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Dvorak Layout Claimed Not Superior To QWERTY
Michael Pyne sends in an article published at Reason Online 13 years ago, dismantling the entrenched myth that the Dvorak keyboard layout is a superior technology to QWERTY. The odd thing is that this 13-year-old article recaps research (refereed and published in a respected economics journal) 19 years ago. While we have discussed Dvorak many times over the years, I don't believe we have dug into this convincing-sounding refutation of the Dvorak mythology. The article is in the context of arguing against the conventional wisdom of "first mover advantage" — that the first product to market gains a large entrenchment benefit, such as VHS vs. Beta, MS-DOS vs. anything, etc. It's very much a pro-markets piece.
oh my god, there's another keyboard layout, I don't want to learn how to type all over again: it's clearly inferior.
Is that old blowhard at it again? Why do you keep posting stuff about this bozo?
This guy's the limit!
The world is full of people who tried Dvorak and didn't think it was all that special.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
It really depends on what language the typist is using.
I learned to type on a dvorak layout keyboard years ago and do find that there is a lot less hand fatigue and improved typing speed for me.
Just like many things, I am sure that dvorak is better for some than qwerty and equal or worse for others. I have average guy hands and dvorak is nice for me.
That said, I type exclusively on qwerty now because I dont want to veer off the standard layout.
... but I never got to learn how to type
I tried it. Thought it was neat even but gave up on it. Programming in it was just to far removed and I found my self making really odd errors.
I'm fluent on both Dvorak and QWERTY. I'm about 30% faster on Dvorak, and it's five times as comfortable (no fatigue, effortless typing). Even looking at the keyboard layouts, common sense tells you Dvorak must be better. I mean, what the fuck is a semicolon doing as a home key?
However, it's not THAT much better that people are willing to put in 100 hours of training time, or buy specialized keyboards (esp. since you can easily remap your keyboard with software).
tl;dr
aoeuhtns
If you're serious about typing at high speeds, you know better than to use a sequential keyboard, you go for chorded. A sequential keyboard is one where you type all letters in sequence, such as the common qwerty or dvorak. A chorded keyboard is parallel in the sense that you type whole syllables at the same time; it's kind of like playing the piano. Instead of typing s-y-l-l-a-b-l-e, you'd type syl-la-ble. Do that at speed and you're golden; you can get around three times the speed of ten-fingered qwerty once you're into the system and have it in muscle memory.
The sad truth is of course that that qwerty is here to stay since it has no barrier to entrance: you start with hunt and peck and take off from there. Chorded keyboards take conscious effort to master, but once you're trained on them, they're bliss.
Check out the Veyboard, by a Dutch company, it's one of the nicer chorded systems. (Doesn't lean heavy on abbrevs and cryptospeak like Stenotype.) http://www.veyboard.nl
but because it saved my writs from the carpal tunnel syndrome. I really started to feel pain in my wrists, after switching to dvorak it vanished. Now, tell me what you want, it may be a placebo effect or whatever, but my fingers move less on the keyboard, I write about 10wpm faster than I did before with qwerty (150 vs 140), and best of all I don't feel any pain any more.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
I'm perfectly open to the idea that Dvorak is overrated. I'm afraid I don't have the patience to work through this particular old ideological rant to dredge up whatever even older arguments it's touting.
I am curious as to whether or not the mention of MS-DOS as a parallel example is in TFA or an invention of the submitter. I don't have the patience to read TFA to find out. In any case, it's a childish suggestion. The inferiority of MS-DOS isn't some ex post facto invention. It's a grim fact that was painfully obvious to anybody who used multiple x86 OSs at the time MS-DOS was introduced.
I predict that people will still support the Dvorak layout for years to come, regardless of evidence for or against it's usefulness based purly off being differnt or a desire to believe that stupidity stops people from seeing Dvorak's improvements and thus anyone who does use the layout is a better human being.
From what I've heard, QWERTY wasn't designed to slow typists down, but rather to try to stop commonly adjacent letters being adjacent on the keyboard. Keys jammed then adjacent keys were pressed at the same time, so you want this to happen infrequently.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
Dvorak ain't language agnostic, so for non-english languages it's worse.
1) Giving very practiced users a faster top speed. (i.e. peak performance)
2) Allowing beginners to type somewhat faster while learning. (i.e. faster learning curve)
From the evidence I've seen, Dvorak is superior using definition 2, but not using definition 1.
Since most typists are not "very practiced", then the conclusion should be obvious.
LANG=C grep -v "[^qwertyuiop]"
Coincidence? I think not.
And why does it take forever if you don't have a vanilla $LANG?
As someone who types with only one hand [nerve damage to left hand/arm] I'd like to point out that Dvorak exists in three standard layouts: two-handed, left-handed, and right-handed. I've been typing on QWERTY since I was about 10, and typing on Dvorak-RH since I was 18. The difference in speed isn't actually great, but the difference in required range of motion and therefore repetitive strain injury is significant. It's worth it for that alone; QWERTY spreads keys so far apart that typing with one hand is painful after only a few minutes.
..Just wanted to point out that there are other reasons for other keyboard layouts, accessibility for the disabled among them.
That said, it's really only good for English, which isn't an issue to me but would of course be for people who type more often in other languages.
Well, it works well for languages that use lots of vowels. I think it works well for English, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish...
Maybe it works best with English, but it sure is a valid layout for lots of other languages as well.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
For non-english languages you will also need charactors not on a english keyboard.... so what the hell was your point? Its not like qwerty can magically change its letters to suit whatever language you want to type in.
true enough. but I do about 99% of my typing in english. Qwerty is a romance language specific layout geared towards english. It is adapted to other languages pretty well but a dvorak for danish could also be made where qwerty for danish is a bit lacking.
Remember that qwerty was also designed to make it easy to type english words. Other romance languages have different letter combinations that are not ideal for qwerty.
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
Referencing Stan Liebowitz as a relevant/credible source on ./ ?
I dont think that DVORAK is any better than QWERTY.
I don't type blind. What I do is that I keep my eyes on the keyboard. I have two hands and for every keystroke my brain is constantly looping the process of "Which finger is closest to the next key to press? Would this be effiencent for the next keys to press? If so then allocate an apropriate finger. Now repeat the process untill all the cashed caracters in my brains have been typed and look at the screen.".
Because I dont spread my 2*5 fingers over 2*1 halfs of the keyboard you can imagine why DVORAK is living hell. You'd understand why after even half a year of DVORAK my typing was still slower then on QWERTY. Because I don't make much errors this way I am almost always faster than a person who types blindly (========== "ah fsck" ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H).
Here be signatures
I tried using Dvorak for about three days and was already as fast as I was on QWERTY. It's just I don't really have a keyboard laid out for it and I didn't want to take all the keys off of mine.
I've heard QWERTY was intentionally laid out to slow the typist down so the keys wouldn't jam on early typewriters. Notice that 'u' is the only vowel that is hit with a strong finger. 'A' a very common vowel is hit with the pinky. And E the most common vowel gets the middle finger.
I find switching between QWERTY and DVORAK as easy as transposing key signatures in music. Ask any studied musician about transposing from C major to G major, it is just a tiny mental shift, that's all. I must admit, though, that going from a regular DVORAK to a Microsoft "split" keyboard , natural keyboard, or ergonomic keyboard is very frustrating.
Dvorak ain't language agnostic, so for non-english languages it's worse.
There are language-specific variants of QWERTY too; QWERTZ for German, AZERTY for French, etc.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I can type with both layouts, and dvorak _is_ faster . You have to type two keys with the same finger consecutively much less often (which is something that is very annoying when using qwerty). You don't really need big studies and tl;dr articles when you can just try it yourself.
"that the first product to market gains a large entrenchment benefit, such as VHS vs. Beta, MS-DOS vs. anything, etc. It's very much a pro-markets piece."
Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that Unix and CP/M might have some qualms about MSDOS being "First to Market" - those OS's came a bit before MSDOS ever started being worked on...
Why indeed...
Stan Liebowitz is a TOTAL bozo...
Not really, the keys are placed on a Dvorak keyboard based upon the frequency of use. Trying to balance it so that as much as possible you're not using the same finger for consecutive letters and often times not on the same hand. It's basically meant to be fast and efficient. Whether or not that's the case is a matter for consideration elsewhere.
And yes, that does depend a great deal upon the language, as just because you're talking about 21 different non-vowels, they're not necessarily optimally placed in the same places in French as in German as in English. And you've also got the added need to consider the special characters, accents, umlauts, etc.
Yes, I know that. On my QWERTY keyboard there are three extra vowels. But A-Z is still in the same place, so if I have to use an english keyboard I can still type with the same speed (except if I need one of the three vowels). With a language-optimized Dvorak layout, A-Z would change places from language to language.
Actually, you can. Just change the keyboard map. Of course that leaves you with a keyboard that's basically Das Keyboard, with random printing, but you can do it. Anybody that can touch type in German ought to be able to remap a standard QWERTY to do that trick as well as a "proper" German keyboard.
Is that like saying "bat" is a variant of the word "cat"? I'd say those layouts aren't QWERTY; they're QWERTZ and AZERTY, respectively.
This article is the sort of crap that results in people talking about "market fundamentalists" and dismissing the very real benifits of decentralized decision making produced by healthy markets. The authors of this article missed three key points:
Healthy markets really are a good way to solve resource allocation problems and to make locally effective choices. They're probably even the best way. But saying that all markets always have optimal outcomes is absurd and results in people making the opposing absurd claim ("all markets are broken and need either heavy regulation or to be replaced with central planning") sound more reasonable.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
So, if QWERTY was designed to be worse for typing speed and isn't, they failed in creating an inferior design? They had to have some really bad designers, not even being able to design a bad product.
I used to get pains in my finger joints from typing too much. Switching to a Microsoft Natural keyboard helped, but did not alleviate the pains I was getting. Then I did some research and reasoned that switching from Qwerty to Dvorak layout might help me. Ten days later, I was completely switched. My finger pains completely stopped. I haven't looked back.
I don't care about the subjective speed or typo difference between Qwerty and Dvorak. Dvorak's logical arrangement of keys cuts down finger travel, and that is easily quantifiable.
Much of the article seems to be less concerned with the notion of proving that Dvorak isn't the better typing system as it is with proving that the market is very good at choosing winner systems. Or that the market isn't as dumb as we think about choosing losers. Or something.
Clearly, typists other than McGurrin could touch type, and machines other than Remington were competitive. These events have largely been ignored. But if we are interested in whether the QWERTY keyboard's existence can be attributed to more than happenstance or an inventor's whim, these events are crucial. The other keyboards did compete. They just couldn't surpass QWERTY. So we cannot attribute the success of the QWERTY keyboard either to a lack of alternatives or to the chance association of this keyboard arrangement with the only touch typist or the only mechanically adequate typewriter.
Unfortunately, the author's analysis of the QWERTY advantage seems to end here. He seems to assume that because QWERTY beat its competition, it must have won on the basis of being a better typing system. Not on the marketing power or fiscal strength of the business backing it. The author cites that the machines were being brought into office for people that had never typed before and cited competitions where non-QWERTY systems were used to great speed. His study doesn't really detail what factors allowed QWERTY to beat out the other contenders.
In the first phase of the experiment, 10 government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over 25 days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old QWERTY speeds. (Compare this to the Navy study's results.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speeds, the second phase of the experiment began. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of 10 QWERTY typists (matched in skill to the Dvorak typists) began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did QWERTY typists training on QWERTY keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. He recommended instead that the government provide further training in the QWERTY keyboard for QWERTY typists.
Moreover, while the author has done something of a service in showing some of the deficiencies of the AMAZING SUPERIORITY! of Dvorak over QWERTY, he seems to fall into much the same trap himself by correlating a lack of worth in retraining people onto a new system (I'm sure it would take me quite a while to get up to speed on a system of typing that I hadn't been using since I was in elementary school) to a lack of worth for using the new system as a whole. While it may be true that it's not terribly worth spending effort and money to retrain yourself on a new system, he doesn't examine much which system would actually be better to train a new typist on.
Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent. For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing." Other studies based on analysis of hand-and-finger motions find differences of only a few percentage points between Dvorak and QWERTY. The consistent finding in ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak, and certainly no advantage of the magnitude that is so often claimed.
As ergonomics often seems to be a greater concern than high-end performance for people who do very large amounts of typing work, the mention of ergonomics only as an afterthought doesn't help his case much. If that "difference of a few percentage points" falls in Dvorak's favor, then that would hurt his argument somewhat for people who would really prefer to have the 5% more comforta
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
It's very much a pro-markets piece.
It's very much a pro-markets publication. While the arguments put forward rest on their own merits, it's safe to say that Reason Online -- whose masthead includes the slogan, "Free Minds and Free Markets" -- is certainly not going to publish articles that challenge the idea that the market is an efficient and rational actor, at least most of the time. Whether that inherent bias extends to cherry-picking the data used to reach conclusions, or whether the data is even unambiguous, are things one needs to consider in cases like this.
Probably everyone here can think of some examples of inferior products that have remained dominant despite the appearance of superior alternatives, and also examples of the reverse. For any of that to mean anything, one would have to survey a substantial sampling of such cases, determine which represented the majority and by what measure (total monetary value, units sold, etc.) and then look at all kinds of other factors (market segment, cost of switching products, and so on) before one could begin to draw useful and quite probably heavily qualified conclusions.
Then there's the inherent ambiguity involved in "superiority". Take Mac versus Windows versus Linux, for example. If, like most computer users, you have a preference, you can probably explain what drives that preference. But so can people who have different preferences. One might prefer Windows for reasons that are entirely irrelevant to a Mac aficionado, and vice versa. So which is superior? Obviously, there is no single, universal answer to this question -- and many others like it -- so we continue to see a market for Windows and a smaller, but quite healthy, market for Macs. Likewise, Harley-Davidson motorcycles continue to sell alongside everything from Vespa scooters to Honda racing bikes, and there are a dozen or more brands of sandwich bread at the average supermarket despite, what, more than six thousand years of not very exciting developments in bread technology.
The short version is that in any complex area of study riddled with exceptions and special cases, sweeping general conclusions are likely to be true, if at all, only within some arbitrary subset of cases that may be of very little predictive value, but that will seldom deter anyone with an article deadline and a point to "prove".
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I skimmed the article so maybe I missed it, but did the authors of this article try to learn DVORAK themselves? Seems to me they are trying to use economic theory to discount the effectiveness of Dvorak. I have not known anyone who learned it ever say it wasn't faster. It's always as fast or faster.
Just in what other language(s) than english is Y a consonate? I keep wondering... I may be wrong, but I took for granted that in latin languages, it was a vowel, with no idea about where it came about..
(I didn't read the whole article, so I may have overlooked a few more gems of insight.)
I use dvorak myself, and while I think I'm probably a faster dvorak typist now than I ever was with qwerty, that is only after using it for about 10 years. If you use both layouts on a daily basis, you'll probably always be slower than if you just pick one. (I can still type qwerty just fine without thinking about the transition, I just don't use it regularly.) However, speed isn't the only reason to use dvorak; I find that it's a lot more comfortable (and that isn't an easy thing to quantify). Comparing the two layouts objectively is probably close to impossible unless you use test subjects who have never used a computer or typewriter, so I think people ought to try it for themselves and if they like it that's great, and if they don't, that's fine too.
Read it!
Just because it's not specifically optimized for other languages doesn't mean that it isn't better than QWERTY for many of them, or that you couldn't apply the same principles to come up with an optimized layout for other languages.
I believe that the typewriter jamming issue solved by QWERTY makes typists faster. It's not true that QWERTY is designed to slow typists down. QWERTY is designed to eliminate ``hazards'' in the machine's ``pipeline''.
We can in fact liken this to the execution of instructions on a processor.
The opponents of QWERTY say that its purpose is to bring about ``underclocking'', i.e. slowing down of the overall keystroke issue rate. But the technical issue is not speed, but collision between the hammers in the typewriter. The margin, or window of interference for adjacent hammers (corresponding to keys that are in adjacent columns of the keyboard) is worse than for keys that are horizontally distant.
There can be consider parallelism in the action of these hammers. Two keystrokes can be in progress at the same time, with one hammer slightly ahead of the other. One strikes the tape and paper, then recoils, and the other one lands in the same spot afterward. The farther apart the hammers are located, the closer together they can be temporally; i.e. the faster the typist can issue these keystrokes without causing a jam! I.e. the typist is encouraged to be faster, not to be slower.
But this spaced arrangement also makes it easier for the typist to go fast. Alternation between the hands leads to much more rapid typing. The typist can double the rate compared to using one hand. It's difficult to type a fast sequence with the fingers of one hand. This is particularly true of the weaker fingers: ring finger and pinky. Pianists struggle to get these into shape. Try playing a fast trill using your ring finger and pinky on a weighted piano keyboard, then try it with your thumb and index finger, then with two strong fingers from the opposite hand.
Also it takes energy to make the keys and hammers move, in a typewriter or piano. The typist can use gravity: the weight of his forearm from the elbow can act through a single finger to send power to the keystroke. If two or more keys have to be hit in rapid succession using the same hand, the energy of a single fall of the forearm has to be distributed across all three. C. C. Chang describes the concept of parallel sets and gravity attack principle in his Fundamentals of Piano Practice http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book.
When piano music contains a monophonic passage (one melody line), pianists take advantage of two-handed fingering to achieve greater virtuosity. Playing a melody with one hand is a difficult compromise for the sake of polyphony (e.g. Bach two-part invention with two independent melody lines often at the same tempo).
Also look at the African folk instrument known as the thumb piano. It's a resonant box with protruding, tuned metal reeds that are plucked with the thumbs. The scale is arranged such that you can play fast runs by hitting notes with alternate thumbs on opposite sides of the ``reedboard''. Virtuoso thumb piano players can shred blazingly fast over scale and arpeggio runs due to this left right alternation. You can see these guys in action in Bela Fleck's documentary film Throw Down Your Heart http://www.throwdownyourheart.com/. It's hard to believe they are just using their thumbs.
Well, that concludes my typing rant. At least it's not about static versus dynamic typing, for once! :)
I have never understood how merely rearranging the keys on the same fscking keyboard could make a real difference. Yeah, you might get a 6% improvement in typing speed. Who cares?
What would make a difference would be to make sure that you can press Control, Shift, Alt and at the same time press another key without dislocating your fingers. And to have an ergonomic layout of the surrounding keys (cursor movement, backspace, etc.). Our keyboards are in the stone age and the challenge is *not* the arrangement of the character keys, it's the arrangement of everything else. Where in a given layout your p's and q's actually are is a minor thing. Being able to move around your cursor and delete and edit things without leaving your home position can easily *double* your editing speed. That's the reason why people still love vi and Emacs. And this is not a joke.
That, or finally introduce foot pedals. It's a shame that even the most recent keyboards are still bound to torture your hands and your mind just to type capitals, to hit a key combo or to move two words back. Get a decent keyboard that allows to press the control key with the edge of your hand instead of with your pinky and use Emacs and you'll be in editing heaven. Pathetic...
Speaking of which, why the hell do they do this? What's the point of swapping two keys around, such as Z and Y in case of the German (and Czech, and possibly quite a few other) layout? This has been my greatest keyboard-related mystery for quite a while now.
C ydp.e ekrpatw xgy mf y.qy co ann iapxn.e ,day ick.oZ
Its very difficult to compare as in typing speed measurements one will either be limited to different people as well as different keyboard layouts, or at least different amounts of exposure to each layout. And what about some control cases of randomly generated layouts or alphabetical layouts?
An interesting hypothesis to test would be that any keyboard layout might have similar typing speeds (say give a factor of 2 or so) once a user has enough experience with it - for things that can be typed with single key presses.
I _do_ have some personal experience with the (standard 2-hand) dvorak keyboard layout which anyone can try by selecting that layout in their OS's keyboard settings (irrespective of their physical keyboard), a side effect of this is that you will be forced to learn to touch-type as obviously the letters written on your standard keyboard will have no relation to what comes out on the screen any more!
Speaking entirely qualitatively - it was suprising how easy it was to learn, and a few times since I abandoned it I've gone back and found that it can be picked up again within an hour or two once learnt (just like riding a bike?). And as a few other posters have already mentioned (for typing normal English) it feels more comfortable as less finger movement is required on average.
However (and this is the reason I've abandoned using it) - the dvorak layout is inappropriate for most uses apart from simply typing English - such as computer programming, working with spreadsheets, linux command line usage etc.
This is because by arranging the characters by their frequency in standard english, many non-alphanumeric characters which are rarely used in standard english but now very frequently used for other tasks on a computer are placed in very awkard positions requiring you to type with the little finger (or even worse, shift + little-finger). Here are some examples
':' - used a lot in C++, is where shift-'z' is on qwerty.
'{' and '}' - are shift-'-' and shift-'=' on qwerty.
'\'' and '"' - are q and shift-'q' on qwerty.
Useful for distinguishing between the insufferable nerds that don't know they are insufferable and the ones that are worth spending time with.
First mention of keyboard layouts tells you spend your time elsewhere or this unwashed creep will cause all your OTHER friends to stay away.
Dvorak ain't language agnostic, so for non-english languages it's worse.
And you're saying that qwerty isn't language agnostic? I've never had more of a problem typing Japanese in dvorak than qwerty. I'm sure for some languages dvorak makes typing easier while on other it makes it worse.
The biggest problem I personally have with dvorak is that most key-bindings are set for the best placement on a qwerty keyboard. Though Mac OS X has an interesting Dvorak command qwerty layout.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Remember that qwerty was also designed to make it easy to type english words. Other romance languages have different letter combinations that are not ideal for qwerty.
Uhhh... no.
QWERTY was designed so that fast typing would not cause typewriter bars to jam up.
WTF??!?!?!?!
QWERTY was NEVER designed to make it easy to type english! It was DESIGNED TO RUIN YOUR WRISTS. Back when typwriters existed, and not computers, people became very good typers. To good. The typwriters would jam when you typed fast, and people learned to type far to fast. So what did they do? The invented QWERTY to purposely give people grief, forcing them to type slower. As you can see, QWERTY was never designed to make any typing easy, it was designed to make it hard.
The dvorak layout cannot be superior because that would imply that market acceptance does not necessarily equal superlative merit. It's a libertarian economic theory that I think clearly fails empirical tests.
For anecdote, I'll add that I have used dvorak exclusively for about 10 years. The biggest advantage to moving to dvorak, for me, was that I became a touch typist whereas before I was a hunt and pecking typist. Starting from scratch on a new layout made touch typing possible where it would be nearly impossible to avoid the temptation to hunt and peck when trying to get better at qwerty.
That certainly doesn't make a case that either is the superior layout. I think eventually what's superior will depend on the person and the language. The English language is a moving target, but moreover different subsets of tasks have different needs. It took me a long time to get used to UNIX key shortcuts on a dvorak layout.
Well, it works well for languages that use lots of vowels. I think it works well for English, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Swedish...
So, ironically, not the kind of languages that would start a word with the phoneme "dv".
Yes, very mysterious.
Frequencies English:
y = 1.974%
z = 0.074%
Frequencies German:
y = 0.04%
z = 1.13%
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequencies
Subjective valuation is the cornerstone of free market economics. What I value something at, and why, could be different from you.
This includes technical differences. For some people that matters, and for them Dvorak layouts have generally been subjectively valued more highly. For everyone else the cost of switching is higher than the perceived value, so they don't.
The author of TFA, writing for a libertarian magazine, has made a fundamental socialist blunder. He has assumed that there is such a thing as objective value and that the market reveals it (or hides it).
This is not new. This argument has been circulated before. It is flawed because it strays from first principles. It is embarrassing for thinking libertarians everywhere because reinforces the stereotype that ideology trumps reality.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
the study contains no new research - just a rehash of existing studies - therefore the jury's still out until we finally get someone to do a proper and rigourous experiment .
as a dvorak user for ten years myself, and a qwerty user for many years before that - i find less rsi pain in my wrists, and a speed boast from 55 to 65 wpm using dvorak - glad i switched. :-)
...published in a respected economics journal...
Economists, meh. Who trusts them now? Look at the mess they got us into.
Italian is a latin language and it doesn't even have a Y. If it's used at all, it's in foreign origin.
In fact, Latin itself didn't have a Y either. Linguistics fail.
Oh yea. Markets are completely anarchic and capricious just like that. Just take a look at Google. A much superior search engine still battling to dig Yahoo and Altavista out of their trenches.
Damn those market fundamentalists and their ludicrous 'invisible hand' which, to be honest, I'll only believe when I see it!
[/sarcasm]
Send your spendthrift head of state this
That's as logical as saying it's a reptile specific food geared towards mammals. And about as true.
At the bottom of the
I used to be way into dvorak, even purchasing a hard-wired dvortyboard (lots of fun for when people wanted to use my computer). But for coding, dvorak falls short.
I switched to colemak last year, and I love it. It's also much easier to learn than dvorak if you're coming from qwerty.
Is colemak/dvorak faster than qwerty? I have no idea. I didn't realize that was one of the goals. For me, colemak/dvorak are both more _comfortable_ than qwerty. The more you type (and I type a LOT), the more important that is. Speed never entered into it.
Don't put advice in your sig.
I attest that Y is a consonant in Spanish. Vowels are only five: A, E, I, O, U.
Ydco b., nafrgy co k.pf jrbugocbi abe jrgby.p cbygcyck.
I've been using the dvorak layout for several years now and will say that:
1. Dvorak isn't necessarily faster than Qwerty.
I certainly used to be able to achieve faster typing speeds using Qwerty.
2. Dvorak is more comfortable.
I used to suffer periodic bouts of painful wrist and finger ache (no comments please!) when typing on a Qwerty layout. I switched to Dvorak and everything has been hunky dory since.
Just remap the capslock key to ctrl and it will make your life wonderful.
Just wait until the Colemak layout guy shows up...
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
In Turkish y is a consonant.
I dont want to veer off the standard layout.
Why not, I wonder?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Y is a consonant in German as well.
where's all that Karma?
German, sometimes. German has A E I O U Ä Ö Ü and Y, but Y can be a vowel or a consonant depending on context and it's only counted by a vowel by most people because it's most often used as an Ü allophone. Still, some people learn in school that Y is not a vowel... But then again, school has always lagged behind current science by 30 to 50 years.
An example for consonant use of Y would be "Yacht", which means exactly what you think it does.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
So why switch? the "z" key on a qwerty keyboard is a lot easier to reach than the "y" key in no-mans-land.
A keyboard layout that places the ';:' key on the right where the 'aA' key is on the left cannot possibly be superior... Putting the right shift key where repeated use leads to carpal tunnel where the left has no such problem is a similar example of a problem created by the keyboard designer - and the article does not address those but instead goes into a vague attack on individual reports supporting Dvorak. This is called argumentum ad ignorantiam - one of the classic fallacies of logic - by attacking what might prove the opposite and then claiming nothing does.
So the American Simplified Keyboard (which does not jumble the numbers as Dvorak's did) is based on alternating right and left usage, and the QWERTY Keyboard has an urban legend at least half a century old of being intended to avoid keyboard jamming in early models. Both are typewriter input methods adapted to computer use, hence the emphasis on two hands of alternating input. Since computer keyboards will not jam, there is surely a more efficient keyboard input method. Suppose the keys were arranged so that common character patterns (such as 'tion') became a drumming motion from little to index fingers. That would speed things up.
There really does not seem to be much in the way of statistical studies on this topic on the web, at least that can be easily found. The author says he has sources but does not cite them. Argumentum ad populem.
Given the ease in remapping a keyboard layout, it would also seem to be much ado about nothing - and that is the impression the reader is left with, an unattributed position paper. Just this side of trollbait.
If someone beats this, I will agree that Qwerty is superior. http://web.syr.edu/~rcranger/blackburn.htm till then, please, practice qwerty to make it worthy.
In english
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
DOS had some real advantages. A big one was simply price, but that isn't a trivial thing. You have to consider IBM was charging many hundreds of dollars for UNIX on their PCs and less than a hundred for DOS. However the biggest was it was extremely light weight in terms of disk size, memory usage and CPU usage. Where as these days a really full featured OS is what you want, you have to remember it wasn't always so. When processors were much, MUCH weaker, it was more desirable to have a small OS that could get out of the way. You discover that all the nice things we are used to today eat up system resources. Today's processors have the power that it doesn't matter, but the x86 didn't.
So the fact that DOS didn't do much was an advantage not a disadvantage. You'll find it still gets used in embedded devices to this day for that reason. They want something small and light to handle basic IO, not a full out OS with memory management, multi tasking and so on.
In fact it could even be an advantage in some situations much later. I remember back in 1995 I discovered MP3 encoding. Not downloading of MP3s, I didn't have an Internet connection at that point, just the idea of compressing music like that. It fascinated me and I liked to play with it. Took forEVER to rip music off a CD (the CD player had really bad jitter that had to be corrected for) and even longer to calculate the compression. It also took almost all of my slow 486's power to play it. In Windows 95, I couldn't play the MP3 full rate. The OS took up too much resources. However if I dropped to DOS, I could. DOS used, well, no CPU when a program was running for the most part so the system could handle it.
So really DOS wasn't this horrible solution way behind the times. When it came out, it was quite useful. I think it just stuck around in mainstream computers longer than it should have.
Trufax: QWERTY was designed for typewriters. The reason why the keys are so far apart is so that the hammers in the actual typewriter didn't crash and burn.
...QWERTY at work or using Windows on this dual-boot machine, or Dvorak when I'm using OSX. The reason I still type QWERTY on Windows is precisely the gaming thing - it gives enough trouble already that I mouse left-handed (some games have trouble with honoring mouse-button switches) and I'm usually not willing to fight with both the mouse thing and keyboard layouts on a regular basis.
That said, I can type either layout with more or less equal ability, both somewhere up around 100wpm, and it only takes a moment to "switch" between either layout if I need to for some reason (I have 3 keyboard layouts on every system I use - QWERTY, Dvorak, and a Russian Cyrillic layout - that I use now and have a hotkey switch assigned for, and touch-type them all). I find with any keyboard layout there is a 2-3 week period of initial pain and then it just gets slotted into my brain as something I can rely on with the same ease as anything else.
That said, I do agree with the GP - I make more mistakes with brackets and such on Dvorak when coding, and more "normal" typos when writing normal English text on QWERTY. Not enough to make me bother switching on a per-task basis, but enough to notice. As to which I prefer, Dvorak is much more comfortable, but I see some utility in changing up my typing patterns on a regular basis as I like to challenge my brain and I suspect it may be good for my wrists to change up the typing pattern once in a while. (Queue inevitable jokes about wrists..ah well.)
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
QWERTY: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
DVORAK: Yd. 'gcjt xpr,b urq hgmlork.p yd. na;f eriv
I'll stick w/ QWERTY thanks it's faster and less 'encoded'.
Ask those companies that threw their weight behind HD-DVD, whether or not being first to market makes you automatically win a standards war. Blu-ray won that war, despite being months behind HD-DVD's release, and missing most of the advanced features that were available to HD-DVD users at launch. To date, Blu-Ray still has fewer advanced features than HD-DVD. In addition, manufacturers yield for Blu-Ray is 10 to 20 percent less than HD-DVD, which makes the profit margin much slimmer for Blu-Ray manufacturing.
In Conclusion, first to market, superior advanced features, and a larger profit margin did not help HD-DVD win the war against Blu-Ray.
NOTE:
Yes, Blu-Ray has more space than HD-DVD, but as that space is not being used by the content creators, that one superior aspect of Blu-Ray was not a real factor in this war.
I'm just "this guy", you know?
One more thing: It doesn't matter whether Y is a vowel or not; it simply doesn't occur that often in some languages. For example, it's actually the third least common letter in the German alphabet, before X and Q. (Source: Wikipedia citing Albrecht Beutelspacher, Kryptologie, 7th edition, ISBN 3-8348-0014-7, p. 10) Having it smack dab in the middle of the keyboard is pretty useless - observe the German standard layout, where the Y and Z keys have been switched.
For comparison, in English the Y appears almost 500 times as often as in German (1.974% vs. 0.04% of the alphabet) whereas the Z is more common in German (1.13% vs. 0.074%).
The Dvorak layout simply doesn't work that well for non-English languages, hence localized (and even more obscure) layouts like NEO have been created.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I use Dvorak and I love it, I certainly see it as superior to QWERTY for typing English (but not other languages), because of its ergonomics, speed, and accuracy. I don't care what some journalist says, I trust my personal experience. You should, too: buy a Dvorak keyboard and try it. The one I use is the Typematrix, which is both Dvorak and QWERTY (useful if you are just now learning Dvorak, or if you change the keyboard between computers, or if you want to use Dvorak for English and QWERTY for another language as I do).
Und wer ist dieser Typ?!
If one of my writing students had created that headline, I'd have flunked him.
"...claimed not superior to..."?
This is why techies who know how to write well are such a valued commodity.
But thanks for the interesting story. I tried dvorak in grad school and I had my doubts about it back then.
You are welcome on my lawn.
C-m jrbkcbj.e .brgid yr oycjt ,cyd mf "<>PYFv
(Translation: I'm convinced enough to stick with my QWERTY.)
The article uses the word Eskimo which is derogatory (if not racist).
... right, you just watch a lot of porn.
Well, that's Slavic languages like Polish out of the works, isn't...
Disclaimer: I speak Polish. It has a vowel deficiency. Czesc!
They lost credibility before they even got into the issue of Dvorak. They assume that any two things that look vaguely similar must in fact be nearly exactly similar. Going by their reasoning, everyone now-a-days drives a car with a steering wheel, and engine, and four tires, so all cars must be the same.
With that kind of poor reasoning, who cares what they have to say regarding Dvorak?
Agreed, being able to type a bit faster is nice, but the main benefit of Dvorak for heavy usage is the improved ergonomics.
Re-training in Dvorak might not be cost-effective for the employer, but how about the poor employee (and their health provider) who gets their wrists f*cked from typing QWERTY all day?
I'm not going to advocate Dvorak for new typists though, because much like QWERTY it was designed for manual typewriters, and computer keyboards are different.
Dvorak tends to split digraphs across the two hands. This is good for mechanical typewriters that require force from the wrist. For computer keyboards, it's faster to type pairs of adjacent letters on the same hand.
Maybe something like 'Snaither' here...
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 [ ]
L F O P J Z M D Y W / =
S N A I . , T H E R -
G U Q B ' ; V K X C
Italian doesn't have a 'y'? Well, at least Italy does.
OK a new size TV
The author ties it all into a criticism of path dependence, the fairly obvious idea that once a particular option becomes entrenched, it can keep superior options from replacing it. To do that, he cites studies that found retraining existing QWERTY typers in Dvorak wasn't cost effective compared to additional training in QWERTY.
Well, duh. That's almost what it means to be an entrenched option. We've reached a local maxima; movement to the global maxima would be costly. Whether or not Dvorak is superior, it is highly unlikely that QWERTY is the perfectly optimal layout, so there's probably some better layout. Yet we're stuck with QWERTY for the conceivable future because QWERTY came first. That is path dependence in action.
The "Z" key in qwerty: pinky finger, lower row. The pinky finger is the least accurate and most quickly tired of the fingers.
The "Y" key in qwerty: index finger, one up and one over from the home keys. The index finger is the strongest and most accurate of the fingers.
I know that the Slashdot editing has a very low reputation around here but I was pretty interested to see how much work was done on this article writeup. You can see mine at the Firehose entry. The Slashdot editor even went to the trouble of looking up prior Dvorak-related articles (and taking the trouble to notice the article I submitted was 13 years old -- whoops)
Wow, you're right. I'll fire off an email to Taco letting him know that kdawson's account has been hacked. That sort of compromise can't be tolerated, even if it's by a benevolent professional editor.
Theoretically interesting, but doesn't align with the facts.
Barbara Blackburn, until her passing the world's fastest typist, typed Dvorak exclusively. She couldn't stand QWERTY and certainly couldn't achieve the speeds she did with QWERTY.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I actually did a large portion of my Master's Thesis on the old Dvorak vs. QWERTY argument, and my own conclusions--as well as the conclusions of the majority of other academic (rather than market) research on the topic--was that DVORAK might have an efficiency advantage of maybe 5% max. The myth of phenomenal gains was started largely by a marketing campaign, and the fake numbers persisted.
So chalk one up for capitalism and advertising, but chalk one up more or less correctly for free markets as well, since QWERTY isn't relying nearly so much on the first-mover advantage as most people think.
But Italy is called Italia in Italy ;)
TFA has two points to make:
1. Bad science has been used in supporting claims of Dvorak's superiority
2. There is evidence that *re*-training in Dvorak isn't cost effective
There's nothing there to suggest that Dvorak isn't superior to QWERTY, at least for those who type Dvorak from the get-go.
Hands up how many Dvorak advocates actually advocate learning QWERTY first, and only then switching to Dvorak? Just for kicks? I thought not.
No 'myth' is being 'debunked' here.
I, personally, find Dvorak a lot more comfortable.
But try this app out: http://colemak.com/Compare
It's a java app that let's you enter text and compare how far your fingers are traveling each time and other fun stats.
Of course, the World's Fastest Typist anecdote is proof, proof I tell you, that ordinary computer geeks are better off with dvorak.
Dvorak: The homeopathy of the keyboard...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
There are language-specific variants of QWERTY too; QWERTZ for German, AZERTY for French, etc.
Is that like saying "bat" is a variant of the word "cat"?
No.
:)
Is this a typical Slashdot-type attempt to make a point and win an argument by bad analogy?! Answering that question properly would probably require more in-depth consideration of linguistics, word origins, meanings, etc. than you intended.
And it would still be a misleading and pointless analogy, so why bother?
I'd say those layouts aren't QWERTY; they're QWERTZ and AZERTY, respectively.
Say that if you want. :) Can't say I feel like getting into a long, pedantic and pointless argument about how one wants to classify them.
I consider them variants because (a) they're near-identical to QWERTY (compared to something like DVORAK) and (b) they're very obviously derived from it.
If that similarity was pure coincidence, I would be more inclined to agree with you, but I doubt that's the case.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
that is like saying russia doesnt have a j and then teling everyone that it's russja.
"Quertz oder stirb!", the favorite opera of true Prussians. Composed 1902 by Antonin Dvorak it later became one the hymn of the national socialist party.
It goes on to say that the researchers who demonstrated Dvorak's superiority didn't explain their methodology well enough. After that everyone accepted the general observation that Dvorak is faster and less stressful do to a secret communist conspiracy.
If this guy is so obsessed with the fucking Dvorak vs. QWERTY debate why doesn't he conduct the experiment again with more stringent methodology? It would be a stunning victory for free market theory if he proved that the QWERTY survived only because it was superior even though it was designed to be slow. Of course, if the experiment doesn't go the way he wants, he'll have to change his religion and I suppose he's not ready to do that.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
*edits my brain* Y is only a vowel in french it seems.
Thanks to you and all the other posters for clearing that up.
If you RTFA, that story isn't as true as you think it is.
You are correct about the design principles behind QWERTY, but your metaphor for human efficiency is terrible. Human fingers are not hammers of a type writer, and do not behave similarly at all.
More importantly, you follow with principles of fast typing as if they support QWERTY over Dvorak, when in fact Dvorak is designed with all of these things in mind. The most commonly used letters are in the home row, but spaced such that the same hand rarely types multiple letters in a row. Meanwhile, with QWERTY, vast quantities of common words are purely or a majority one handed.
Having used Qwerty, then I switched to Dvorak for about a decade. Then I switched back about 4 years ago, so I feel qualified to talk more than most.
* Your fingers move a lot less under Dvorak. You can definitely tell.
* Because your fingers move less, you've got to be more careful about overdoing it and getting RSI. You need to lift your hands up more and do some exercises.
* I think Dvorak is definitely faster with less effort. Maybe Qwerty can be as fast (don't know) but you'll need a lot more training to get there.
* For general use as a programmer, it doesn't matter much. As a secretary typing big documents as quickly as possible its more likely to matter. But typing at the speed of your own thoughts it doesn't matter much.
* At the end of the day the reason I switched back was the annoyance of living in two worlds. If I'm at somebody else's computer with Qwerty, it was a pain. If somebody else came to my computer it was a pain. Yes, to some extent you can learn both, but basically living with both systems was more trouble than it was worth I think. If you don't have anyone else using Qwerty to deal with, it might be worth a go.
I've always said that if Dvorak is the mac of keyboard layouts, Colemak is the Ubuntu. See you on #colemak
Typing is Fun Again.
You make very good points about alternating between hands. The strength of the Dvorak keyboard is that a high percentage of English words are typed in an alternating pattern. In QWERTY there are a lot of words that require typing two consecutive letters with the same finger. In Dvorak, there are quite a few words which can be "rolled". In fact, my most common typing mistakes in Dvorak are hitting the keys in the wrong order because I can basically "press" the word, and it's a matter of the keystrokes landing in the right order. QWERTY typing has a much rougher rhythm to it.
I'm not inclined to believe the article, because my experience relates otherwise.
I was using qwerty for years before I switched to dvorak. Despite spending weeks on typing tutor programs, I was never able to touch-type with qwerty. With dvorak, it came naturally after the first week. Also, I developed pain in my fingers and wrists while typing with qwerty, but it eased away and disappeared soon after I started using dvorak.
I feel a lot more comfortable typing with a dvorak keyboard and my typing speed has improved. So, going with my personal experience, I would say that the dvorak keyboard is significantly superior to qwerty.
Ah, but Dvorak uses hand alteration even more than qwerty.
Since you brought up musical instruments, it's widely known that drumming fingers inwards (pinky to index) is much faster than drumming outwards (index to pinky). Try it! Dvorak layout takes advantage of this in its design, particularly for common two letter combo's (th, st, sh, ch, sc, and so forth).
There are many metrics that can be used to measure typing/finger travel efficiency. Qwerty does well on some, but badly on most of them. Dvorak is one attempt to improve upon qwerty, Colemak is another. Both are *far* more efficient than qwerty.
It doesn't matter though. Most people will have your attitude that "qwerty is good because it's popular", without actually examining anything for themselves. I hope the rest of slashdot is different.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
When someone beats that, you will agree that Colemak is superior.
... Qwerty is a romance language specific layout geared towards english. ...
... Other romance languages have different letter combinations that are not ideal for qwerty.
You seem to be confused. English is not a Romance language. It's more closely related to German.
Who is to say we'll even be needing keyboards in the future?
Colemak has a variant for Windows wherein holding down the space bar flips the keyboard over itself horizontally. It's less than half the speed of one handed typing, but it sure is novel, and great for those times when the other hand is, uh, ..busy.
"convincing-sounding"... wtf does that mean?
How does kdawson work here?
SlashSig Karma: Excellent (mostly affected by moderatio
Dvorak Users: I want the truth, and want to be 'right' in the long term. We are rational and can follow a logical argument. The short term cost of retraining is less than the long term gains of a better layout so we switch.
Learning, science and logic are my friends.
Qwerty Users:
I want to be 'right' now.
There are many of us and we don't like change.
We can construct arguments to support our position.
The ability of the human mind to construct irrational arguments to agree with what a person wants to believe never ceases to amaze me.
Forget global warming, evolution, and other science vs irrational mob arguments. This is the clearest case of irrational thinking amongst them.
Have a look at the keyboard in front of you.
There are three rows of letter keys.
It makes sense that this should be the 'home' row as it is the middle position up / down the keyboard. Now have a look at the keys under your hands : 'ASDF JKL'; Does it make sense to put a J under your right hand index finger given it's infrequent use in english ?
Which keys are the hardest to reach ? T, Y, both relatively common in english, especially T (with left hand).
Put your hands on the desk. Tap your fingers on the desk sequentially inwards and outwards. Notice how much more coordinated you can make them rolling inwards ?
Now lets have a look at english:
Patterns of vowels and consonants following each other.
Consonents and vowels occur regularly grouped like th,ch,wh,oi,ei,ou,st.
Some letters are more popular than others.
Now lets put common two letter groups next to each other, consonants under one hand and vowels under another and attempt to put popular letters within easier reach.
This is pretty much the dvorak layout.
Type 'the' on qwerty. Type 'the' on dvorak.
Can you honestly think that qwerty could be better for typing english ?
I thought about using Dvorak, but the fact that I won't have hjkl together is a no-no.
The really sad part is that, while it kind of makes sense to keep the obsolete QWERTY layout if you assume your customers can't be bothered to learn anything new, it makes no sense to keep the weird horizontal offsets.
The top row is 1/3 of a key to the left, and the bottom row is 1/2 key to the right. This isn't because of some weird anatomical quirk that as your fingers straighten they naturally go a little to the left (on *both* hands?). It's, again, to keep the type heads from jamming: no two keys are in exactly the same x-position. Even with zero retraining, it's *easier* to type on a "matrix" keyboard, yet very few keyboard manufacturers (and no laptop manufacturers) make such keyboards.
Y is a vowel in Swedish too. And it just like GP says about it being able to act as a vowel in German, it can act that way in english too, like in "why".
Indeed, alternating hands is easier, and as a result, one of the design goals of Dvorak was to make keystrokes alternate hands as much as possible. Note that the vowels are all in the left hand, and the most-used consonants in the right. Further, in the Dvorak layout, the most used letters are placed below the stronger fingers.
Also note that QWERTY was designed to keep the hammers from colliding, which has no direct correlation to where the keys are actually located on the keyboard.
Likewise. I am a fluent touchtypist on both layouts, and I find dvorak to be both faster and more comfortable.
I also find the difference to be significantly greater on a keyboard with sound ergonomic layout and minimal finger travel, like the kinesis contoured. Though I'm a programmer and not a trained typist, just from use I can pretty easily type around 100wpm on a kinesis + dvorak.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
I typed a few years in QUERTY up to a good touch typing efficiency. Then I played with the idea of switching to Dvorak. Took me a lot of self conviction, but I finally just switched the layout. The first day was totally confusing. Then it got better. Then worse again, because the old reflexes snaped in again. After 1-2 months the conversion was about done. Now I use it since a few years and never had even the slightest desire to switch to QUERTY again.
Speed is one thing and back when there was a guiness book discipline for touch typing - dvorak was on the first place, but the more important thing is, that it does not stress the hands too much and I don't get RSI even with much typing. There is another thing: it is actually fun typing in Dvorak.
Now I don't care what market analysts say. Especially people who don't type in Dvorak. It's like the Windows vs. Linux discussion. Linux people know why they like Linux because they use it. Windows people have no clue. Gets old.
Dvorak is a more efficient layout, allowing a typist to type more words with less finger movement. The advantage has been quantified:
There isn't any logical reason why one would be "better" than the other in all cases. It's just a matter of personal preference.
And I thought french had too many exceptions *shakes head*
The Betamax videorecording system was introduced by Sony in 1975. Well before VHS (Video Home System) in 1976. The Japanese did not have 2 hour movie blocks with commercial like the US, and therefore the Betamax format only recorded 60 minutes per tape in its original version, the L500, 90 minutes on the L750. The first version of VHS could record 2 hours per tape, and worked better with the US networks habit or showing a feature film spread over 2 hours with commercials filling the extra time.
So, this is now a good example of first in the market establishing an indomitable foothold. More of a lack of understanding of the consumer market.
And I thought french had too many exceptions *shakes head*
You, my friend, don't seem to have ever come across the German language. In comparison, French is well-ordered and intiutive. (And yes, I'm fluent in German and a good French speaker)
Quantum hacker.
After I installed speech recognition to my IBM Selectric laptop, I never looked back. You have to get it.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
Remember, kids! Don't pick your nose with your pinky or you'll poke your eyes out!
I type "wrong" but still manage to hit 50-60 wpm when I'm in my stride. I'm not a secretary, nor a programmer. I work in technical support. Some of that support is managed through a chat program. I can handle 4 separate customers, plus questions from subordinates via GAIM/Pigeon, on my QWERTY keyboard.
I use whatever fingers feel comfortable at the time. It depends on the words being typed whether it's the left or right hand. The majority of the typing is done with my index fingers, but ring fingers on each hand get their fair share, as well as the occasional thumb for the spacebar, depending on what the index fingers are doing at the time.
Yeah, I backspace a lot, but still type faster than almost anyone I work with.
I could probably do the same thing with a Dvorak keyboard after a few weeks or practice, but why would I bother? What would be the benefit to learning a new keyboard that would only be at home? Work likely wouldn't provide me with a new keyboard without a valid reason. I have no family nor friends who use Dvorak keyboards. While it would annoy my wife on those rare occasions when she needed to use my computer, that's not enough of a reason to move over.
Please don't humanize the morons around me. It makes me very uncomfortable.
I also type Japanese in Dvorak, on occasion. I can't see how any language could be better in that POS QWERTY layout than Dvorak. A particular lameness is that XP requires a registry edit to use the IME and dvorak at the same time. Without it you can have dvorak, or you can have Japanese, but you can't eat it too.
1. This is not news -- to put it mildly.
2. As has been pointed out every time this comes up, the "research" isn't even CLOSE to addressing the real claims of Dvorak advocates. (Hint: Any test under about ten years isn't going to give you a fair comparison to "experienced" keyboard users...)
3. Furthermore, this also doesn't hint at issues related to RSI. I didn't switch to Dvorak because it was "faster" -- I switched because I was hurting my hands. Switching seemed to have helped, because my fingers moved in different patterns.
4. Why, oh why, is kdawson still able to post garbage like this? This is not news, it's not stuff that matters. It's a "debunking" over a decade old with major, blindingly-obvious, flaws. I don't even think this is the first time it's been on Slashdot in particular.
Can't we PLEASE get someone in who has actually read Slashdot before, and knows both what kind of material is suitable, and what's already been posted?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
The problem that I have with dvorak is that when you type on it you feel like your right hand is doing far more work than the left hand since the positioning of the letters.
This is fine for people who are right-handed, but tends to be problematic for people such as myelf whom are left handed.
Qwerty is more spread across both sides of the keyboard, and a lot of words can be made with just the left hand alone.
You might only feel this sort of "strain" if you're a left-handed typist.
I might regret admitting this, seeing as I like to think I'm not a bad writer, but... flunked? What the hell is wrong with it? Sure, it doesn't flow very nicely (I'd probably try to look for something better), but the meaning is strictly correct ("not superior" != "inferior", if that's what you're thinking) and it's unambiguous. I would've thought that would be important for what techies write.
Also look at the African folk instrument known as the thumb piano
or, more appropriately, the mbira.
Does anyone else have any real data to compare?
http://klausler.com/evolved.html
I would give dvorak a try but I still can't fathom how vi/emacs would work.
y?
What the hell is wrong with it?
I think this is the sort of question that cannot be answered in English to a non-native English speaker. What is your native language?
- Your friendly neighborhood English spelling and grammar nazi
Pretty much every libertarian economist who has respect for empiricism has renounced their purist point of view on this subject since the credit crash.
There are no semantics to argue this time around like there were in others, libertarian theory failed.
The economy is composed of people, just like society. The government was removed (no more police), and we had anarchy in which the most predatory rose to the top (or raced to the bottom), took their share, and bailed, letting everyone else take the fallout.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
DOS- What is windows.
Better? Or the original is obsolete? ( VHS/Beta) vs DVD.
There is a winner takes all that can't be denied.
Dvorak is better-- BUT, it's not a mouse. It's not a light pen.
When we have direct brain plug in control, both Dvorak and Qwerty will be obsolete but Dvorak will still have been better.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
and you will see using DVORAK your fingers move less to type an average amount of text.
however, at the time of this experiment, I didn't know what "ergonomic" meant.
I switched to Dvorak 2 years ago. Before that I had typed Qwerty for about 20 years. I feel that I have a good sense of the strengths and weaknesses of both. On paper, Dvorak looks great and Qwerty looks terrible. But Dvorak isn't without its warts, and Qwerty isn't all that bad for those who don't experience discomfort from it. In my experience, Dvorak relieved the pain in my hands and wrists (although the right pinky took some time to stregthen). My hands and fingers would tire very easily when typing Qwerty. As for speed, I feel they are roughly equivalent, although my speed has increased approx 10 wpm. I know some very fast Qwerty typists (~160 wpm), and some very fast Dvorak typists (~165 wpm). As for me, I peaked at about 95 wpm. As a side note, Dvorak isn't the only alternative layout that I have worked with. I also spent some time on modified version of the carpalx BULPKM layout and stuck with it until I was up to about 60 wpm. That layout was extremely comfortable to type on (noticeably better than even Dvorak), but it was apparent that comfort was the goal as opposed to speed.
As I was preparing to take the GREs this fall, I was astounded to discover that the only keyboard layout for the Analytical Writing portion of the exam was QWERTY. There was no way for me to use Dvorak. I've been using Dvorak since freshman year, and it has become ingrained in my muscle memory. I'd completely forgotten QWERTY.
So in addition to studying words and practicing math problems, I also had to completely relearn how to type. This experience has been repeated time and time again when I need to do searches on public computer terminals. I really should switch entirely back to QWERTY.
...I use Colemak. Switching from QWERTY took a few weeks to get back up to 85 wpm, and my wrist forearm fatigue left and never returned.
It's not necessarily faster but it sure is more comfortable, at least for me.
I claim, you claim, he/she claims, they claimed.
The Dvorak layout can't claim anything by itself, it needs an actor. So "Dvorak layout has been claimed (not to be)", or "Dvorak layout is claimed (not to be)" would just about work. Both of those imply an actor. Typical newspaper crap headline.
People complain about grammar nazis wasting so much time on things that seem so petty, but I think it's only fair when you consider how much of your life is taken up by trying to understand what something means when you should be able to just read it and get on with your life. This is why there are so many arguments at times, merely because the poster didn't make themselves clear, and time is wasted going down the path of misunderstanding.
And those who prefer the retort "language changes, get over it" are just idly proclaiming their own ignorance, as well as missing the great subtlety and nuance that the English language can impart - when used correctly. Otherwise, things get worse as fewer words have to impart greater meaning. So sue me if I try to at least educate those who make genuine mistakes. Typos happen, but if the word is completely wrong contextually, that makes whoever wrote it look foolish and takes away from whatever argument they were trying to make. Surely the right thing to do when spotting an genuine error is to inform the person so they know for next time ? Or is that too communistic ?
I suspect a lot of people who post here would cheerfully direct a foreign tourist to the wrong place 'for a laugh'. Having been a foreign tourist myself, I don't find it funny in the least. If they are making an effort to be understood in your language, at least have the decency to help out. Unless your hovercraft really is full of eels.
Beta did extremely well, just not as a consumer product. Betacam was the standard for the broadcast industry for years.
MiniDisc is *still* doing quite well, just not as a consumer product worldwide.
Just because they did not *win the war* so to speak for consumer home-use does not mean they failed in any real sense of the word. This is not like HD-DVD which was available for a year and a half and then nobody made it anymore...that was a failed format.
Both of these media formats have done quite well and made a lot of money for SONY.
I have GOT to learn Dvorak so I can type one-handed! That would leave my other hand free for... um... coffee!
Assumption: alternating between left and right hand letters is fast and easy on the muscles (I think this has been found to be true, but I can't find the study)
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -E "^([qwertasdfgzxcvb][yuiophjklnm])+\$" | wc -l
254
$ cat /usr/share/dict/words | grep -E "^([pyaoeuiqjkx][fcgrldhtnsbmwvz])+\$" | wc -l
637
Conclusion: dvorak allows you to type 2-3 times as many words using the alternating hands technique
(Note: the regex is inexact, missing out words which start on the right hand side, or are an odd number of characters long; I leave a more complete regex as an excercise to the reader :-) )
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
I heard that it's good, so I learned it a few years ago during my high school summary holiday.
It took me 4 weeks to fly at the same speed as QWERTY.
More importantly, because I started playing computer at may be 4 yo, although I did touch typing with QWERTY, but might be grown up using wrong finger to hit the wrong key. Learning Dvorak allows me to relearn the keyboard, which might helps a bit.
RSI wise...I once developed a RSI symptom in a month on my left pinky, because I was working on an embedded system which translates to a lot CTRL-F5, Ctrl-this, Ctrl-that to for compiling, trail-and-error and so on. Since then, I switch the Caps Lock and Ctrl key, and the symptom goes away in one day!
The letter y functions as a vowel in some cases. Think of ay, hoy, rey, buey, Paraguay.
I find the Dvorak-LH to be very useful. I have redtube open in another window, and I can type with my left hand while my right hand is occupied with another activity.
both developed by sony+phillips.
I think you answered your own question here. Sony+Philips is not Sony. Sony's failures in media are all about the attempt to assert control too early in the demand curve. When they split ownership of a standard with Philips, they surrender the ability to assert control.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Most people don't put in effort to learn QWERTY, they just learn because they have to type on it.
To switch to Dvorak you actually have to put in effort to learn it, thus people type faster on Dvorak because they've had more focused practice.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
Your post seems to suggest you believe English is a Romantic language. It is in fact a Germanic language.
The Admin and the Engineer
Silly question, but if it's to keep adjacent hammers from colliding, why not just put the hammers in a different order and leave the keys alone?
I don't know about you guys, but I prefer QWERTY because I can easily type "lol" repeatedly on one hand while having the other hand ready to cover my mouth in laughter, depending on how many "lol's" I type.
This comes really handy in conversations which use internet in pluralized form and conversations with cats with "lol" as the prefix.
"Hegelians, who love a synthesis, will probably conclude that he wears a wig." - Bertrand Russell
Bela Fleck's documentary film Throw Down Your Heart
You know, I read that as Black Fella's, must be an Australian thing.
At least it's not about static versus dynamic typing, for once! :)
And how does a duck type!?
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Guess you havent been to Italia then eh?
About six years ago I took it upon myself to switch to Dvorak. Not for speed, but for ergonomics (wrist pain that I was hoping to head off before it got worse). After reading up on things I concluded that QWERTY wasn't as terrible as everyone wanted to think it was, but I did think that Dvorak would win on comfort due to reduced finger travel. After my switch I picked up a Kinesis Contoured keyboard and after I found I could still type QWERTY fine after the initial Dvorak learning period, I ended up relocating a few keys (the L so 'ls' was two-handed, and a bunch of punctuation), and now have been typing for most of the 6 years on the new, modified Dvorak format (detailed more here: http://www.interloper.net/keyboard/). I'd say don't switch your keyboard unless you really are having ergonomic issues--it's a pain and takes months to get back up to speed again. For me personally however my Dvorak-modified variant has been great...no more wrist pain...much greater comfort, and for whatever reason I'm still fine on QWERTY when I need to be (maybe at 50-60 wpm instead of the 70-80 I do on my modified Dvorak layout). - Bill
That's hardly a single phoneme.
Ignore this signature. By order.
The usual Croatian keyboard layout is pretty much ripped from German, substituting umlauts for Croatian diacritics. Therefore, it is also a QWERTZ layout – except on the Mac.
I find I like Mac's QWERTY layout better even though Y is rarely used in Croatian (it is not even in our alphabet): I have fairly short index fingers, so I have poor control over the middle of the keyboard.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Fully ACK, the weird tilt is kind of driving me nuts because it so obviously just doesn't make any sense and would be easy to fix. Even the ergonomic split keyboards don't fix it.
The really annoying part for me is that my 'perfect' keyboard was already build, detachable numpad, trackball in the middle, matrix layout, split layout... all the good stuff I miss on my current keyboard. Sadly its just a prototype that never entered production.
Reading comprehension fail for you, "Latin languages" is a way of referring to the romance languages, such as French and Spanish, which both have 'y's in them.
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
The variants of Qwerty are referred to as variants of Qwerty. What you say is neither insightful nor true. Just like American English is a (well several actually) variant of English, but it is still called English, not American.
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
Try listening to a VHS HiFi tape over five years old. There's NO stereo left! Next, try a Beta-100% of the strero is still there! This is because beta left space FOR stereo, while VHS never did-and had to go go a two depth recording system that simply goes away over time.
IIRC, QWERTY was developed to DELIBERATELY slow down typists! See, many typists were able to type faster then the typewriters of the time could go, causing lock ups, jamming, etc. SO they developed the QWERTY keyboard to force them to slow down!
If one of my writing students had created that headline, I'd have flunked him.
"...claimed not superior to..."?
I consider myself an excellent technical writer with several published papers to my name, and I don't see anything wrong that headline. What aspect of it are you objecting to?
Y is a vowel in scandinavian languages as well as Finnish.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Their failure is about their insistence on seizing control before the proper point in the demand curve. Everything they do where they split control with somebody else is irrelevant to the question because when they do that they lack the failure mode control that they use to prevent their own success.
Is that so hard? They shoot themselves in the foot over and over. It's not my fault.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
One, I know what romance languages are asshat. Two, grandparent did not say some, so all is to be understood. Fail for you and DIE IN A FIRE.
So I'll give this guidance for free.
SONY: When you develop a new medium, and it looks like the best thing, be patient.
When the director of the division comes to you and says, "now is the time to strike" he has measured the market and he's wrong. Fire him on the spot and mark your calendar. Cut your margins to almost zero and grant liberal terms for limited periods. Three years from that day, the time is ripe. You will then win and can then charge as much as the market will bear.
Or don't... and I will taunt you again.
Poor bastards probably aren't reading this anyway.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I think the objective is not to reach the absolute maximum, but a point where additional improvements are not significant. In computer science the simulated annealing method employs this principle. And the author's mention of studies on the cost/benefit ratio of retraining typers in Dvorak vs. giving them further training in QWERTY seems to corroborate this.
The myth that the article tries to debunk is that a particular market choice is dictated largely by luck, whoever comes first will dominate. This is true only for largely equivalent choices, where the difference between both is small. For instance, I saw a side by side comparison of Beta vs VHS once, with well maintained equipment for both technologies, and didn't see any advantage in Beta that would offset the difference in recording times. If there's a significant difference, the best option will prevail, even if the other one dominates the market at some time. The Ford model T once dominated the car market, but its peculiar pedal layout was never adopted by other manufacturers and Ford itself ended accepting the alternative user interface in the later model A.
I have considered adopting the Dvorak layout myself, with computers this is very easy. Even with typewriters this wouldn't be too difficult, as the article mentions, it would be just a matter of resoldering the types and keys. However, what would this accomplish? My greater problem is not typing text, but all the special symbols that computer programming needs. I ended by switching from Perl to Python, instead of from QWERTY do Dvorak.
*Has hayz memories of tzping emails home from Germanz*
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
y as a vocal comes from the ancient greek
take care
a.
On a mechanical typewriter, the levers were arranged in strict left-to-right order, ignoring the row.
That is, the actual order was 1QAZ2WSX3EDC4RFV... well you get the idea. Keys on the same row were four levers apart, much reducing the risk of jamming.
You can still find a few common letter combinations, but you should be looking up/down rather than left/right.
"Claimed not superior to" is different than "claimed inferior to" and "claimed equivalent to". If the headline summary reflects the research findings which falsify the hypothesis "Dvorak is superior to QWERTY", then the author's choice of words are accurate, if poorly chosen.
It could be the case that your "F" should be just a "C" (for crummy style).
(Credential/Disclaimer: I am a professor of English.)
blog
Dvorak.
....but it makes a great password.
Atleast it served me well on /. for 10+ years.
(Now sit back and watch the ankle biters try to log on as moi....)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
yep, they sure do.
Y is a consonant in German as well.
Nope.
I'm late into this story, and a lot has been said about this subject by now. Suffice it to say that I use Dvorak (the Norwegian variant with æÃÃ¥) and like it a lot. I don't need to type any faster than I can think, but it's nice to type comfortably.
Here, take this test:
This page shows the (standard US) qwerty and Dvorak layouts side-by-side. Feed it some text and it displays some statistics.
The statistics very clearly show how most hits on a qwerty keyboard are on the top row, while Dvorak scores between half and two thirds of all hits on the home row.
Actually, this very post has 62% of its characters on the home row on Dvorak, compared to only 32% on Qwerty (and 22% on the top row on Dvorak, compared to 47% on Qwerty). Another (scientifically speaking less 'hard') piece of data is finger movement: figures are 16.5m and 25.8m for Dvorak and qwerty, respectively. In other words, Dvorak gets you the same result with 36% less effort.
"Good news, everyone!"
Do "Dvorak" type keyboards exist for languages beside English?
The common shortcuts are too valuable to give up. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X, Alt-F, etc. are all in the wrong place on the keyboard when you switch to Dvorak. I tried to learn it for a little while, but I quickly gave up after running into this real-world problem.
Yeah, I suppose I could've gone through and re-mapped those shortcuts, but that would've been a pain in the butt doing at every computer I ever sit down at, for every application.
And your point is?
I type at just over 100 WPM. I couldn't achieve even a tenth of that speed with Dvorak. In fact, I type QWERTY exclusively.
I guess that proves how useless Dvorak is!
If horizontal distance is so important, why are t and h so close horizontally? 'th' is the most common English digraph.
By the way, while we're talking about technical reasons to choose qwerty, the fact that the letters in 'typewriter' are all on the top row is a nice argument.
This rambling is incoherent. -1
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
One things that inspired me to finally take the leap to learn Dvorak was http://www.dvzine.org/zine/index.html. I think it handles many of the myths that are referred to in various comments here.
I switched about a year ago, and I'm much more comfortable writing Dvorak that I was qwerty, even though I was writing about 100 wpm in qwerty.
1. No, I'm not writing much faster on Dvorak.
2. Yes, I'm still making errors, but different ones than on qwerty.
3. No, it is not harder to write code in dvorak (I do it all day).
But most importantly:
4. I think it feels much better. I alternate much more between my hands (more or less every other letter) and I don't have to move as much. The fingers gets to move in much more comfortable patterns, something I notice when trying to write qwerty again, which I now find painful.
Also check out the EZ-Reach keyboard from www.typematrix.com. No matter if you're writing dvorak or qwerty, it is a great keyboard! I've had it for two years and I love it dearly.
While his article makes some interesting discussion, and some nice points, the most important piece of his 'persuasion' is in the experimental evidence he is seeking to provide. That evidence comes from a study conducted through the Navy and he describes how in their study Dvorak did not display the 'benefit' let alone a significant one.
However there is an enourmous flaw that I can't ignore, the complete lack of validity to this study. Having spent time studying it (see next paragraph) that 'study' is basically a text book example of how NOT to perform experimental research. It violated just about every single method of control that it encountered and was extremely biased. So much so that it was later used as a case study of how not to conduct research in one of my classes.
I say this all because I am familiar with the topic. When I was in college (graduated in '06) I took two courses of note: Human Factors in Design, and Research Methods and Statistics. The professor who teaches them both, had (and usually has) many students cross-enrolled and allows the semester project to be combined if appropriate subject matter is used. I combined my projects and the focus area was Dvorak and alternative layouts over QWERTY.
What I uncovered in background in a nutshell was as I said above. A seriously flawed study. Inadequate rest was given to the subjects, no control over ordering, while it can't be blind to subject the ordering the subjects were using should have been blind to the proctors. The assumed acceptable time for training on DVORAK was an extremely lowball guess. Furthermore there was a study the Navy 'funded' that showed the results the other way which they abandoned (as well as other studies from other branches). The entire study couldn't have been much more biased.
Furthermore if you are familiar with QWERTY, the very DESIGN of it was to slow you down. QWERTY was designed to prevent typewriters from jamming. Jams were caused by people typing too rapidly; QWERTY was enough of a hinderence to prevent it. By the time computers rolled around, there were so many typewriters and people trained and invested in the QWERTY layout that people simply didn't want to switch. Additionally companies likely didn't (and don't) want to replace their entire office at once; or to have to spend time and effort re-training.
We can see this kind of legacy hinderence throughout the market place; where despite a better product being around, the adoption of prior less ideal but acceptable product is so widespread that it can be disadvantageous to switch.
I'm not even going to waste my time talking about the details of the ergonomics. The only point I will make there is one that even DVORAK still had room for improvement on. That is balance of finger use. On a QWERTY keyboard there is an extreme overuse of the pinky and ring fingers compared to the middle, index, and sadly the most dexterous of all the thumb; (especially as compared to their relative strengths)
The problem is that while for a machine pushing each key is equally difficult; and thus jams are matter of angles; it is not so for a human. Pushing certain keys is more difficult than others.
I apologize that much of this has been said prolly, but I couldn't avoid commenting on a horrible post. Take a 13 year old article now, and make that article about a then 19 year old experiment. Clearly in the past 32 years or so we haven't had any advances in the standards for conducting valid research. Let alone advances in our very understanding of the underlying factors (many of which didn't have names when this study was conducted).
FAIL :-)
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
Getting the best results from a market require that all participants have perfect information (which implies they've spent the time to do a full analysis of all their options). This never happens.
Since perfect information never happens, isn't it a bit silly to make it a requirement for best results?
Sounds very much like the old wives' tales emitted by half-baked econ profs, kinda reminds me of a toothpaste tube ;-)
It is making the impossible perfect be the enemy of the real good: that markets deal very well with imperfect information. People (companies, countries) can pay to be ignorant - thus saving their time for other endeavors (or in the case of countries, Endeavours) - or they can be wise misers.
I knew a Congressman's private secretary who could type 90 wpm, at least triple my ten-fingered speed. Her weapon of choice was an IBM Selectric sporting a snazzy qwerty keyboard. That, and absinthe, IIRC. Something green. Maybe it was Mountain Dew?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Before I switched to Dvorak two years ago, my wrists and knuckles would hurt after extended writing sessions. Doesn't happen anymore.
I'm not concerned about the speed. Why would you care about that, unless you are doing data entry for a living?
You may not be a "proper" keyboardist but learning Dvorak is the perfect excuse to become a proper keyboardist, because you can't tell from the look of the key what it does. This forces you to look at the screen, which is where you should be looking.
With Qwerty, the temptation is too strong to look down all the time. Looking at the screen, you can see mistakes immediately and correct them much faster. In fact, correcting common mistakes becomes entirely routine and one tends to reach the end of a section without leaving any mistakes.
The secret is just to type "poise " over and over again...
If people complain that the text doesn't make sense, I explain that it's sound poetry.
How so?
qwerty was invented in the US for english language keyboards on typewriters. The layout was expanded to other romance languages such as french, german, and italian. in germany its QWERTZ and in france it is AZERTY.
Your statement is incorrect. This is a layout geared towards english and the design is specific to romance languages of which english in one of.
Being able to move around your cursor and delete and edit things without leaving your home position can easily *double* your editing speed. That's the reason why people still love vi and Emacs. And this is not a joke.
Well almost. You still have to reach for the ESC key to switch between typing and moving the cursor. I find that slightly harder than reaching for the enter or backspace keys. You can train yourself to reach for it in a certain location, then find that when you switch to a laptop you keep hitting backquote or F1 instead.
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
That said, it's really only good for English, which isn't an issue to me but would of course be for people who type more often in other languages. ..Just wanted to point out that there are other reasons for other keyboard layouts, accessibility for the disabled among them.
Totally agreed. Actually, I type a lot in both English and German, and so I end up using the QWERTY-like setup of QWERTZUIOP from the German keyboard. Of course, this gives me three keys that I rarely ever hit: Ã-ÃÃoe, but meh, I'm pretty used to it now.
When I was using Swedish English and German a lot all together, I was actually using the Swedish keyboard, since the Ãoe was easier to type on the Swedish keyboard than the Ã... on the German. But now I'm on a Mac, an Ã... is just Opt-Shift-A, and the much more common use of German over Swedish won me over. It's also nice having the  ` and ^ deadkeys available for all the romance languages. I can actually talk about resumés, and fiancés appropriately.
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
... WTF doesn't Slashdot understand UTF-8 input?
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
First, I'm pretty sure I've seen this article before. How does a 1996 article suddenly become news?
There's a hole in the guy's argument that I'dn't seen before though:
Perfectly operating markets rely on perfect information flowing to all the participants. Approximately perfect markets rely on participants having approximately perfect information. If A is true, it's okay that some people believe A and some believe B; the people who believe A will be rewarded by the market, thus encouraging people to be right. However, if A is true and there is a persistent myth that almost everyone believes that B is true, its a real market killer. In that case, the market will make decisions based on B and will radically misprice anything affected by A or B. (As an example, circa 2006, A = house prices are going to fall, B = seriously falling house prices are negligably improbable.)
Thus if it's true that Dvorak keyboards aren't actually better while the persistent myth says they are, that would be a mark against the perfectly optimal free market. To recover, they would have to argue that, while the Dvorak myth persists, no similar myths exist for economically important realities. They don't do that.
Arguments of perfection really do free market theory a grave disservice. Outside of God's Heaven (which I don't think literally exists) nothing is perfect. Being unaware of your imperfections is an invitation for them to overwhelm you.
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
FTFY.
I don't see much right it.
At the bottom of the
Both Dvorak and qwerty were hand-designed layouts for typewriters. Since computers are much better at optimizing over permutations of a large number of objects than humans, anyone considering learning a non-standard layout should strongly consider one of the modern computer-optimized layouts.
If you have a qwerty background and care at least a little about standardization, colemak is a modern layout that includes ease of transition from qwerty in its design. I've been using colemak for about a year, and can touch type in both qwerty and colemak. The transition was very fast and painless for me, especially for conversational English. If you go in with reasonable expectations, you'll probably be surprised how quickly your mind can adapt.
http://colemak.com/
If you don't care about standardization at all, you can download software to tune a layout for the sort of typing you do here:
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/
Dvorak is one attempt to improve upon qwerty, Colemak is another. Both are *far* more efficient than qwerty.
It doesn't matter though.
This is only true if you consider four to six percentage points enough to classify them as "far more efficient". No one says that QWERTY is the best, only that the alternatives are not demonstrably superior to the degree that retraining is worth the effort.
Most people will have your attitude that "qwerty is good because it's popular", without actually examining anything for themselves. I hope the rest of slashdot is different.
Most people have the attitude that QWERTY is good enough--- and they're right.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Theoretically interesting, but doesn't align with the facts.
Barbara Blackburn, until her passing the world's fastest typist, typed Dvorak exclusively. She couldn't stand QWERTY and certainly couldn't achieve the speeds she did with QWERTY.
The previous record holder before her got 198wpm out of QWERTY in 1998. If all the previous record holders going back to the 40's used Dvorak, your point might have had some merit, but given that QWERTY and Dvorak both seem to produce record holders, the layout used by "Fastest Typists" is completely irrelevant to the discussion.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
As an experiment in grad school, for about 6 months I completely switched over to Dvorak. It wasn't about becoming a faster typist; I'm a pretty capable typist on QWERTY (> 100 wpm), and in a practical sense I find that thinking of what to type is usually the rate-limiting factor. I had two goals: (a) See whether and how quickly my brain could retrain, and (b) See whether there was any impact on some mild pain in my wrists (I was doing a lot of typing).
As others have pointed out, with keyboard remapping it's easy to get Dvorak on any computer you might happen to use. So in a practical sense there is no longer any lock-in of that type.
My experience:
Ultimately I switched back to QWERTY for the keyboard shortcut issue noted above. Dvorak didn't have nearly as much impact on my wrist pain as taking breaks from work did.
My conclusion is that QWERTY vs Dvorak is largely irrelevant. There may have been more relevance before computers, when a lot of typing was done as dictation or copying. However most people today type as they're composing the words, and I strongly suspect brain speed is the practical limiting factor, not keyboard layout.
Oh, I'm sure there's a healthy bit of that... I haven't found too many exeptions to what I learned in pre-school french yet. A vowel is a vowel is a vowel...
Semi-vowels?
I think it might count as a single phoneme in its native Czech? Not sure, IANAL (I am not a linguist).
I picked up awerty pretty fast in France, so really the only thing keeping me from switching to dvorak is that I would probably pick colemac first. Just 'cause.
(what's keeping me from colemac? lazy)
What makes you think that the alphabet distribution change so much between languages to make Dvorak worse than Qwerty for typing non-english?
Maybe it's true if you write in polish or asdfish; when typing in Italian I feel clearly that my fingers have to travel around much less when using Dvorak layout instead of qwerty.
Consider using the " key to put words in quotes. It'll look less stupid.
I am a linguist, and a native speaker of a Slavic language (not Czech, though).
I know of no Slavic language that would have such a phoneme. In fact, I don't know a single language with a single phoneme such as this, which may be because it is hard to combine a dental plosive (d) with a labial approximant (v) into a single phoneme (warning: actual phonemes associated with letters may differ, depending on language). While it is conceivable that a letter combination would signify something other than its components (look no further than English, with ghoti as the mock-alternative spelling for fish), Slavic languages all have pretty much phonetic ortography, and 'dv' is not a digraph.
Ignore this signature. By order.
And if this country had been run on libertarian principles for the last 100 years, you might have a point.
When the government demands that lenders make more loans to the least qualified people, when the government enforces a debt-based monetary policy, how exactly is that libertarian?
Mir tut es leid, Menschen daß Einfältigfehlersuchenbaumfolgendenaffen sind.
You seem to know absolutely nothing about languages. German is not a Romance language at all, any more than Chinese is. English, too, is no more a Romance language than Russian is.
My question is: what's the point of swapping two keys around (such as Z and Y in this case), but not the rest of the letters? If you're going to mess with the layout, with the intention of making it more optimal for a specific language, then why not optimize it completely, instead of doing such a half-assed job?
I'm sure that it depends entirely on the language. English and Italian are pretty different, but they do have a number of similarities, as English borrows a lot from Latin. With a language like Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc., (even in their Latin-alphabet forms), Dvorak probably isn't much of a help at all.
No different to most other half-assed jobs: can't be bothered, cost too much, or both.
At the bottom of the