Re: [MiNT] My remarks (2)

[Maurits van de Kamp <maurits@bassment.nu>]

Actually I got sick and tired of this thread which has now taken the turn
of me being called "obsessed" whereas all I did was state one little fact
that happened to touch the shrine of Atari perfection, resulting in
rediculous attacks that required some defending from my part. If there's
any obsession going on, it's not on my side.

In this whole "discussion", there has been no reply that actually says
anything against my original explanation about the ergonomics, there have
just been sarcastic replies to text snippets taken out of context which
are inherantly totally irrelevant. The only sensible counter argument I've
read was the fact that some PC users use a patch to obtain the same. This
at least INDICATES that there is a reason to, although did not explain
what this reason was. But all other responses were simple "I want to be
right and I see some words there I can whack into!" which totally lost
track of my original point.

Now I'm just gonna reply to this one to clear up some more of Konrad's
misunderstandings since he still hasn't gotten the point, and after this
I'm gonna give up trying.

> To be clear:
>
> I) You stated that Ctrl close to the A is a design flaw on Atari keyboard.

No.

I stated that the ctrl key does not belong in the character typing region
of the keyboard, and it's closeness to the A-key was one example to
illustrate this. Oh beware of using examples when trying to make a general
point, it will be all your adversaries have to wack into and they will,
constantly.

> II) When asked, why, you said that with Ctrl/A + some key you can destroy
> your entire text.

No, that was not an answer to why it was a design flaw. But because of you
and Andreas constantly taking bits of text out of context just to have
some replies to make me look silly, you have totally lost track of the
discussion. Which is no surprise.

> III) But (others stated, me among them) this is a major problem only if:

("This" being the illustration taken out of context)

> 1) your wordprocessor does not take this into account, or

Which acknowledges there is a problem to be taken into account

> 2) your wordprocessor does not have a proper Undo function (which may be
> called a "workaround" as well);

I never called it that, that was another one of your whitty replies taking
things I've said out of context. And then I could say "well if undo and
other protections like these cancel out bad design, you might as well have
a keyboard with all keys located in a random order and still say it's
good".

> IV) And *THIS IS* a point ("use proper tool"), because actually otherwise
> many such design flaws may be found on almost each keyboard.

When you link design flaws to typoes, yes. And this was not what I'm
taking about but you don't want to see. As I said, you lost track. Which
explains your confusion when I say it wasn't my own problem to begin with.
Which renders your "solution" irrelevant.

> So, in your view, putting Q close to A is an *utterly stupid design flaw*,
> because it can lead to destroying entire work

I hope you read the beginning of my post properly this time so I don't
have to tell you what's wrong in this argument of yours.

> (note that separating control
> and letter keys in different areas does not prevent this; not that CapsLock
> belongs less to control keys than the Control key, btw.).

Caps lock is a part of character input. It just so happens I never use it,
but if I did, I wanted it closest at hand while typing text. Ctrl, alt and
command are command keys which are never a part of inputting text, you use
them in separate keyboard hits or sequences of control characters to
execute certain commands but you don't need them in the middle of typing a
word. (Although alt is more of an exception since on several systems it's
used to type alternate characters like accents etc).

> And of course there are programs (e.g. TOSWIN) which do not ask you, whether
> you certainly want to quit, i.e. which do not have software "workarounds"
> for this "keyboard design flaw".

Because THAT is not a design flaw. Again you've proven my point.

Maurits.