Literal Odds and Ends

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Speaker to Animals
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by Speaker to Animals » Tue May 07, 2019 8:05 am

"It is alleged"

Show me the evidence for that, not passive language stating some anonymous people alleged it.

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Montegriffo
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by Montegriffo » Tue May 07, 2019 8:29 am

Speaker to Animals wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 8:05 am
"It is alleged"

Show me the evidence for that, not passive language stating some anonymous people alleged it.
So why do you think he changed the keyboard layout from alphabetical to qwerty?
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Speaker to Animals
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by Speaker to Animals » Tue May 07, 2019 8:42 am

Montegriffo wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 8:29 am
Speaker to Animals wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 8:05 am
"It is alleged"

Show me the evidence for that, not passive language stating some anonymous people alleged it.
So why do you think he changed the keyboard layout from alphabetical to qwerty?
An alphabetical arrangement would be even less efficient than qwerty, first of all, so the argument that they would go from an alphabetical keyboard to qwerty to slow people down is just demonstrably false.

The most efficient keyboard layout for a given language would put the most frequently used letters in the middle of the keyboard and outward according to the zipf distribution. That would be unique for each language too.

We had a discussion a few months ago about social media monopolies and why they exist (network effect) and neocons couldn't grasp this point. It is almost arbitrary which technology gets the critical mass to become the first monopoly. Certainly, small advantages in quality could play a factor, but not as much as one might assume. Facebook, for example, was a much better interface and network than MySpace, but neither of them were as good as Zaadz was, which was built with Ruby on Rails. To this day Facebook sucks big time compared to Zaadz. But Zaadz lost out partially due to the network effect already coming into play.

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Speaker to Animals
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by Speaker to Animals » Tue May 07, 2019 8:47 am

The zipf distribution of letters is going to depend upon the corpus you use to compute the distribution curve, but just going by the Oxford dictionary you get:

"EARIOTNSLCUDPMHGBFYWKVXZJQ"

I think that is unrealistic to use the Oxford dictionary, but just going with that corpus..

You'd want to replace on our current keyboards the G with an E, the F with an A, and H with an R. Those middle keys are the easiest to type. Going in that fashion, you'd get the most efficient keyboard layout for any given corpus you use to compute the letter distribution. Instead of Oxford dictionary, I would use something like the Penn Treebank corpus, since it uses for it's corpus a lot of printed texts, which is exactly what keyboards are used for.

But switching to that new layout would come with a huge cost. People would need to relearn how to type, and you'd see massive productivity drops. The cost to switch to a more efficient keyboard layout is so high in the short term that nobody is going to do it, and because everybody uses qwerty, you aren't likely to see many people want to use the new layout going forward either. It's possible, but unlikely. That is what the network effect means.

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Montegriffo
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by Montegriffo » Tue May 07, 2019 9:02 am

Speaker to Animals wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 8:47 am
The zipf distribution of letters is going to depend upon the corpus you use to compute the distribution curve, but just going by the Oxford dictionary you get:

"EARIOTNSLCUDPMHGBFYWKVXZJQ"

I think that is unrealistic to use the Oxford dictionary, but just going with that corpus..

You'd want to replace on our current keyboards the G with an E, the F with an A, and H with an R. Those middle keys are the easiest to type. Going in that fashion, you'd get the most efficient keyboard layout for any given corpus you use to compute the letter distribution. Instead of Oxford dictionary, I would use something like the Penn Treebank corpus, since it uses for it's corpus a lot of printed texts, which is exactly what keyboards are used for.

But switching to that new layout would come with a huge cost. People would need to relearn how to type, and you'd see massive productivity drops. The cost to switch to a more efficient keyboard layout is so high in the short term that nobody is going to do it, and because everybody uses qwerty, you aren't likely to see many people want to use the new layout going forward either. It's possible, but unlikely. That is what the network effect means.
None of that counters the reason for originally designing the qwerty keyboard being to stop the typebars jamming.
It is clearly not the most efficient layout but there are numerous sources claiming that as the inventor's reason for doing it.
The network effect may be why qwerty came to dominate but typebar jamming seems to be the original motivation.
For legal reasons, we are not threatening to destroy U.S. government property with our glorious medieval siege engine. But if we wanted to, we could. But we won’t. But we could.
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Speaker to Animals
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by Speaker to Animals » Tue May 07, 2019 9:42 am

Montegriffo wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 9:02 am
Speaker to Animals wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 8:47 am
The zipf distribution of letters is going to depend upon the corpus you use to compute the distribution curve, but just going by the Oxford dictionary you get:

"EARIOTNSLCUDPMHGBFYWKVXZJQ"

I think that is unrealistic to use the Oxford dictionary, but just going with that corpus..

You'd want to replace on our current keyboards the G with an E, the F with an A, and H with an R. Those middle keys are the easiest to type. Going in that fashion, you'd get the most efficient keyboard layout for any given corpus you use to compute the letter distribution. Instead of Oxford dictionary, I would use something like the Penn Treebank corpus, since it uses for it's corpus a lot of printed texts, which is exactly what keyboards are used for.

But switching to that new layout would come with a huge cost. People would need to relearn how to type, and you'd see massive productivity drops. The cost to switch to a more efficient keyboard layout is so high in the short term that nobody is going to do it, and because everybody uses qwerty, you aren't likely to see many people want to use the new layout going forward either. It's possible, but unlikely. That is what the network effect means.
None of that counters the reason for originally designing the qwerty keyboard being to stop the typebars jamming.
It is clearly not the most efficient layout but there are numerous sources claiming that as the inventor's reason for doing it.
The network effect may be why qwerty came to dominate but typebar jamming seems to be the original motivation.
It is not my job to prove a negative. There exists no evidence this was the case. You have to actually show first sources that confirm this was the case, and you cannot, which is this story is assumed a myth.

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Montegriffo
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by Montegriffo » Tue May 07, 2019 10:33 am

Speaker to Animals wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 9:42 am
Montegriffo wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 9:02 am
Speaker to Animals wrote:
Tue May 07, 2019 8:47 am
The zipf distribution of letters is going to depend upon the corpus you use to compute the distribution curve, but just going by the Oxford dictionary you get:

"EARIOTNSLCUDPMHGBFYWKVXZJQ"

I think that is unrealistic to use the Oxford dictionary, but just going with that corpus..

You'd want to replace on our current keyboards the G with an E, the F with an A, and H with an R. Those middle keys are the easiest to type. Going in that fashion, you'd get the most efficient keyboard layout for any given corpus you use to compute the letter distribution. Instead of Oxford dictionary, I would use something like the Penn Treebank corpus, since it uses for it's corpus a lot of printed texts, which is exactly what keyboards are used for.

But switching to that new layout would come with a huge cost. People would need to relearn how to type, and you'd see massive productivity drops. The cost to switch to a more efficient keyboard layout is so high in the short term that nobody is going to do it, and because everybody uses qwerty, you aren't likely to see many people want to use the new layout going forward either. It's possible, but unlikely. That is what the network effect means.
None of that counters the reason for originally designing the qwerty keyboard being to stop the typebars jamming.
It is clearly not the most efficient layout but there are numerous sources claiming that as the inventor's reason for doing it.
The network effect may be why qwerty came to dominate but typebar jamming seems to be the original motivation.
It is not my job to prove a negative. There exists no evidence this was the case. You have to actually show first sources that confirm this was the case, and you cannot, which is this story is assumed a myth.
Well maybe Christopher Sholes intended to type out why he wasn't happy with his first keyboard design but the typebar kept jamming.
For legal reasons, we are not threatening to destroy U.S. government property with our glorious medieval siege engine. But if we wanted to, we could. But we won’t. But we could.
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SuburbanFarmer
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by SuburbanFarmer » Tue May 07, 2019 10:20 pm

:lol:
SJWs are a natural consequence of corporatism.

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https://youtu.be/CYbT8-rSqo0

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TheReal_ND
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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by TheReal_ND » Wed May 15, 2019 3:17 pm

Tom Hanks Instagram. Odd ....

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Re: Literal Odds and Ends

Post by SuburbanFarmer » Wed May 15, 2019 8:37 pm

Side note: The type bar wouldn’t jam simply from typing too fast. It’s because the strikers next to each other might be pressed too rapidly. Spreading out the alphabet makes more sense, if you can keep people from fat-fingering A and B at the same time.
SJWs are a natural consequence of corporatism.

Formerly GrumpyCatFace

https://youtu.be/CYbT8-rSqo0