Chrome Does Have a Caps-Lock Key After All
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, you insensitive clods.
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.
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
> 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.
Democrat delenda est