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."
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.
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: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: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: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: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.
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".
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.
Re:ADB (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Redundant keys (Score:3, Informative)
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 it does now.
Is it irony or hypocricy that on my work machine, after you boot it you have to hit Ctrl-Alt-Del to log on, and again if the screen saver comes on? It's a really stupid, unergonomic and user-hostile design; move the mouse when the screen saver is on and rather than taking you to a login prompt like XP and 98 did, you get a screen instructing you to CtrlAltDel, only after you hit that does the login come on. It's a really stupid design, but that doesn't surprise me considering it's Microsoft.
Re:So why continue it... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Redundant keys (Score:5, Informative)
Shift-F10.
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.
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: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.
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.
Where is Dave Bradley when we need him? (Score:2, Informative)
Dave is the IBM engineer that "invented" alt-ctrl-del, was even a Jeopardy answer once.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bradley_%28engineer%29
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.
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.
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.