On Sat, Dec 13, 2003 at 05:24:20PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote:
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.
There's a funny story about why railroad tracks are as far apart as they are...it involved the width of a horse's ass...
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".
Indeed, I see that point. Given that Maltron uses the basic qwerty letter layout, it's probably easier for someone to switch .
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
Question: who made the Maltron such that it's that much superior to a Dvorak layout? Has anyone tried using the physical Maltron keyboard with a Dvorak letter mapping?
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.
I'm saying that after looking at a picture of the Maltron keyboard, I don't think there's any way to convert a standard keyboard short of a hacksaw and soldering iron. The physical metaphor is wrong.
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.
Noting that the compatibility issue is a human one. The machine can trivially remap the keyboard's logical layout.
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.
Most large organisations would be using some form of imaging anyway. It's trivial to ensure that the correct keyboard definition files exist, and are easily available for use. On a slightly divergent note, I'm still quite perplexed as to why having the most commonly typed letter _not_ on the home row is not such a performance hit as one would expect. Neverminding that the studies you cite say that there's negligible improvement, I'm quite curious as to why that is. -- taa /*eof*/ -- 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