Stan Liebowitz

The classic disproof of the Dvorak superiority to qwerty is "The Fable of the Keys", here http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html , which was also the lead chapter in the authors' book "Losers, Winners, and Microsoft", a general attack on network (or lock-in) effects.

The argument that Dvorak is superior and that inertia is keeping people from converting has been studied, and while I think there's some element of truth, it doesn't seem particularly compelling, since big disruptive changes occur all the time. "the best-documented experiments, as well as recent ergonomic studies, suggest little or no advantage for the Dvorak keyboard." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_Simplified_Keyboard#Controversies… "The trap constituted by an obsolete standard may be quite fragile. Because real-world situations present opportunities for agents to profit from changing to a superior standard, we cannot simply rely on an abstract model to conclude that an inferior standard has persisted. Such a claim demands empirical examination." http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html Musical notation is a vastly more complex system than keyboard layout, and I don't believe we have a Dvorak of music notation to even compare with. There are no contenders for musical notation that a large group of people believe are superior. So there's no reason to believe that inertia is keeping people from using another notation. To go one step further, music notation is constantly changing, it has been evolving, adopting and incorporating the best ideas for thousands of years. What reason is there to not start with the assumption that it already took the best changes so far? I have no doubt that if superior ideas for notation develop in the next hundred…

"""I'm not sure who the article was for, people who already know its contents perhaps?""" No, just anyone who already knows a bit of music theory. Not even a great deal of it. Something that can be learned in a week, tops. Tons of articles on HN have titles like: Djikstra's algorithm, advanced types in Haskell, currying and memoization in Scala, A Graphical Notation for the Lambda Calculus, and similar content. Is someone expected to understand those without knowing the underlying naming schemes, theory, basic domain knowledge etc? Or do people seeing stuff like "^[ab](foo)^[k])/i complain that: "that pretty much explains why people have a hard time "getting" computer science theory. Gibberish.Goobeltygook$"? There a logic behind regular expressions, and there's a logic behind chord/interval notation. And the second is a lot easier, too, and it's used because it's succint and it works. Urban legends about qwerty keyboards ( http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html ) and railroad gauges ( http://www.snopes.com/history/american/gauge.asp ) aside, bad solutions don't last 400 years. """Anyone else would have to have a solid background in theory to understand much of anything in it.""" The naming scheme used in the article takes like 10 minutes to grasp --and requires no great background in music theory. 7th, 13th etc are like numeric indexes. As for dominant / tonic, those are are like music theory 101. Similar to knowing what "Objects" and "Interfaces" mean when…

What they are afraid of is the idea of the free market not always and in every case producing the best possible result, so they need to aggressively attempt to demonstrate that 1) either market failure just doesn't exist, as they attempt to show here, or 2) that in no case, ever, will government intervention improve the situation, which is the topic of other libertarian writing. In other words, this is just another episode of "Libertarians vs Socialists": http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419503 For a serious treatment of the economics of digital goods and networked economies, I think Varian and Shapiro are a better read: http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/7/information-rules-a-strategic… (Edit: to be fair, it turns out the authors have a more scholarly treatment of the subject matter, which is a better read: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/harvj/harvard.html Still though, I think it's pretty clear that they're coming from a point of view, and "backfilling" to try and get there)

I'm not the poster above, but the best-known example of propagandizing about them is a paper called "The Fable of the Keys" by Liebowitz and Margolis (http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html), which dragged the Qwerty vs. Dvorak issue into the middle of an academic holy war about the free market. Much of the resulting Qwerty vs. Dvorak arguments have really been about economics, not their actual merits as keyboard layouts. (The only argument about the layouts themselves in the paper concerns whether typing on Dvorak is inherently faster.) The two links lliiffee gave above are by the authors of "The Fable of the Keys" and a newspaper column including a refutation by marketing professor, respectively. (I'm not sure who the "guy in the early twentieth century who had an axe to grind" jerf mentions is, though.) Now, I really don't care about economic ideology, but I like facts. The Dvorak keyboard places more frequently used letters on the home row than Qwerty* . Also, all of the vowels are on the left hand, which means that typing will generally alternate between hands. If you agree that it is better to spend most time typing on the home row (to reduce finger travel and general hand contortion/RSI) and to not type several letters in a row on the same hand (compare "reverberated" to "antiskepticism" on Qwerty, for example), then Dvorak is objectively better by your standards. (All bets are off if you're typing in Czech or something, of course.) * Specifically, "asdfg…

>and then an asshole invents “office hours” and we’re all screwed Assholes invent all kinds of things. It's those who enforce and tolerate it at fault. >File under “qwerty-level bad choices” Qwerty wasn't actually that bad, and Dvorak was more like self-promoted infomercial-snake-oil-style cargo-cult https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

>Yes. He's the reason the Apple II had support for the Dvorak keyboard layout, hidden as it may have been. That's a big UX thing for me. That's just adding a feature, and one designed by someone else (well, Dvorak) at that, not UX design. Plus, the Dvorak keyboard was an elaborate scam, an early version of "bio-magnetic bracelets" and such: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html It's popular with guys that like the exclusivity of using it and enjoy the placebo effect, but has never been conclusively shown easier or faster to type. Not to mention that for programmers its case is made even worst, because something designed for regular typing is not at all necessary to also be good for programming languages, where the common characters change, and even include ones like {} and such. It's the ideal keyboard layout for the guys that make optimizations without profiling.

I don't think QWERTY is as bad as it has been portrayed. See http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

"The Qwerty layout also was designed to actually slow down the speed at which we type in order to prevent typewriter keys from jamming." A myth, most likely false: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html

>MS was not notable back then Really? Then by your standard which tech companies were notable then? (he worked there during 1991-1993) BTW, Joel created VBA for Excel as a program manager around the time when Excel gained popularity over Lotus 1-2-3. There are graphs here: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/book/sheets/sheet.html. Figure 8.6 shows revenue share. The other company that he had worked at (Juno) was something that I was also familiar with as a consumer. To support your point, however, Joel's work experience was more on the product side than actual programming. However, ironically for this discussion, the VBA that Joel designed is the way that many noncoders in a business first start coding.

This article says they were able to find a copy of the original Navy study: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html Was anyone able to find an online copy of the studies from Western Electric or Oregon State University that the article referenced?

For a more academic-economics-oriented article on the same theme by the same authors, see http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/keys1.html , from _Journal of Law and Economics_. Incidentally, I would be very interested in a pointer to a comparably serious/academic rebuttal of Fable of the Keys. It has been a very long time since Fable of the Keys was published, and it has been a long time since I last tuned into the controversy, and at that time my understanding was that a rebuttal had long been promised but never produced.

This might be implicitly covered under "In the first 10 years of Desktop linux there was no doubt that Microsoft was working hard to try to nip any sign of Desktop Linux gaining any kind of foothold or momentum," but I think the biggest answer is path dependence: https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/paths.html and network effects. Once most people used MS DOS and then Windows, it was easiest for most other people to do so too. Activation energy in switching is hard, and a strong ecosystem begets a stronger ecosystem. In many domains, there's an early period of fermentation and experimentation. Famously, there were hundreds of American car companies around the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Today there are three and prior to Tesla the the last successful one was founded decades ago. And it remains to be seen if Tesla is in it for the long term. In phones, we have Apple and Android and that's likely it. Path dependence. Lots of people are excited about AR/VR because those fields seem relatively open. But if they turn out to be important, they too are likely to have two big players.

There's a lot here, so sorry that I am just dumping links in, but I'll be glad to come back and expand on anything if you like. people of anniston, AL vs. Monsanto http://www.chemicalindustryarchives.org/dirtysecrets/annistonindepth/i… scotus scuttles lower court ruling to stop gmo planting: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/09-475.pdf chimeric gene - http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/10-1068.pd… general monsanto info - http://www.monsantowatch.org/ groundwater pollution - http://yosemite.epa.gov/r10/cleanup.nsf/4c5259381f6b967d88256b58006115… monsanto uses front group to fund against anti-GMO ballot initiative - http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/measureh122903.cfm one of my favorites, can you see the parallels between Monsanto and the RIAA? You could point this one in favor of Monsanto, but if you are like me and think that pushing terminator seeds to small farmers is a terrible thing then you will see it a different light. Often times they give out the seeds free the first year then have you stuck on them, comparisons could be made to drug pushers: http://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/knowledge_goods/monsanto.html Here's one against the idea that Monsanto's products are "always better" than non-GMO agriculture: http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/monsanto%E2%80%99s-cotton-strategy-wears-th… Excerpt: "Monsanto entered India in 2002 with some very compelling advertising. They…