No, this is not true. The original marketing of Dvorak concerned speed and accuracy. The question here is about RSI. And my specific experience is that Dvorak makes a dramatic difference in the ability to use a keyboard constantly without RSI becoming an issue.
I am a programmer and, while in college, was a data-entry droid on the side.
About 5 years into my profesional career, carpal-tunnel took over and I could no longer user my hands and wrists without significant paint from my forearms up into my palms and fingers. I had to wear braces nearly 24-hours a day to protect my wrists.
Switching to Dvorak ended the pain within two weeks and I've not had the pain or the braces since. The change was absolutely that dramatic.
In western society, we live under a fallacy that some research can quote a statistic and that somehow that statistic will make a difference in your life. If some research finds that 50% of respondents had an overage reduction in pain of 65%, that in no way means that half of me is going to feel 2/3rds better. Nor can you quote the statistic and say with certainty that I will or will not feel better. Neither approach is truthful or accurate.
Every single reader of this thread has a different structural set-up of their arm/wrist/hand bones. Everyone has different sensitivities in their neural sheath in the wrist. Really, the only way you are going to know if this will help is to try it. The test on you is the only one that matters to you. You might also want to try some of the other suggestions in this thread. Find something that works for you. Dvorak worked for me.
But to tell anyone that any particular mechanism is bogus or is your salvation is inaccurate at best and irresponsible at worst.
Find something that works for you. Dvorak worked for me, and it worked dramatically. And it might be a waste of time for you.
I had to switch to Dvorak specifically for RSI reasons. One (1) subject does not a statistically significant population make. However, before Dvorak, I had to wear wrist braces when attempting to alleviate stinging shooting pains from my forearms up into my palms and fingers. After Dvorak, the pain and the braces went away. The change was that dramatic.
I often have to do the switch between Dvorak and QWERTY and it isn't always instantaneous, but it isn't rocket science either. I am bi-keyboardal. I can touch type on both systems (as soon as the brain makes the switch).
Both Linux and Windows support switching keymappings out easily. So I have a QWERTY layout keyboard (that is, the *printing* on the keycaps says QWERTY....) for the sake of visitors and I can swap back and forth with keyboard short-cuts. The brain goes along, if sometimes reluctantly.
As far as speed and accuracy are concerned, I am significantly faster with Dvorak, as long as I know exactly what I'm gonna type. Coming up with content is the constraining factor for me, not typing. I am also more accurate with Dvorak, though that might be solely due to it being my favorite layout.
I've tried other keyboards that are specifically for ease of use or RSI considerations (like the Natural keyboard). But I haven't seen any change that is as drastically useful as just switching to the Dvorak keymap.
I like Lyx, but I just can't find enough templates. And I can't see how to create them myself (I am ignorant of TeX and LaTeX). I've used Lyx to produce a letter and the output was tremendous. But that is the only template I've found useful.
I've search high and low for new templates and there just doesn't seem to be a huge community for these things (or at least Google doesn't get it).
Dvorak may have made up marketing fluff but...
on
New Standard Keyboard
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· Score: 1
It works anyway. I had bad carpal tunnel from doing data entry for inventory. It stayed troublesome no matter how manner rubber egg-shaped devices I squeezed, no matter how many metal chinese balls I rolled in my hands, no matter... well you get the picture.
I switched to Dvorak and the carpal tunnel went away.
I regard this study more highly than any other (though, you might not).
Re:Examples of Math books for lay people
on
Prime Obsession
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· Score: 1
The best math book ever has to be Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Thompson and edited by Martin Gardener.
I studied Calc for 4 semesters to get a Math Minor for my B.S. degree. I can honestly say I left college with little idea what calculus was. Within 4 chapters of this book, by and large, I got what I'd been missing: a practical descriptive answer for "What the heck is calculus?".
In the fall of '84 I was working at a well-funded DoD facility outside of DC. We had the new-fangled contraptions called Grid computers. They were really laptops, as long as your lap could support 15lbs (IIRC) and you didn't mind reading a red-colored monochrome screen about 4" diagonal in size. But I digress...
The interesting part was that it would hang every so often. And our techs would come to the office, hold the laptop one foot above the desk or the floor and drop it. Reboot and everything is fine. I kid you not, this was actually in the support manual. This was what our techs were taught.
You'll have to go the print edition for this story, but I've read it and it's worth the effort. In fact I find NewScientist to be one of the few periodicals to which I would re-subscribe almost without thinking.
I don't wish to step on their copyright so I'm only going to quote the beginning of the story:
Four days that shook the world. New Scientist vol 182 issue 2446 - 08 May 2004, page 32
Just when you thought the dust had settled on the cause of the demise of the dinosaurs, there's a new type of catastrophe kicking it up again. Forget meteorites and mega-volcanoes, Verneshots are the real culprit, says Kate Ravilious
THE Earth exploded under their feet. Noxious gases spouted into the atmosphere and quickly circulated around the globe. The ground shook with the force of a hundred massive earthquakes, and 20 gigatonnes of the Earth's crust and mantle were blasted into the sky before raining back down onto the surface. It was a terrible day for the dinosaurs. They never recovered.
Is this, at last, a true description of what happened 66 million years ago? The argument over what killed the dinosaurs has raged for 25 years, and has polarised into two opposing camps: a meteorite impact, or a prolonged bout of mega-volcanism called a continental flood basalt.
But now a team from Geomar, an earth sciences institute at Kiel University in Germany, has come up with a completely new type of geological catastrophe to explain the death of the dinosaurs, as well as three previous mass extinctions. If they are right the culprit was neither a meteorite nor a flood basalt, but a colossal underground explosion called a Verneshot.
As yet the idea is in its infancy (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol 217, p 263). But the Verneshot hypothesis has one big advantage over its rivals. It explains a mystery that haunts the debate over mass extinctions: why the extinctions always seem to coincide with both continental flood basalts and meteorite impacts when the odds of these happening simultaneously are vanishingly slim.
The whole seperation of content thing is crap, though. The structure of the HTML still affects both the layout and the formatting, so there's no way you can get a totally clean break. Accept that fact that alterations to the sites HTML will require changes to the CSS and vice versa.
Not exactly true. And the evidence is that you can apply CSS to XML and you have, by definition, content and presentation separate. And if you use 'display' in your CSS, even HTML doesn't have to follow implied layout. Try it out: you can make the p tag display as an inline element.
<html> <body> <p> first paragraph </p>
<p>2nd paragraph starts</p>more text <p style="display: inline">3rd paragraph is inline.</p> with more text. </body> </html>
I tried getting/. to accept some of this but I think it's editing out the style= attribute. So you'll have to try this out in a separate doc.
Having said that, if you allow HTML to be rendered using its default display implications, then the above statement will hold to some extent.
There is no straight analogy in OO for a flow chart or DFD. But activity diagrams (here, here, and here) serve a similar function. They provide a high level of abstraction that can be done with a picture.
One poster said to use a "high level language". I agree, at least with the first two words. I mildly disagree at the word "language". Some people think better in words, others think better in pictures.
What's important is that you don't try write your detailed code using pictures. People who map one set of things to a picture will map a different set of things to a language. So it is difficult to draw pictures that then create exactly the code (language) desired.
Keep the pictures (activity diagrams) high level but leave the details for coding by hand.
Having said that, I shall now waffle: If you're very good at thinking in pictures, UML does provide some detailed diagrams for run-time aspects of software.
are all ways to describe run-time state and behavior. I tend to believe programmers generally are better with languages when they need to describe details.
So not only do we litter Earth orbit, now we're littering Mars orbit too! I wonder if the NASA rednecks ever put their old satellites up on cinder-blocks?
(The article says there are seven non-working craft orbiting Mars now).
I know it's not free, but it is so good that you will wonder why Calc was ever so mysterious. I am amazed at how convoluted Calculus textbooks have become. Published originally circa 1900 (I apologize but I don't have the book in front of me and I can't recall the exact date), this very small book treats calculus the way it should. Rather than hitting you over the head with a weighty tome, it just explains calculus.
After reading just a few chapters, I actually calculated by hand the calculus results for a typical calculus problem. I was not using the 'chain rule' or any of those short-cut tools, but just only used basic algebra. This was the first time I'd ever done this in my entire life. I've been through Calc 1 & 2 and Multi-Var Calc, and others (for a Math minor)(hehe, I did Calc 1 twice, got an A both times, and still didn't understand it). I learned all the 'rules' but I never understood why I was doing it until I read Silvanus.
I recommend it highly. Martin Gardiner updated the book for it's recent publication to use current notation. Best of all, it's a small book. If you're at all interested in calc, it's worth your time. I would wager it's worth more than several of the 'cinder block' calc textbooks put together.
It's been done. 20 years ago. My first serious workstation development was on a Symbolics Workstation whose OS was written in LISP. We had a windowing operating system with bit-mapped graphics, source-level debugging, suspend-substitute-and-continue code execution. Just all kinds of cool stuff. And coding in an OO LISP was the best experience. Ruby and Perl have both similar levels of joy in programming, but as LISP was my first, it will always hold a special place.
Unfortunately it was too expensive. My workstation cost $125000. Alas...
An interesting thread is afoot at comp.lang.ruby to try and create the shortest one-liner to scramble in this fashion. Here's the shortest I've seen so far (by Kurt Dresner) (I don't have the news: URL, sorry):
How is it that Open Source is so pitiful that we have to get M$ to support it? I thought we were unstoppable because OSS is a better idea, not because we could gouge some other company for money.
And if it is okay for a government to slam M$ for money, then it will only be a quick swing of the pendulum before the gov comes demanding unjust taxes from OSS.
These are all nice ideas and appropriate in some ways. But the problem with insurance these days is the same problem everywhere. The economy is down. More specifically the market is down.
The main point: The insurance companies have lost a BOATLOAD of money in their investments and their investment incomes have dropped as well. So how do they make up their money? The can't get more investment income; that already sucks. So they raise premiums. We pay more for insurance. It sucks, but their business model is requiring it right now.
Don't get me wrong, insurance intrusion is wrong. It would also be wrong to allow necessary procedures to be swept aside by less necessary procedures. But the money problems with insurance are being driven by money problems in the market place. If you have lost ivestment money over the last few years, you have some idea what the insurance companies are feeling.
I don't think slowing down is the healing process. I had great pain in my palms, hand-heel, wrists, and forearms after working as a data-entry clerk in college in 1986. I lived with it till 1993 (often in tremendous pain). Then I switched to Dvorak. The pain went away. Period. I switched over a period of two weeks and I did it by typing _more_ not less. I typed the alphabet on Dvorak _literally_ hundreds of times till I could touch-type.
Nine years, constant keyboarding, and still no pain. I go through coding binges and still have no pain.
I highly recommend trying Dvorak.
BTW, I am bi-keyboardal. I can still type QWERTY.
Regarding speed. Yes my fingers really can move faster. Not my brain, but my fingers. I suspect it's the brain that is the limiting factor. I keep having to stop.... and think. If I know exactly what I'm going to type, BRRRRRRRPPP, it's done.
But forget the speed. It's worth switching just to be rid of the pain.
I once had three strands of Christmas Tree lights, all the same brand, using the same neato-geewhize-ooo-aaa blinking controller. I set them to the same type of blinking, but they obviously started out of phase. The next morning they were all blinking exactly together, in phase, all three strands. And they stayed that way until I turned them off.
I have tried to repeat this each Christmas since and have yet to see it again.
In my last year of college (1985) I coop-ed with DoD in Baltimore (I'm sure some recognize the euphemism) and learned LISP on the job, with only a set of manuals and a Symbolics workstation.
I can honestly say I was writing productive code in less time with LISP than I have with any language since, including C, C++, Basic, Perl, Java, and Prolog. The language supports things being done easily. The dynamic nature of the language cannot be overstated as its main benefit.
Also, the funky notation is not truly odd. When you have only one structural rule, it is learned quite quickly even if it is quite different from usual language (like English: we say "three PLUS five" but not "PLUS three five"; sigh...)
Once you get past that point, LISP flows from the mind like water from a pitcher. God, I wish I could do some real LISP development, and not just play with Emacs code!
I envy my brother tremendously. He lives in Evansville, IN; I live in the Louisville Metro area (about 10 times the population as his town). His electric company runs a broadband ISP service. They just showed up with a box and it works! He is nearly computer illiterate and has not had a problem. IP as commodity; I like it. ISP as utility; great idea.
The FAQ mentions a 2% hiring rate. That sounds about right. Though, I don't actually do the hiring mechanism (HR does that) I've interviewed scores of people and read many times as many resumes. Yes, there is a shortage. I once received a stack of resumes from HR that was 5 inches thick. Only 4 of the resumes were worth looking at, we interviewed 2. We offered to 1. Guess what: He was Indian.
Representative of the resumes we received was one person who had worked administratively for 10 years, took 2 classes on VB (Count 'em, yes, TWO) and had as the objective to become a professional programmer.
My experience may be statistically insignificant, but it jibes with the hype.
I suffered pretty severely from carpal tunnel for years. When I switched to a Dvorak keyboard layout, the pain went away, literally in a month. I've not had to use my braces since using Dvorak. I did have a problem 3 years ago with over-using my mouse. But never a keyboard pain with Dvorak. Even if you aren't faster (and I feel I am) Dvorak means less pain.
In wealthier countries, all members of society have the luxury of becoming more educated. Having babies is not necessarily the Capra-esque scenario that tradition might have it. Get some education in the mix and women start realizing, "Hey, I *don't* have to do this." Babies become a choice and not an eventuality.
I take part in a committee (in our church) that works for social justice. Our (adittedly anecdotal) evidence is that education lifts women up to the option of choosing.
It may be a myth but my personal experience tells me otherwise. I've been using DVORAK now for 5 years. Without a doubt I'm faster at typing. It may be possible that I am not faster at thinking and so do not get results any faster. But typing is certainly one less thing getting in the way.
The comment as a reduction in RSI is spot on. I suffered exetensively from carpal tunnel and had to wear the braces and do the exercises and everything. It all started 12 years ago working as a data entry clerk on a QWERTY keyboard. Since I've been using the Dvorak keyboard I have not ONCE had to use my braces. The pain has disappeared.
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No, this is not true. The original marketing of Dvorak concerned speed and accuracy. The question here is about RSI. And my specific experience is that Dvorak makes a dramatic difference in the ability to use a keyboard constantly without RSI becoming an issue.
I am a programmer and, while in college, was a data-entry droid on the side.
About 5 years into my profesional career, carpal-tunnel took over and I could no longer user my hands and wrists without significant paint from my forearms up into my palms and fingers. I had to wear braces nearly 24-hours a day to protect my wrists.
Switching to Dvorak ended the pain within two weeks and I've not had the pain or the braces since. The change was absolutely that dramatic.
In western society, we live under a fallacy that some research can quote a statistic and that somehow that statistic will make a difference in your life. If some research finds that 50% of respondents had an overage reduction in pain of 65%, that in no way means that half of me is going to feel 2/3rds better. Nor can you quote the statistic and say with certainty that I will or will not feel better. Neither approach is truthful or accurate.
Every single reader of this thread has a different structural set-up of their arm/wrist/hand bones. Everyone has different sensitivities in their neural sheath in the wrist. Really, the only way you are going to know if this will help is to try it. The test on you is the only one that matters to you. You might also want to try some of the other suggestions in this thread. Find something that works for you. Dvorak worked for me.
But to tell anyone that any particular mechanism is bogus or is your salvation is inaccurate at best and irresponsible at worst.
Find something that works for you. Dvorak worked for me, and it worked dramatically. And it might be a waste of time for you.
Drew
I had to switch to Dvorak specifically for RSI reasons. One (1) subject does not a statistically significant population make. However, before Dvorak, I had to wear wrist braces when attempting to alleviate stinging shooting pains from my forearms up into my palms and fingers. After Dvorak, the pain and the braces went away. The change was that dramatic.
I often have to do the switch between Dvorak and QWERTY and it isn't always instantaneous, but it isn't rocket science either. I am bi-keyboardal. I can touch type on both systems (as soon as the brain makes the switch).
Both Linux and Windows support switching keymappings out easily. So I have a QWERTY layout keyboard (that is, the *printing* on the keycaps says QWERTY....) for the sake of visitors and I can swap back and forth with keyboard short-cuts. The brain goes along, if sometimes reluctantly.
As far as speed and accuracy are concerned, I am significantly faster with Dvorak, as long as I know exactly what I'm gonna type. Coming up with content is the constraining factor for me, not typing. I am also more accurate with Dvorak, though that might be solely due to it being my favorite layout.
I've tried other keyboards that are specifically for ease of use or RSI considerations (like the Natural keyboard). But I haven't seen any change that is as drastically useful as just switching to the Dvorak keymap.
Drew
I like Lyx, but I just can't find enough templates. And I can't see how to create them myself (I am ignorant of TeX and LaTeX). I've used Lyx to produce a letter and the output was tremendous. But that is the only template I've found useful.
I've search high and low for new templates and there just doesn't seem to be a huge community for these things (or at least Google doesn't get it).
It works anyway. I had bad carpal tunnel from doing data entry for inventory. It stayed troublesome no matter how manner rubber egg-shaped devices I squeezed, no matter how many metal chinese balls I rolled in my hands, no matter ... well you get the picture.
I switched to Dvorak and the carpal tunnel went away.
I regard this study more highly than any other (though, you might not).
The best math book ever has to be Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus Thompson and edited by Martin Gardener.
I studied Calc for 4 semesters to get a Math Minor for my B.S. degree. I can honestly say I left college with little idea what calculus was. Within 4 chapters of this book, by and large, I got what I'd been missing: a practical descriptive answer for "What the heck is calculus?".
In the fall of '84 I was working at a well-funded DoD facility outside of DC. We had the new-fangled contraptions called Grid computers. They were really laptops, as long as your lap could support 15lbs (IIRC) and you didn't mind reading a red-colored monochrome screen about 4" diagonal in size. But I digress...
The interesting part was that it would hang every so often. And our techs would come to the office, hold the laptop one foot above the desk or the floor and drop it. Reboot and everything is fine. I kid you not, this was actually in the support manual. This was what our techs were taught.
Everything old is new again. Mullets anyone?
I don't wish to step on their copyright so I'm only going to quote the beginning of the story:
Four days that shook the world. New Scientist vol 182 issue 2446 - 08 May 2004, page 32
Just when you thought the dust had settled on the cause of the demise of the dinosaurs, there's a new type of catastrophe kicking it up again. Forget meteorites and mega-volcanoes, Verneshots are the real culprit, says Kate Ravilious
THE Earth exploded under their feet. Noxious gases spouted into the atmosphere and quickly circulated around the globe. The ground shook with the force of a hundred massive earthquakes, and 20 gigatonnes of the Earth's crust and mantle were blasted into the sky before raining back down onto the surface. It was a terrible day for the dinosaurs. They never recovered.
Is this, at last, a true description of what happened 66 million years ago? The argument over what killed the dinosaurs has raged for 25 years, and has polarised into two opposing camps: a meteorite impact, or a prolonged bout of mega-volcanism called a continental flood basalt.
But now a team from Geomar, an earth sciences institute at Kiel University in Germany, has come up with a completely new type of geological catastrophe to explain the death of the dinosaurs, as well as three previous mass extinctions. If they are right the culprit was neither a meteorite nor a flood basalt, but a colossal underground explosion called a Verneshot.
As yet the idea is in its infancy (Earth and Planetary Science Letters, vol 217, p 263). But the Verneshot hypothesis has one big advantage over its rivals. It explains a mystery that haunts the debate over mass extinctions: why the extinctions always seem to coincide with both continental flood basalts and meteorite impacts when the odds of these happening simultaneously are vanishingly slim.
Not exactly true. And the evidence is that you can apply CSS to XML and you have, by definition, content and presentation separate. And if you use 'display' in your CSS, even HTML doesn't have to follow implied layout. Try it out: you can make the p tag display as an inline element.
I tried getting /. to accept some of this but I think it's editing out the style= attribute. So you'll have to try this out in a separate doc.
Having said that, if you allow HTML to be rendered using its default display implications, then the above statement will hold to some extent.
Check out American Music Supply.
I second this. They are regularly the best buy on books when using shopping.yahoo.com as a price guide.
There is no straight analogy in OO for a flow chart or DFD. But activity diagrams (here, here, and here) serve a similar function. They provide a high level of abstraction that can be done with a picture.
One poster said to use a "high level language". I agree, at least with the first two words. I mildly disagree at the word "language". Some people think better in words, others think better in pictures.
What's important is that you don't try write your detailed code using pictures. People who map one set of things to a picture will map a different set of things to a language. So it is difficult to draw pictures that then create exactly the code (language) desired.
Keep the pictures (activity diagrams) high level but leave the details for coding by hand.
Having said that, I shall now waffle: If you're very good at thinking in pictures, UML does provide some detailed diagrams for run-time aspects of software.
- State Diagrams (here and here)
- Sequence Diagrams (here and here)
- and
- Collaboration Diagrams (here and here)
are all ways to describe run-time state and behavior. I tend to believe programmers generally are better with languages when they need to describe details.Drew
So not only do we litter Earth orbit, now we're littering Mars orbit too! I wonder if the NASA rednecks ever put their old satellites up on cinder-blocks?
(The article says there are seven non-working craft orbiting Mars now).
I know it's not free, but it is so good that you will wonder why Calc was ever so mysterious. I am amazed at how convoluted Calculus textbooks have become. Published originally circa 1900 (I apologize but I don't have the book in front of me and I can't recall the exact date), this very small book treats calculus the way it should. Rather than hitting you over the head with a weighty tome, it just explains calculus.
After reading just a few chapters, I actually calculated by hand the calculus results for a typical calculus problem. I was not using the 'chain rule' or any of those short-cut tools, but just only used basic algebra. This was the first time I'd ever done this in my entire life. I've been through Calc 1 & 2 and Multi-Var Calc, and others (for a Math minor)(hehe, I did Calc 1 twice, got an A both times, and still didn't understand it). I learned all the 'rules' but I never understood why I was doing it until I read Silvanus.
I recommend it highly. Martin Gardiner updated the book for it's recent publication to use current notation. Best of all, it's a small book. If you're at all interested in calc, it's worth your time. I would wager it's worth more than several of the 'cinder block' calc textbooks put together.
It's been done. 20 years ago. My first serious workstation development was on a Symbolics Workstation whose OS was written in LISP. We had a windowing operating system with bit-mapped graphics, source-level debugging, suspend-substitute-and-continue code execution. Just all kinds of cool stuff. And coding in an OO LISP was the best experience. Ruby and Perl have both similar levels of joy in programming, but as LISP was my first, it will always hold a special place.
Unfortunately it was too expensive. My workstation cost $125000. Alas...
Drew
How is it that Open Source is so pitiful that we have to get M$ to support it? I thought we were unstoppable because OSS is a better idea, not because we could gouge some other company for money.
And if it is okay for a government to slam M$ for money, then it will only be a quick swing of the pendulum before the gov comes demanding unjust taxes from OSS.
It's a whitewashed sepulchre. Run away.
The main point: The insurance companies have lost a BOATLOAD of money in their investments and their investment incomes have dropped as well. So how do they make up their money? The can't get more investment income; that already sucks. So they raise premiums. We pay more for insurance. It sucks, but their business model is requiring it right now.
Don't get me wrong, insurance intrusion is wrong. It would also be wrong to allow necessary procedures to be swept aside by less necessary procedures. But the money problems with insurance are being driven by money problems in the market place. If you have lost ivestment money over the last few years, you have some idea what the insurance companies are feeling.
Nine years, constant keyboarding, and still no pain. I go through coding binges and still have no pain.
I highly recommend trying Dvorak. BTW, I am bi-keyboardal. I can still type QWERTY.
Regarding speed. Yes my fingers really can move faster. Not my brain, but my fingers. I suspect it's the brain that is the limiting factor. I keep having to stop.... and think. If I know exactly what I'm going to type, BRRRRRRRPPP, it's done.
But forget the speed. It's worth switching just to be rid of the pain.
I once had three strands of Christmas Tree lights, all the same brand, using the same neato-geewhize-ooo-aaa blinking controller. I set them to the same type of blinking, but they obviously started out of phase. The next morning they were all blinking exactly together, in phase, all three strands. And they stayed that way until I turned them off.
I have tried to repeat this each Christmas since and have yet to see it again.
Any explanations anyone?
In my last year of college (1985) I coop-ed with DoD in Baltimore (I'm sure some recognize the euphemism) and learned LISP on the job, with only a set of manuals and a Symbolics workstation.
I can honestly say I was writing productive code in less time with LISP than I have with any language since, including C, C++, Basic, Perl, Java, and Prolog. The language supports things being done easily. The dynamic nature of the language cannot be overstated as its main benefit.
Also, the funky notation is not truly odd. When you have only one structural rule, it is learned quite quickly even if it is quite different from usual language (like English: we say "three PLUS five" but not "PLUS three five"; sigh...)
Once you get past that point, LISP flows from the mind like water from a pitcher. God, I wish I could do some real LISP development, and not just play with Emacs code!
I envy my brother tremendously. He lives in Evansville, IN; I live in the Louisville Metro area (about 10 times the population as his town). His electric company runs a broadband ISP service. They just showed up with a box and it works! He is nearly computer illiterate and has not had a problem. IP as commodity; I like it. ISP as utility; great idea.
The FAQ mentions a 2% hiring rate. That sounds about right. Though, I don't actually do the hiring mechanism (HR does that) I've interviewed scores of people and read many times as many resumes. Yes, there is a shortage. I once received a stack of resumes from HR that was 5 inches thick. Only 4 of the resumes were worth looking at, we interviewed 2. We offered to 1. Guess what: He was Indian.
Representative of the resumes we received was one person who had worked administratively for 10 years, took 2 classes on VB (Count 'em, yes, TWO) and had as the objective to become a professional programmer.
My experience may be statistically insignificant, but it jibes with the hype.
I suffered pretty severely from carpal tunnel for years. When I switched to a Dvorak keyboard layout, the pain went away, literally in a month. I've not had to use my braces since using Dvorak. I did have a problem 3 years ago with over-using my mouse. But never a keyboard pain with Dvorak. Even if you aren't faster (and I feel I am) Dvorak means less pain.
Drew
In wealthier countries, all members of society have the luxury of becoming more educated. Having babies is not necessarily the Capra-esque scenario that tradition might have it. Get some education in the mix and women start realizing, "Hey, I *don't* have to do this." Babies become a choice and not an eventuality.
I take part in a committee (in our church) that works for social justice. Our (adittedly anecdotal) evidence is that education lifts women up to the option of choosing.
It may be a myth but my personal experience tells me otherwise. I've been using DVORAK now for 5 years. Without a doubt I'm faster at typing. It may be possible that I am not faster at thinking and so do not get results any faster. But typing is certainly one less thing getting in the way.
The comment as a reduction in RSI is spot on. I suffered exetensively from carpal tunnel and had to wear the braces and do the exercises and everything. It all started 12 years ago working as a data entry clerk on a QWERTY keyboard. Since I've been using the Dvorak keyboard I have not ONCE had to use my braces. The pain has disappeared.