On Sat, 13 Dec 2003, Taavi Burns wrote:
Mainly, the very high costs of conversion, including a lengthy period of operating both...
Agreed. But at what point do the long-term benefits of that marginal improvement overcome the initial cost of switching?
Possibly never, if the long-term benefits are small, the assumptions they rest on are uncertain (will we still be using keyboards at all in 100 years?), and current users would get little benefit in return for the pain. We routinely live with *many* decisions that are known to be suboptimal but for which it just isn't worth switching. For example, there is general agreement that a somewhat wider railroad gauge (spacing between the two rails) would be superior... but it's not going to happen, given how many railyards, bridges, tunnels, etc. would have to be rebuilt. Note that if a keyboard switch *was* undertaken, something like the Maltron keyboard almost certainly would be the new keyboard of choice. Dvorak's only virtue, in comparison, is physical compatibility with Qwerty, and physical compatibility isn't that important in such a major change: retraining costs totally dominate equipment costs, most keyboards have a limited working life anyway, Maltron keyboards would not be expensive if made in really large numbers, and if we're going through the pain of switching, we should go all the way to the optimal solution rather than settling for a halfway point. Almost all the "we should switch" arguments also support "switch to Maltron, not Dvorak".
You might perhaps be able to come up with a vaguely Maltron-ish remapping of the standard layout. The thumb areas would be tricky.
It's still a qwerty, though. I don't see how a logical remapping of a standard keyboard to some approximation of that would be of any use.
If it's of no use, then Dvorak is of no use. The Maltron key layout was designed with far more complete knowledge of typing ergonomics etc. than the Dvorak layout; if you could shoehorn some approximation of it into a Qwerty-based physical layout (which I'm unsure of), the result is quite likely to be better than Dvorak.
The cost of conversion, however, suggests that at most one switchover is acceptable.
You're saying that no switchover (to Dvoark) is acceptable. How much better does something have to be for it to be worth it?
Preferably a factor of ten. It has to be at least a factor of two to get people excited. 10% just isn't enough when there are major compatibility issues.
The beautiful thing about the Dvorak is that you DON'T need to go out and buy anything special. Windows can be configured to switch between qwerty and Dvorak using ALT-LEFTSHIFT. Does it get any simpler than that?
That's not "simple", not if you have to configure every machine in a company to do that. There's a big difference between what's reasonable for an organized conversion campaign, and what's reasonable for one person with unusual needs/preferences. Henry Spencer henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org -- The Toronto Linux Users Group. Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml