Chrome Does Have a Caps-Lock Key After All 391
Meshach writes "Amidst all the angst about Google taking away the caps lock key from Chrome it now appears that is not the case. With one small change any user can change the Modifier Key from a Search key to a Caps Lock key. Peace has been restored..." If there must be such a thing as a Caps Lock key on conventional keyboards, I wish it could be banished (along with the Insert/Delete pair) to a hard-to-fumble-upon switch on the bottom of the keyboard or laptop.
My printer only has capital letters (Score:5, Interesting)
My printer only has capital letters [aetherltd.com], you insensitive clods.
Get rid of all these stupid useless keys (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in the Employment office in Gresham, Oregon USA. I help people use computers. In order to get unemployment checks in Oregon, all applicants have to complete this long questionaire on a PC about their occupational skills, work history, and personal status. People can do this on-line or come into our 'worksource center' and use the computers that we have here. And I'm supposed to help them. (I get minimum wage for this and no benefits. Nnot that that is important. I just want you to know that I'm not a highly paid government employee)
The information is supposed to match the unemployed with the jobs that all the companies in Oregon have available.
Not a bad concept except for two things. There are no jobs, and, about half of the people coming through the process can't use computers. And about 15-20% of the people can't speak english and have never, ever, ever used a computer before. I am not bullshitting you about this. It seems like a fantasy to highly-educated young Slashdaughters like yourself, but I assure you that this is the case in the lower-middle class neighborhoods of the USA (and probably the rest of the world as well).
So I get a lot of people who have never typed on a keyboard before. And they get put in front of a keyboard that was designed for advanced professional word-processing business typists of the early 1980's era. A lot of them must feel like they've been abducted by space aliens, especially the ones who have come from pre-industrial cultures and have been doing 'under the table' unskilled construction labor or fruit picking.
I would greatly help if there were only half of the keys on the PC keyboard that there are presently. And get rid of the fucking Num-lock key and the stupid Caps-Lock key!
Please.
I'm not kidding about this. Just do it.
Re:delete key? what? (Score:5, Interesting)
> IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key.
Useless keys are very valuable if you think outside the box. Map it to a compose key. Or use it as a special key for things like virtual machines instead of having to make do with chording a bunch of the buckybits. Of course if one is stuck on stupid (i.e. Windows) then there probably isn't much use for a useless key.
Re:WHO CARES? (Score:5, Interesting)
> Are any of the techies who visit this site going to buy a laptop that can only run one program and can't be modified?
Don't bet on that last bit. I'm totally stoked about Chrome but not because I actually want such a retarded thing. How long have we been waiting for ARM based netbooks? Just when it looked like the Year of Linux on the Netbook was here and would soon abandon the power guzzling Atom for a more sensible ARM, Wintel threw its weight around and netbooks vanished. Hint: if it isn't cheap, small, light, flash based and netcentric it ain't a netbook. What the marketing folks are branding as netbooks these days are three pounds plus and have hard hard drives loaded with Windows. Well now here comes ARM based hardware just waiting to get repurposed to running a more general purpose netbook environment. And rooted it will be, just like every Android product has been rooted.
Re:delete key? what? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's the reverse for me. The Insert key is so close to the Delete key that I sometimes hit it by accident. What does anyone need the Insert key for?
Hey guys, scroll lock and pause/break are useless!
Also, this control key? What's the point of that?!
Protip: Every key on the keyboard is useful. Just because you and your programs don't make use of a key doesn't mean you should have any input about the layout of my input devices.
Real talk: Got Excel? Click a cell, use the arrow keys. Hit scroll lock. Click a cell, use the arrow keys. HOLY SHIT A FUNCTION FOR A KEY YOU DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT. (Might work in Calc. I wouldn't know, since I'm not a masochist.)
Re:The caps lock key doesn't bother me (Score:4, Interesting)
when you run the system as single user, custom patch are not an ugly hack, they are a thing of beauty, a symbol of freedom
Re:WHO CARES? (Score:4, Interesting)
> Because that's an Atom device, not ARM.
It is also a limited run prototype intended to seed the developer market. If Google puts a stupid Atom into the production hardware I'll lose all respect for them. It runs one application and one plugin. It is ported to ARM as is Flash. Intel hopes to someday (maybe even next year... yeah right) get idle power consumption down to under a watt. You can get some pretty nice ARM SoC solutions that top out at a watt. And that is for everything but the backlight, not just the CPU. These prototypes are three fracking pounds. If that is anything like what is going to ship Google can pack it in now and save everyone the bother.
Not to mention that if it ships with Intel Inside the pricetag is going to be right in with the modern Windows based netbooks and again, why bother? If they aren't planning to deliver them at retail to end users for $200 in WiFi or free with a 3G data plan then again, Google is far less savy than I have been giving them credit for. To hit those pricepoints ARM is the only option. Intel has no plans to offer a SoC solution anytime in the next couple of years and there are multiple ARM based solutions shipping that have CPU+GPU+3G+WiFi+Bluetooth+Power on the same chip and you can get SoC+RAM+FLASH on a very small module.
Re:delete key? what? (Score:4, Interesting)
IF you want to talk about useless keys, let's talk about the 'context menu key' that is located beside the right windows key.
I use the Context key frequently. For example, if you're typing in Word and the spell checker identifies a mistake (red squiggle), I can put my cursor inside the word and use the Context key to pull up the spell check results. This is far faster than grabbing the mouse to use a right-click.
Likewise with working on files. I often navigate to folders and open them without using the mouse. The Context key lets me "right click" whatever I have selected so that I can send it to a USB drive, email it as an attachment, or open it with an alternative program.
I would say it gets far more use than the Caps Lock and Scroll Lock combined.