Bill Gates Acknowledges Ctrl+Alt+Del Was a Mistake 665
theodp writes "If he'd had his druthers, Bill Gates told a Harvard audience, Ctrl+Alt+Del would never have seen the light of day. However, an IBM keyboard designer didn't want to give Microsoft a single button to start things up, and thus the iconic three-finger-salute was born."
There you have it. (Score:5, Funny)
XT was a mistake (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:XT was a mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
Not the XT, but some food for thought:
Back when IBM was planning their original personal computer (note that "PC" used to mean any personal computer, but the IBM-PC's success hijacked the name), one design they considered was based on the 801, an early RISC processor about 45 times more powerful than the 8088 they ended up using, and their own modern operating system instead of Microsoft's junk... yeah, that's no typo, FOURTY FIVE TIMES more powerful: the 8088 @ 5 MHz did a paltry 0.33 MIPS, while the 801 did 15 MIPS.
Think about it, the PC started with the wrong foot. A broken, twisted, crippled, atrophied foot. How much technological progress did we lose because we had to waste time overcoming the limitations of this super shitty beginning?
Re:XT was a mistake (Score:4, Interesting)
How much technological progress did we lose because we had to waste time overcoming the limitations of this super shitty beginning?
Hard to say. Because: Its also true the XT they shipped was built of mostly COTS parts. There is no reason to think a much bigger project the 801 based machine with some operating system that would have to either be written or ported from 390 or elsewhere would have ever made it out the door before getting canceled.
I don't even know your more powerful machine would have been successful; honestly IBMs experience with Operating Systems and interfaces at the time would not have translated well to home users and SMBs. MS-DOS was something motivated people could figure out on their own with manual.
IBM would have had to build something that did not use JCL would would have been radical for them at the time. Because there aint no way people would have picked that up.
So its very likely we would have never had a more or less 'open' PC platform at all, it would have all been the very proprietary 8-bit and early 16-bit stuff in the space from Ti, C=, and others.
We might still be well behind where we are today.
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So why continue it... (Score:5, Funny)
Once they got the "Windows Key", why did they continue using the Ctrl + Alt + Delete?
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Because not everyone has one?
This keyboard does not. In fact I don't think I own any that do.
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Re:So why continue it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because accidentally pressing the windows key in the middle of a game would shut down an entire computer instead of momentarily piss off a gamer.
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That's why I love my Logitech G11... it has a "game switch" that basically only serves to disable the Win key.
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Re:So why continue it... (Score:5, Informative)
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When we used to play Decent 2 on Windows NT and Windows 95 we used to remove the "Windows" Keys from the keyboard as you somehow jumped out of DOS (the game ran in a kind of DOS or something other awkward) but you did not come into windows. So you could not switch back. Sometimes Alt-Tab worked, but often not. Was annoying like hell.
Re:So why continue it... (Score:5, Funny)
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The problem now is that when a game freezes you can't Win key or alt-tab out and kill it.
Re:So why continue it... (Score:5, Informative)
I use the Start key all of the time. Seriously. I use it in the following manner, essentially as a keyboard shortcut and linux holdover:
*Start* (type some keys) (enter) to launch a program.
Frequent uses include "cal" for Calculator, "not" for notepad, "wor" for Word, and "add or remove" for the Program Manager
*Start* (# key) to bring up window #.
One uses include Start+1 (Currently set to the Google App Launcher) (then used as the first example)
Another is Start+2, which is always my E-mail application (across multiple computers)
*Start*+R to bring up the "Run" dialog
Frequent uses from the Run dialog are "dxdiag", "cmd", and "regedit"
*Start*+D to "Show Desktop"
Admittedly used less now with the prevalence of two monitors
*Start*+E to bring up Explorer
Used ALL THE TIME
*Start*+CTRL+TAB to bring up a listing of all windows
Admittedly, this is mapped to a StrokeIt Gesture shortcut (but the point stands)
*Start*+DirectionalArrow (Up/Down/Left/Right)
Used to move, maximize, and restore a window. Try it, Start+Left will put a window at half of your left screen. SUPER USEFUL. USED ALL THE TIME. EXTRA POINTS ON A BIG MONITOR. This is the fastest way to move windows to a second monitor.
I probably do 90% of these every day. I use the Start key as much as CTRL and ALT.
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Because people would cry with petitions like "Give me my Ctrl + Alt + Delete back!, don't change things that works!" and everything your hear when someone try to do something different
ADB (Score:2)
I loved the power key on the old Apple ADB keyboards. I didn't enjoy the operating system back then, but I remember wishing PC's had such a key.
Re:ADB (Score:5, Informative)
Makes sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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The only way a single key would make sense would be to put it "under" the keyboard.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
But then managers would hit it every time they went to change their password Post-It.
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I have a number of keys that are used far less frequently than the Win key... notably Scroll Lock, Pause/Break, Insert and, of course, Caps Lock. The least used key is probably the context menu key, which I've only ever used on systems with a malfunctioning or nonexistent mouse. I also rarely use most of the F keys... F4 and F5 are the only ones that see use on a regular basis.
Re:Makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a keyboard once with a dedicated start/shutdown key.
After shutting down my system a few times accidentally I threw that keyboard away.
Power key was more sensible on Macs (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a keyboard once with a dedicated start/shutdown key.
After shutting down my system a few times accidentally I threw that keyboard away.
Seems like a bad design. Macs had a power key for ages on their keyboard, but it pulled up a shutdown prompt instead of killing the whole machine instantly. (You could hold it down for 3 seconds for a force power down, IIRC.) It was also far above the keys and hard to accidentally hit on the machines I remember. This [wikimedia.org] is the one I had on my Performa 5200, and this [wikimedia.org] was the one my old iMac had. (You can see the power key on the latter above the divide between the letter and numeric keypad sections.)
What was the keyboard you used like, and what OS was it for?
Re:Makes sense (Score:4, Insightful)
I had a keyboard once with a dedicated start/shutdown key.
After shutting down my system a few times accidentally I threw that keyboard away.
Apple keyboards have a power button on the keyboard. It's not the location or difficulty of hitting the key that matters, it's how it's handled. The approach currently used by Apple (but not invented by Apple, BTW) of "tap = request to shutdown, requires confirmation" and "press and hold means forcible power off" works just fine.
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You do realize that most PCs today ship with a power button that's effectively on the keyboard, right? After all, most PCs shipped today are laptops, and virtually every laptop has a power button that is for all intents and purposes a part of the keyboard, since it shares the same face of the device as the other buttons in the keyboard. People seem to have figured out ways around the problems you're describing as well, such as prompting the user to confirm that they want to shut down if they just casually p
Why would you want a single button??? (Score:5, Insightful)
A single button that, if hit, would reboot the system???? That's is the stupidest shit I've ever heard. If you hit it by accident, goodbye to your work. Remember that when you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL in DOS, it didn't even give you a prompt to shut down, it just rebooted. Who in their right mind would want that in a single key??
Re:Why would you want a single button??? (Score:5, Funny)
Who in their right mind would want that in a single key??
Data recovery companies?
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This is not about Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot; it is about having to press Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows if you want to log in. This was implemented IIRC in Windows NT and Windows 2000, and in Windows XP if it was joined in a domain.
3-fingers are just fine (Score:5, Interesting)
In my book that is the one thing they got right. It is a cumbersome combination as it should be since you do not want to reboot your computer by accident.
It still irks me how easy is to accidentally shutdown your computer in windows when all you are trying to do is putting it to sleep through the menu.
In programming languages this is called "syntactic salt" and it is used to implement powerful primitives that should not be used lightly.
Revisionist history (Score:5, Informative)
Ctrl-Alt-Del was a thing *before* Windows. Microsoft made use of it because it was there. It made sense to use it as a login trigger by intercepting its function. Especially since doing so put the reboot function under the control of the OS, not the user.
Yes, I've only read the summary, not the article itself, but I suggest you read this in conjunction with it, or afterwards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctrl_alt_del
Re:Revisionist history (Score:5, Informative)
Using Ctrl-Alt-Del to trigger login gives you two kinds of security:
1. Software cannot simulate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in order to play games with the login screen.
2. By first pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, the user logging on can be quite sure that they are giving their login credentials to a genuine Windows (or whatever OS) login screen, and not some malware that merely resembles the login screen.
Re:Revisionist history (Score:5, Interesting)
Using Ctrl-Alt-Del to trigger login gives you two kinds of security:
1. Software cannot simulate a Ctrl-Alt-Del in order to play games with the login screen.
2. By first pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del, the user logging on can be quite sure that they are giving their login credentials to a genuine Windows (or whatever OS) login screen, and not some malware that merely resembles the login screen.
Perhaps I'm simply misinformed and the software does something different somewhere...but I've 'simulated' Ctrl+Alt+Del from Remote Desktop, LogMeIn, TeamViewer, and VNC...I still don't follow how this still holds true.
It's the other way around (Score:3)
When you press Ctrl+Alt+Del on your computer, you know that the OS is the one that receives it so you know that the login screen before you was generated by the OS and not some malware that's sitting in userland.
When you 'simulate' it from a remote session, you lose that guarantee. Any malware could intercept the simulated Ctrl+Alt+Del and show you what looks like the OS login screen.
Re:Revisionist history (Score:5, Interesting)
But try 'simulating' a Ctrl-Alt-Del for the GUI session attached to the physical display/keyboard. I'll wait.
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I hate single-button action keys anyway (Score:2)
I have kids. At times, they've randomly walked up to the keyboard and pressed keys. That's how I found out that one of my keyboards had a "moon" key, and that it magically shut down my computer - no prompting needed. And the number of times I've intentionally pressed the "Windows" key? Probably once a year.
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The sleep key to put a computer to sleep was pretty common on OEM systems for a while (especially Compaq), but I see it less often now on basic keyboards.
If you run Windows and never use the Windows key, you're missing out on a lot of good keyboard shortcuts.
Why would you (Score:3)
Why on earth would you want a key on your keyboard to be a non maskable interrupt? Heaven forbid you mistype, or someone comes walking by and hits it. I'm going to have to side with IBM on this one. Also, what does C.A.D. have to do with starting a computer? It was only added to the Windows startup processes as a way to trick malicious programs into terminating.
Could have been worse than Ctrl + Alt + Del (Score:5, Funny)
I'm just glad we didn't have to do something like Ctrl + Alt + Del + F6 + Esc + (number pad) Enter for the same functionality.
What's wrong with it? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't understand the problem. Ctrl+Alt+Del originally meant "reboot". That's obviously not something you want to do accidentally. If there's a problem it is in using the three-finger-salute for things other than reboot.
Rebooting the linux servers. (Score:5, Funny)
I used to work for a small company where we had 10 Linux servers and 1 windows NT box hooked to a Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) switch. My boss was using the windows server for Webtrends.
He would never check which server he was on before pressing ctrl-alt-del to login so he would reboot the Linux servers at random causing customers to phone us because they were offline.
Gladly enough, ctrl-alt-del isn't as hardcoded in Linux that it is in Windows. All I had to do is modify the init scripts to ignore ctrl-alt-del so that solved our problem.
RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
Since most can't seem to be bothered to read the TFA, you're all a bit confused.
Gates isn't opposed to the three finger salute for rebooting, he's decrying M$ use of Ctrl-Alt-Delete to LOGIN TO WINDOWS.
It would be nice if the title represented the story accurately, but this is slashdot.
It had to be ctl-alt-del (Score:4, Informative)
The summary doesn't give the real reason -- it's in TFA. As ctl-alt-del was a low level interrupt on the PC to restart -- getting out of a bluescreen or a hung desktop -- and given that it was absurdly easy to write a trojan that mimicked the login screen, it became necessary to force users to use ctl-alt-del to log in to be able to tell the difference between the real login process and a fake one. There really wasn't a better choice. People had already used the key combination for years to unjam windows, and it was an easy way to enforce a needed security measure.
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Funny)
You are an abnormal lefty, as my wife and I both mouse with the left hand and use the right hand ctl,alt,shift keys.
My sample of Two is 200% more than your sample of one so it makes it more better.
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That Windows key was a relatively recent addition to PC keyboards. It seems to have been inspired by the Apple/Command key on Macs.
So I guess The early PCs could've used that space for the Start button Gates wanted - but then, what would they have called the button that's adorned the lower left corner of the Windows desktop since 95? What old song would've been used at the launch of Windows, since "Start Me Up" wouldn't have worked - the Beatles' "I am the Walrus"?
Re: Redundant keys (Score:3)
They could have stayed with the rolling stones - "Can't get no satisfaction", "As tears go by", "All over now", "19th Nervous Breakdown". Or if they wanted to be ahead of the times - "Get off my cloud"
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Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Funny)
Enter Sandman would have been better. Both more honest and far more bitchin'
Exit Light,
Enter Night,
Take my hand.....
We're off to never-never land...
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Let us not forget the list or menu key or whatever it is called. Hell, not only do I not use it, I can't think of many times I have even heard people mention it. At least right now in firefox it seems to have the same effect as a right mouse click, but I only know that because I just tried it.
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Informative)
Hell, not only do I not use it, I can't think of many times I have even heard people mention it.
Woe betide you should you ever find yourself on a Windows machine without a mouse, then. Can't say I use it often but when I do I'm glad it exists.
=Smidge=
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Informative)
Shift-F10.
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I beg to differ - I just tried it, works just fine (well, in Chromium, anyway - I don't see much reason to use the version that comes pre-loaded with Google spyware). As does the "menu" key.
Perhaps you have some misbehaving plugin capturing your keystrokes and not properly passing them on to the parent window?
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Funny)
If I ever find myself on a Windows machine, I figure woe already done gone betided me.
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If I remember what I've read thirty years ago, Ctrl Alt Del was an IBM thing, not a Microsoft thing. An IBM engineer put it in as a debugging tool. If it had been deliberate it seems they would have used the SysReq key; in thirty years of using DOS and Windows I've never once seen that key used by any program, ever. SysReq would have been a better choice than alt-tab for switching programs when Windows came out, Ctrl-sysReq would have been superior to CtrlAltDel, and shift-SysReq would print the screen like
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Informative)
Control Panel > Users > Manage User Accounts > Advanced
At the bottom, "Secure sign-in" - take the tick out of that, and Apply.
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Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Insightful)
I dont think you understand how POS a POS system is. Most have utterly crappy touchscreens that do not support "gestures" only a single "tap event"
Almost 90% of all the Point of sale hardware out there are steaming piles of Fecies in quality, but cost 20X the price of regular hardware.
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Informative)
I dont think you understand how POS a POS system is.
Sure I do - I used to build Quicken-branded, XP-based abominations for a living; "Why the fuck do they ship an LCD display that isn't compatible with the other hardware??? Yer killin' me, Smalls!"
Most have utterly crappy touchscreens that do not support "gestures" only a single "tap event"
Almost 90% of all the Point of sale hardware out there are steaming piles of Fecies in quality, but cost 20X the price of regular hardware.
Agreed, but that doesn't change the fact that Windows-based touchscreen systems have had tap-and-hold-to-right-click since, like, 2003.
Since we're talking about Windows/MS stuff here, it would be kind of assanine to assume OP was talking about a non-Windows POS.
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Hey now, I use the right ctrl and alt keys when I need to Ctrl+Alt+Delete with one hand... Oh wait!
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Informative)
There is no Right Alt key. There is an Alt-Gr key, which isn't needed in the US, but in Europe, you need it to type characters that aren't on the main keyboard. For example, using my UK keyboard, Alt-Gr + 4 will type the € symbol, and Alt-Gr + e will type the letter é.
Re:Redundant keys (Score:4, Informative)
There is no Right Alt key.
Err... I just looked down at my [US] keyboard and there is a key labeled "Alt" immediately to the right of the space bar.
The Compose key is a much better way to handle extra symbols. Sun keyboards used to have a key with that name, and on Linux you can assign one of those useless keys to the right of the space bar (I use "Window") to act as a Compose key. Compose = E to get €, Compose ' e to get é, Compose / l to get , Compose ~ n to get ñ, etc.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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You're supposed to use the left shift key when typing a character on the right, and the right shift key when typing a character on the left. Speeds things up considerably.
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No it doesn't speed things up considerably. The shift key on the right can easily be used with the pinky while otherwise typing normally, only inhibiting the speed of the keys that you would type with your right pinky. And what else do you hit with your pinky? The 'Enter' key? Backslash?
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Funny)
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If you're touch typing, then p [ ] ; ' # / { } : @ ~ and ?
So quite a lot. Especially if you're programming.
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Funny)
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This rule was invented when manual typewriters were common, so that it was extremely difficult to press and hold the left shift while striking a left hand key forcefully enough to transfer the ink. So most touch typists who were trained will stick to this rule. However I note that a lot of "self trained" typists who learned only on a computer have a more haphazard typing style even if they eventually learn to type quickly.
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I'm not sure how much it speeded things up, but IIRC mechanical typewriters had two shift keys and touch typists -- a significant percentage of potential PC users in the 1980s -- would probably have been quite unhappy without their two shift keys.
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Funny)
But people who type properly use both shift keys.
Many keyboards have a space between the Esc and F1 keys. I heard somewhere that to allow for adding undetermined capabilities later, they originally wanted to add another key in that space. As it would be for undetermined functionality, and to keep with the naming scheme of the other function keys, this key was to be labelled "FU". While the actual key was never adopted, it's spirit has lived on in every release of Windows.
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Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, most people think it's one of the few things Microsoft did right!
Shift isn't redundant, but Ctrl & Alt... (Score:4, Informative)
My keyboard has two shift keys. He should have used one of those.
Where did you learn to type? Any typing class will teach you that you're supposed to use each shift key for the hand opposite to the hand which types the letter/number. Using one shift key all the time (usually the left) just puts that hand into needlessly slow and awkward claw positions.
Theoretically, you're supposed to do the same with the Ctrl & Alt keys, but keyboard manufacturers refuse to put those in a consistent, pinky-accessible spot on the right side. (Laptop makers, I'm talking about you.) That's probably one of the biggest reasons that one-handed shifting has become so endemic. If you want a redundant set of keys, I'd point the finger at those first.
(P.S. I also was taught to actually use the caps lock key when typing in caps, and it is a big pinky-saver when writing C macros.)
Re:So why is it used in Windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Because Ctrl-Alt-Delete is non-interruptible. This way one could be sure it was truly the login screen and not something impersonating the login screen. At least, that's how I remember it. Could be urban legend.
I coulda swore that the inventor of Ctrl-Alt-Delete said the same thing as you in an interview in the 1990s. Might have been in Wired? Could be in a link in the article that I didn't read too.
Re:So why is it used in Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
its not urban legend. that is exactly, and Bill Gates himself says it so on the first paragraph that Bill talks in the summary's linked article:
From http://www.geekwire.com/2013/gates-harvard/
“You want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signaling to a very low level of the software — actually hard-coded in the hardware — that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect, instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like a log-in screen, and then it listens to your password and then it’s able to do that,” Gates said.
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Microsoft calls this the "secure attention sequence." I have heard that older PCs' keyboard interfaces would directly generate an interrupt on reception of ctrl+alt+del, but I can't find anything to back that up.
Supposedly ctrl+alt+del was chosen to be the SAS in Windows NT because no existing app used it as a key combination. [msdn.com]
Re:So why is it used in Windows? (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps, in the past.I seriously doubt that is still true. Modern USB keyboards have no special handling for C-A-D.
Neither did old keyboards, but that's not the point. The point is that the operating system's low-level keyboard drivers have special handling for it, at a level that can't be modified by trojans unless they can muck with the deepest parts of the system internals -- and if they can do that then they already completely own the machine anyway.
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Re: So why is it used in Windows? (Score:4, Informative)
Ctrl+Alt+Delete is, or was at least, a so called "non maskeable interrupt". This makes it harder for Trojan viruses to take over the login screen and steal your password.
Re: So why is it used in Windows? (Score:5, Interesting)
Huh? NMI is a hardware thing, Ctrl+Alt+Delete is entirely a software thing. The only thing that ever had to do with NMI (related to this) is that on the PCjr the KEYBOARD used the NMI to signal a keystroke. This had an advantage that even if your PC somehow wound up in a interrupts-disabled state the keyboard interrupts would still be processed, and thus Ctrl+Alt+Delete would still work (the BIOS recognized the sequence and branched to the 'reset' code). On the other hand, it was a mistake because typing could interfere with timing critical things (like async comms). As far as I know, the PCjr was the only machine to ever use NMI for the keyboard.
Maybe what you are thinking is that there was no way (in Windows) to 'hook' the keyboard in a manner that could intercept Ctrl+Alt+Delete. That would prevent things from taking over the logon screen.
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Elegant? Ask an OSX user how to screenshot a window.
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http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11229 [apple.com]
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You forgot the space. So 4 buttons to do one simple thing. Sure, and I remapped it to screenshot like it should be. That does not explain why it does not default to screenshot if someone plugs in a proper keyboard.
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Which automatically saves it to the desktop as a jpg with a time stamp.
No stupid pasting into Paint & saving.
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No only other parts, on the same login screen [imgur.com]
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Re:BSOD (Score:5, Interesting)
Would your rather your PC just turned off without any error message whatsoever? The BSOD is a useful tool... the mistake that causes it lies elsewhere.
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Pick one that's essentially unused on a personal computer. SysRq, Scroll Lock, Pause/Break?
Somehow, on an OS which has an use for Scroll Lock, I always use Ctrl-S/Ctrl-Q for this purpose anyway.
Same for Ctrl-C.
And SysRq is never used without Ctrl-Alt, and even that only if you mess with your kernel. Having any other key go as a part of that three finger salute would be just as good.
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First one that comes to my find is "Why do I click 'Start' to stop?"
I guess every interface has such design fuck-ups.
I never used Mac OS but was told that you had (still have?) to drag the CD Rom or onto the trashbin to eject the drive.
That always sounded strange to me.
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Re:Why not SysRq? (Score:4, Informative)
You can press the eject button on every Apple keyboard. Or right-click (control-click) the disc and choose eject. Or click to highlight the CD icon and press CMD + Y (put away) or CMD + E (eject) - Not much of a difference anymore, but in the old days when floppy swapping on a single drive was the thing, "eject" would leave the disc icon and directory contents cached on the desktop even after it spit out the floppy. If you clicked into it and tried to retrieve a file or whatever it would prompt you to insert the disk so it could complete the operation. At the time it was nice, since you didn't have to remember what was on what disc through trial and error, or writing really small on the floppy label, you could just have it psedu-mounted and still see the contents of multiple disks on your desktop on a single floppy system.
If you were finally done with it, you could drag the cached image to the trash can to "unmount" it. The "put away" command OTOH ejected the disk and removed the cached image immediately. Dragging the disc from the get-go to the trash had the same effect as "put away".
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I believe the intention was to make it harder for somebody to install a fake login screen on Windows. I remember reading about that somewhere. The idea was that even if you had a fake login screen running, pressing ctrl-alt-del would pop up the real windows login screen. It was supposed to me more secure that way ;-)
Re:No, Caps Lock was the big mistake (Score:4, Funny)
Caps Lock should've been a no-op placebo, like a lot of those pedestrian light-change request buttons at intersections.
Ctrl-Alt-Delete was actually a reasonable solution for the time, except maybe for certain handicapped users. Make sure the user never hits the reboot key by mistake.
CAPS LOCK IS WONDERFUL, I CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT IT
Re:No, Caps Lock was the big mistake (Score:5, Informative)
Caps lock was invented for manual typewriters.
When you wanted to type a capital letter, the caps key would lift the platten ( the key bar had the uppercase character below the lower case character ).
The upshot of that was that when you typed an uppercase letter, there would be a slowdown while you waited for the platen to rise.
If you had to type several capital letters at once, it had several major effects.
First touch typists are never supposed to use Shift, CTL or Alt. and the key on the same hand. This slows you down. Actually there were no CTL or Alt keys back then. They were eventually added to only the left side of keyboards by geeks. When IBM started creating keyboards that directly entered strokes into the computer, they added both left and right. So a sequence like "CAPSLOCK" would have the person bouncing the platten up and down. This made the persons hands more tired and the typing much slower.
Caps lock was a solution to that.
Of course none of that logic applies to computer keyboards.