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What needs to happen to make right-hand drive cars more popular than left-hand drives? RHD is safer for driving, easier to control, and works better for one-ha
by edent 6y ago
What needs to happen to make right-hand drive cars more popular than left-hand drives? RHD is safer for driving, easier to control, and works better for one-handed people.
The reality is - there is no significant improvement between QWERTY and Dvorak. At least, not one which is worth the cost of switching.
Some countries have switched from LHD to RHD. But it is complicated.
These days, nothing is stopping you using Dvorak. Either buy a USB keyboard or switch your virtual one.
- eimrine 6y agoThank you for your great analogy. There _is_ significant improvement between QWERTY and Dvorak, and I covered them in my question (just did not bother with links, but I can bother if the question will be popular). This difference is much deeper than difference between RHD and LHD, because as for cars there is better to have one standard for every country than two standarts, no matter what standard it is. And as for keyboard layout, we _already_ have one standard - but since it has been produced for reasons different from efficiency of typing, my opinion is that it must be changed for more efficient one. Nothing can stop me from using Dvorak, you are right, and I even do not need another hardware keyboard for this reason. But my question is about future generations of typers. I am interested in getting rid of needness of learning bad layout, which occurs mandatory. I am seing very similar situation in the "experiment with monkeys and bananas" and this experiment is irrelevant to RHD vs LHD problem. Do you really think that we must use inefficient standard before the end of civilisation, having a better one but ignoring? For the sake of...?
- edent 6y agoAverage QWERTY typing speed is roughly 50WPM. How much faster is Dvorak? 10%? 50%? 100%? Let's say that it takes a couple of years of retraining from QWERTY to Dvorak until a typical user can reach a 10% improvement. How much typing will they have to do in order to regain that lost time? Typing, nowadays, isn't the bottleneck. If we still had pools of typists clattering away to reproduce our words then - yes - a more efficient typing standard could be good. But what we have is good enough and the gains just aren't sufficient. Having two concurrent standards is a nightmare from a usability point of view. I'm sure you've had the experience of using, say, a train ticket booking system which insists that you use a A-Z keyboard. You are slow and frustrated. I live in a country which hasn't fully embraced the metric system - so people flit around between metric and imperial to all sorts of confusion. Should we all learn Esperanto? Should we all switch to 220V electricity? Should we all use decimal time? All of those standards are better - but they're not good enough to warrant the upheaval of switching.
- eimrine 6y agoPlease do not consider me as troll but I have really understandable analogy of my point - cancelling slavery in USA. Slavery makes suffering, and QWERTY layout also. Why we are using QWERTY instead of ABCDEF? Just because of a marketologist of Typewriter company which decided it is a good idea to foolish people about typing efficiency of QWERTY. He placed "random" word "typewriter" on the upper row of the QWERTY keyboard. And any manager while selling a typewriter demonstrates the "fast typing" of the "random" word on Typewriter's typewriter. From buyer's point of view QWERTY seems like more efficient layout then ABCDEF, and the new standard has been established. Sorry but your question about 10% is impossible to answer and I do not sure the "bad" standards you have chosen are any worse than the similar standards in other countries.
- jaxx 6y agoi would think that dvorak wins. I am getting better at it!