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Lenovo Tinkers With Larger Delete and Escape Keys
Slatterz writes "After a year's research, Lenovo boffins have decided the time is right to install larger Delete and Escape keys on their updated ThinkPad laptop T400s range. While it is a small change, it is fairly radical to tinker with an area of hardware which has been largely unchanged since the 19th century. What convinced them to make the size-change was doing some tests on users to see which keys they use the most. They found that on average, people used the Escape and Delete keys 700 times per week, yet those were the only non-letter keys that Lenovo hasn't made any bigger." The article says Caps Lock may be next on the agenda; death is too good for Caps Lock.
Show me a keyboard that even HAD the Delete or Escape keys, idiot. Hell, when I learned to type, you had to use a lowercase L for the digit 1, and a capital O for the digit zero. Exclamation point was "apostrophe, backspace, period."
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This is a ridiculous story as HP already messed with keyboards.
Try checking out the HP laptop keyboards on Canadian laptops. Dear god the layout on those things is terrible. The old QWERTY stuff is in the right place but punctuation etc... Is all over the place. Absolutely horrendous keyboards. I wound up having to use a USB keyboard with it as the default keyboard is damn near unusable unless you like doing a LOT of deleting and retyping of stuff.
How else would they use vi and emacs?
Sam ty sig.
Straight from Lenovo: http://lenovoblogs.com/designmatters/?p=1565
One that hath name thou can not otter
America doesn't use the word 'boffins'? That's such a 'regular' word (to me) that I never even realised it was slang. (I'm Australian but have lived in America for quite a while - never occurred to me you guys didn't use that word). Well you learn something every day.
Sure enough though, you are right (according to Wiki). And the fact that most of the hits you get on Google if you search for the term are .au or .uk sites.
Having said that, I think it's pretty obvious what it means given the rest of the sentence. Plus Slashdot often uses US slang (or not even slang, but US words which have other equivalents elsewhere) all the time in headlines, but that doesn't trouble the rest of us (too much). Context is your friend.
I've been very happy with my HP laptops and desktops and their quality control.
I wouldn't know about XP drivers, but the hardware runs current versions of Windows and Linux just fine.
Historical note ..... The key combination of CTRL-ALT-DEL was specifically selected because they were so far apart. The original keyboard did not have a CTRL key on the right hand side. This required both hands to press three keys simultaneously, thus making it harder to do accidently
And although the Home and End are basically broken (yes, BROKEN) you can use Beanie-Home and Beanie-End to go the beginning and end of a line.
But that doesn't make it OK for Apple to screw up the keys in the first place.
Mods: Actually, he may have a point.
IIRC, Canada gets two different keyboard layouts - US English, and French-Canadian. I'm guessing someone accidentally bought a French-Canadian layout.
CTRL + SHIFT + ESC brings the task manager without bringing up the fullscreen
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
GP is probably using a British layout which differs slightly from the US standard. There's an article about it on Wikipedia.
Absolutely right, and they all got their ideas from this plucky little thing found on old MIT LISP machines which is why the "Windows Key" is often referred to as the "Super Key" in many Linux apps (most notable of the current day is the python compiz/beryl configurator I suppose).
Wow, someone doesn't know their history. The reason Windows uses control-C for copy is that Macs used Command-C and UNIX systems used Meta-C (using control on a UNIX system is stupid, because it means it won't work in a terminal or an xterm, where control is used for sending escape sequences). The PC keyboard had neither command nor meta keys, so this wasn't possible. Note that this shortcut is a relatively recent thing on Windows. DOS programs conventionally used control-insert/shift-insert for copy and paste. Windows changed this to be more familiar to users of other systems, but was hampered by limitations of the target platform.
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