The Dvorak-Qwerty Myth Is Back
from the disproven dept
Well, here's one of those computing myths that is never going to die, apparently. The Inquirer is the latest to write about how we're all stuck with inferior QWERTY keyboards compared to the vastly superior Dvorak keyboards that came later. It's a nice story (and a very popular one, too), but it's not true.
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I wouldn't take Liebowitz's stuff at face value...
Liebowitz is also responsible for some papers giving pretty absurd cost estimates for the Microsoft breakup proposal in the anti-trust case . (Sponsored by the Association of Competitive Technology, and guess who's a big corporate member...)
A more recent paper of his concludes that music downloading is the only explanation for the recent decline in music sales, and that this is causing significant harm to the industry (though he concedes that it may not be "fatal").
See http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/dissent.html for one rebuttal of his Dvorak paper.
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This is not true
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Dvorak is not a myth. Just a puffed
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-up legend. With no widely accepted research, only theory, behind it.
I especially wish economists would stop trying to be keyboard experts, just because they want to validate their beliefs.
If you switch to Dvorak, you might become faster, you might make fewer errors, but there's a really good chance that you'll type a lot more comfortably.
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