Attn. Mr. (?) "JB"

One can.

Many have.

More will.

Two newsgroups exist precisely for the purpose of making test posts: and .

If any other newcomers are inclined to post test messages, they might either use those groups or else disguise their test by asking an incisive question such as:

What is the best 40-sized engine?

Which is better, Monokote or Ultracote?

What plane should I get as a trainer?

Or, in the great tradition of C programming, one might have a post that said, "hello, world."

YMMV.

Marty

Even worse we also have to suffer people who overreact and insult others for making a silly and harmless joke that intended no insult or injury to you.

For crying out loud lighten up.

Mike D.

Nah.

"How do I get my MDS 40 to run reliably?" "What is the best after run oil?" "What has te AMA ever done for YOU?"

and the usual blather of noise one instantly deletes...

Ther IS a purpose top posting test messages in oher groups that alt.test etc, and that is to ascertain teh propagation speed, and possibly teh existence, of a given newsgroup on your normal server.

Teh? What's "teh"?

And 50% of those post tests to non-test newsgroups.

Or, you can just lighten up a bit and not get so worked up by the little things.

DOH!

It's teh word you put in fornt of othre wrods to show taht you mean a particular thnig.

Marty

WHOOOOOSH

What he means is TNP refuses to learn touch-typing. He 'Hunts-n-pecks' with two fingers. I rag him all the time about his abysmal typing skills. Has not affected him yet!!!

David

David AMA40795 / KC5UH wrote:

In case anybody wants to know, here is a no-fail method for learning touch typing with an absolute minimum of effort, plus an interesting story about the origin of the standard keyboard arrangement.

Go to a website devoted to Dvorak typing and draw a chart of where all the letters are. Just make a little picture of the keyboard and fill in the appropriate letters. Load the Dvorak keyboard driver from your system disk, and install it as your keyboard arrangement rather than the standard qwertyuiop layout. (the physical keys will be in the same qwerty order, but when you type the letter D, it will come out as E, the F will come out as U, and so on.) Tape the chart to the bottom of your computer screen, put your hands on the keyboard and type. You will not be able to hunt and peck because the keys will not type the letters labeled on the keys any more. You will not look at your hands at all. You will be looking at your chart. The first day that you try it, you will be very frustrated and will not do very much typing. The second day, you will be much less frustrated. The third day, you will start getting the hang of it. By the fourth day you will be a competent touch typist. After a couple of weeks, you will actually get some speed.

I learned to type in 8th grade. My wife never learned. She was a hunt-and-peck typist. I told her several times that it would be easier in the long run to learn to type, but she would never do it. I read an article in Discover magazine about keyboards and decided to learn Dvorak, so I kept switching the settings back and forth on the computer. I would load Dvorak to do my typing and then put it back to QWERTY so my wife could hunt and peck. Once I learned the new system, I started telling her about it, but she was not interested. Then I decided to play a sneaky trick on her. I taped the chart to the screen, switched it over, and left her to fend for herself. I refused to tell her how to reset the keyboard driver. Within a week she was a competent typist. To this day, our keyboard is a standard qwerty keyboard, but you can't hunt on it because the letters are in the wrong places.

Now here's the interesting story, paraphrased from a Discover magazine article from 1997 or 1998 or thereabouts. In the early days, the typewriter keyboard was arranged generally in alphabetical order. The engineers at Remington discovered that as typists became faster they would jam the keys, and the engineers did not have the capability of improving the machines sufficiently to prevent this problem. So they did the next best thing. They de-engineered the keyboard to slow the typists. This is how the standard qwertyuiop keyboard was born. It was the least convenient arrangement that they could come up with. This occurred in the late 1800s. In the 1920s, the US Navy requested funding from Congress for additional typists to handle the required paperwork. Congress did not provide the funding. So the Navy got a guy named Dvorak (a distant relative of the famous composer) to figure out how to get more work out of the existing typists. He figured out that when the typewriter keys were arranged in a more sensible fashion, the same typists could get twice as much work done. (Since the turn of the century, typewriters had improved enough to handle the extra speed.) Furthermore, it took an average of 1/14th as much time to train a typist on the Dvorak keyboard as on a regular keyboard. So the Navy then asked Congress for money to buy new Dvorak typewriters. Congress refused. The reason why? Simply because Dvorak is "not standard". So today we are stuck with a system that was deliberately designed to slow us down, even though there is a much better system available.

I can assure you, even if you are an old dog who doesn't like new tricks, if you never learned to type go ahead and learn Dvorak now. Just make your little chart, switch the computer over and don't look back. In about a week you will thank me.

Robbie

George I believe in his own way JB was trying to help by letting you know that he recieved your test. His play on the the word "test" icles was just for fun, not an attack on you.

This Story is a Myth. There are many sources on the Internet that debunk the Dvorak's story. Just search for "qwerty myth" And as for the data that proves that the Dvorak method was faster, the tests were not done in a controlled environment they were done by Dvorak himself.

No, it's the preferred beverage of the English, as in ' a nice cup of teh'.

..and then go to your office, or similar, and find you can't type at all as you have learnt on a non-standard keyboard!

Details, Dave, details!

I thought the preferred beverage was ale?

ROFL. Nice one!

Sadly these days ts tastles lager and alco-pops. Kiddy drinks laced with ethanol and sold to teenagers.