at Peter Amstutz' Dvorak page.

But if keyboard doesn't allow to switch the key caps around you can also relabel them...

Dvorak Keyboard Sellers:

• Dvorty Boards
• Dvorak Keyboards from Fentek

The Dvorak Layout in comparison to the qwerty layout can be found at Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard .

There are also efforts on creating non-english dvorak layouts.

I was going to rush out and buy a new Amiga when it was released. I liked the sound of Neutrino, and then over to Linux based using Transmeta... i wanted it even more to see just what transmeta can do for myself

Amiga is not JUST about "a better way". It WAS about the OS, the Software, the Hardware - this is what made it "a better way"

I bet I am not alone to feel the most dissapointed I have ever been in Amiga and I think I have finally given up hope... that says a hell of a lot coming from me :(

I want the hardware, the software, and everything else. Considering Amiga want to take a different path, it makes me wonder if they have heard of the word 'diversification'

Amiga, give people what they want, THEN offer other ways to distribute this technology in what is currently being proposed.

The only faith I have left in Amiga is that (with their never-ending changing of ideas) they will decide to go back to what was a better solution in the first place. If not, I have lost complete faith. Then again maybe Iwin, Phase5 and QNX can do something...

Whatever happens, I suppose i'll be happy if I can still play Blazemonger
heh

That little matchhead sized web server, iPic that's been featured on slashdot several times, was for a while connected to the net through a Digital Unix box running SLiRP. Looks like it has a normal SLIP connection now, but there's another modern use for you.

Remember?

It's being reimplemented with networking built in from the start as King of the Hill. It's still in early development, but already is fun to play.

I've got an xmodmap file that rearranges those wicked 'doze keys and a few others to more civilized bindings. Feel the power of Alt, Control, Super, Meta, Hyper, and AltGr for language shift :) http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~tetron/ dvorak

save money on hardware????

let's see... $6.00 to $12.00 for the processor..

they made modems with the "processor" in them for years and years without making them cost $9000.00 plus tax. Nooo it's not saving any money for us users, that is a blatent lie. it's making something very shoddy, very cheaply, so that your profit margin is huge..

The flakiness in the Losemodems is almost certainly due to badly-written software. This software would be just as flaky if it was running on an internal uP; the beauty of the PC-side fix is that the problems can be fixed with a simple download. Once the driver is open-sourced, the entire modem system can be upgraded without changing a single bit of hardware. It's still a bad choice for some applications, such as anything which requires simultaneous telephone communications and heavy-duty crunching on tasks which are part of the user interface. But that doesn't cover everything, or even most things; as CPUs accelerate at 40%/year while modem DSP requirements remain roughly static, this keeps falling in importance. Remember, the old Telebit Trailblazer required an entire 68000 to keep up with a 14,000 BPS data rate. Today we can go several times as fast with a fraction of a Pentium. This trend will continue.

For the Internet appliance, this may be the way to go. And with open-source drivers for Linux, I can see the flakiness in software modems becoming far smaller or disappearing entirely. If flaky SW modems proves to be a Windows problem instead of a modem problem, that changes both the argument and the lesson, doesn't it?

If you read the updates section, the guy spends a lot of bits defending against suggestions that it isn't legit. Perhaps the story was pulled because he complained to the /. mavens that his little web server was being so severely /.ed. Just a guess.

--

There was another posted to slashdot only a few weeks ago called iPic. It's smaller than any of the ones mentioned here, I think. The URL is http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~shri/iPic. html. The page has even been updated (new picture, more info) since it was first posted.

At the console type "loadkeys dvorak" or something to that effect.

In X, go to http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~tetron/ dvorak to get a dvorak xmodmap file.

For those who are unfamiliar with the phenomonon of BLAZEMONGER ("If you don't shout when you say it, you suck when you play it."), you can read the complete archive of BLAZEMONGER "press releases." Still funny after all these years...

Schwab

Here, here. Emacs' intergration with make and gdb (M-x compile and M-x gdbsrc respectivly) are incredibly powerful, and the ability to easily extend Emacs from Elisp is just a joy to use (I'm currently implementing a minor mode to emulate the text editor "wily" which has a very interesting mouse-based direct manipulation interface.) Emacs is the ultimate editor :-)

A few emacs hacks of mine

Cats are more independent. You could start making software for a cat by making Oneko, the X cat, more responsive to its environment and give it more emotions than boredom. Not that its boredom can't be useful, as PURR-PUSS uses boredom as a trigger to try a more creative action, while learning [Andreae] by trial and error.

There is also a lot more stuff on adaptive behavior and machine learning out there.

I wrote a small program called joy2key which takes joystick events and translates them into keyboard events. It works in both X and the console, and is great for games...

I got my xmodmap from somewhere else, so wasn't my idea, but the mapping I use, available from here has a fairly full set of international mappings and includes a language shift key. It's pretty cool.

You'll notice that most articles that say the dvorak layout "isn't worth it" mostly say that it isn't worth the costs of retraining hundreds of people. They do not make the case well against an individual learning dvorak. They point out the fact that the tests of the dvorak keyboard were biased and this is true, but also a large part of the issue up until the last ten years has been that to retool for dvorak would for a business or agency involve scrapping thousands of dollars in QWERTY typewriters and buying new dvorak layout ones. With moderns PCs, remapping one's keyboard layout is trivial.

Now, as for specific technical issues... The QWERTY layout has to it's advantage the fact that the keys are all splayed out, as so that while you are typing one key your fingers can set up to type the next key. While this gets you pretty good speed, it tends to be at the expense of good typing style and in the long run can be absolute hell on your wrists. The dvorak layout tends to induce better typing style because the home row is where the most used keys are - no jumping around the keyboard to hit everything. Just comparing the two keyboards is rather telling - with QWERTY, you can type something like maybe 100 common words using the home row. With dvorak the number is something like 600. Qwerty graces the home row with such useful characters as "j", "k", and the ever-useful ";" - useful for programming perhaps, but the majority of typing I do each day is not code. Analyzing a bit of english for letter frequency and mapping it onto qwerty and dvorak shows commonly used letters all splayed all over with qwerty - with dvorak, the home row is most common, then the top, then the bottom, with the more common letters in the middle and moving out to the edges of the keyboard.

Lastly, ask the average person who has taken the plunge and stayed with it and they will tell you they havn't regretted it at all. It just feels better to type dvorak, and when you try to type quickly on qwerty it just feels like you are moving your hands way too much. Finally, you really aren't risking all that much. You won't lose your precious QWERTY skills when you are forced to use other people's computers - once you can comfortably touch-type dvorak (it takes about 2 weeks) going between QWERTY and dvorak takes very little effort - for example, I only use dvorak in X. At the console, it's qwerty all the way. Often when I'm playing a game or doing something where key position matters and I'm not touch-typing I'll switch back to QWERTY because that's what the key labels still say on my keyboard :)

If you've been sold on the wonders of dvorak, check out my page which has an xmodmap file to load a dvorak mapping (it also has some tweaked-out shifting bits - Super, Meta and Hyper baby! :)

This bit of unabashed dvorak advocacy was typed on a dvorak keyboard

Probably the cheapest thing to try the Dvorak keyboard layout. It takes a couple of weeks to get back up to a non-frustrating typing speed, but once you can type proficiently you'll cringe whenever you have to use qwerty :). Once you can touch-type dvorak going switching between it and qwerty becomes very easy - so you really aren't in any danger of screwing yourself up in the long run. Get an xmodmap for XF86 here. One personal keyboard mappping I use that really helps my wrists is moving the delete key from it's place in the upper right corner of the keyboard, where I have to flick my wrist over to hit it, to the left alt key, where I can easily hit it with my thumb - so I don't have to move my hands at all in normal typing (the xmodmap above includes this - along with a full complement of shift bits - shift, control, alt, altgr, meta, super, and hyper (if XF86 supported them, I would have a top and front too :))

I'm currently enrolled at UNLV and I'm having a tough time finding anyone else that uses Linux... *sheesh*

So convert your friends :) Since I came here as a freshman last semester, I have seen something like nine new Linux installations just in my dorm building, and my roommate, who works for university software support, says that they are gearing up to formally support Linux along with Windows and MacOS :)

I'm at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, by the way.

Actually I fine the windows keys to quite useful for "meta" in Emacs. In fact, I have a full complement of shift bits - shift, control, alt, altgr(language shift), meta, hyper, & super. Hop over to here to see my xmodmap map. Oh, one catch - it's for a dvorak layout :)