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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.
You dont use the delete key? how do you delete files? right click?!?
You do know timothy, that backspace is not delete right?
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
My printer only has capital letters, you insensitive clods.
What I want to know is how I can patch the kernel to force num lock on and ignore all attempts to turn it off.
Then, the solution is to have a Missile Switch Cover-type http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9278 thing over the Delete key. Makes my Nuclear General fantasy more believable too.
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.
I use constants but I hate caps lock.
1st, It's really easy to bump by accident.
2nd, when I type in constants, I often use underscores in them, far more frequently than numerals.
I would like a good old mechanical shift lock. Something with a solid click to it so it's harder to accidentally engage.
When I type in constants, I hold one finger on the shift key and make do with the remaining three fingers on my left hand. I find that much easier than the decidedly odd behaviour.
I don't therefore I'm not.
What is it with this crazy trend of removing useful keys??
I don't really care much about caps lock, which is only very rarely useful. But the Delete key??? How do you delete stuff (files, icons, ...) without it? How do you delete right of the cursor instead of left?
Already, Page Up/Down and Home/End are gone on many notebook keyboards, making simple stuff like select to the start/end of line (Shift-Home / Shift-End) too clumsy to be useful when you need to hold a third Fn key simultaneously. And selecting to the end of the document becomes almost impossible.
So now someone is advocating the removal of Insert/Delete?
What is the next step? The return of Bob as a geek power-user OS?
xmodmap -e "clear Lock"
If this doesn't work, get a real operating system.
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.
The only thing that will change it make it hard to turn off, so that we'll have users going for months with their caps lock on because they can't find where to switch it back.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
What about ctrl+delete (cut)
what about ctrl+insert (paste)
What about CTRL+ALT+DELETE?
Did you actually think about how others use the keys before you so cavalierly decided to banish a key? And why pick on insert delete when there is so much more low hanging fruit? Why not pick on F9-F12? Scroll lock?! Or the duplicated forward slashes or pipe key? Who uses tilde or grave!? And I guess we couldn't get rid of one set or the other of the windows keys?
Personally, I cannot dispense with a single key for me or my clients. If I'm on a support call the last thing I want to hear is "I don't have a delete key" –
No! They cannot, there is no taskbar!.
You might as well upload a virus that prevents you from accessing the windows task manager. Please let's think about the children, they'll be supporting windows XP until they die, let’s give them a easy way to log on to the machine.
I hope all these forward thinking kids think about the repercussions of their actions before we end up with a crappy cell phone keyboard hooked up to a Cray 32.
> 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
No, really, I use it frequently. Not just to post inane l33tspeak to the interwebs either. I mean I really do use the thing as part of my daily life. I deal with a few hundred part numbers, many of them are long numbers, sprinkled with letters in there.. My left hand hit the caps lock and my right hand jumps to the numpad and I'm pecking out E5-FU7-Z009A001 etc for a few lines... Natural, easy. The way the keyboard has been used for... Well decades, getting rid of the caps lock is even dumber than adding "windows" keys and whatever other crap we added to go from 101 to 10-Whatever we're at now. Key combinations are more suited for those extra functions.
http://www.bash.org/?835030
First thing I do to new computers is remap caps lock to control, the way God and RMS intended...
And?
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Well now here comes ARM based hardware just waiting to get repurposed to running a more general purpose netbook environment.
Here? Are you talking about the Cr-48 from TFA? Because that's an Atom device, not ARM.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
> 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.
Democrat delenda est
"Degree is not needed 110F is fine"
The way to make sure the degree symbol is not needed is to have everyone switch to using Kelvins.
Oh and if your talking outside temperature, 316.5K is too fscking hot.
Seriously. People incapable of using both hands at once, how are they going to manage comfortably typing all the capital letters without caps-lock?
Too many seem to only think of how they themselves use something an assume the entire world needs only that.
We are all God's parents.
Powered by a nVidia Tegra 2 processor and a special version of Android.
However, reviews haven't been kind on it:
http://www.reghardware.com/2010/11/03/review_netbook_toshiba_ac100/
10/100
"The beautifully designed and executed hardware is very close to my ideal netbook, and it's hardly an exaggeration to say that I'm heart-broken by Toshiba's cocked-up Android implementation. The best one can hope for is a firmware rescue from the open source community, although I wonder if the product will stay around long enough in these tablet-obsessed times for that to happen."
http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-mac/laptops-portable-pcs/laptops-and-netbooks/toshiba-ac100-721195/review?artc_pg=4
2.5/5
Verdict
"If you want a device for carrying the web around with you, and you don't want a tablet and can't be bothered with a Windows 7 powered netbok, then the AC100 may be for you.
There's no denying it works and that you can browse the internet on it, but it's how it goes about doing this that most disappoints.
Especially as the AC100 could have been great, it still has lots going for it – the most crucial being excellent portability.
For us, however, the poor implementation of Android 2.1 remains a deal breaker."
I like to say "A model M is the only keyboard you can use to kill a man; then type his obituary."
I really like to say that, at least once a month.
This is obviously something geeks care about, there are more comments in here than in the china blocking nobel price story.
My keyboard philosophy is "more is less". I want to reach all keys from touch position and need a keyboard that provides that: Happy Hacking Keyboard. Not only is it much faster because I dont need to move my hands much. It also takes up much less space on my desk. Combined with emacs, this is the most powerful user input method I know of.
I never use caps-lock, but if I have to I have a two-key combo that enables it. A special key on the home row for caps lock is just stupid.
Thank you for sharing Crtl-Ins and Shift-Ins with us. I have been using Linux for over 10 years, and never have heard of such a thing. Talk about well kept usability secrets!
testing out my trending skills
Caps lock should be activated automatically when your blood pressure rises above a threshold level.
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
Everyone does realize that backspace and delete actually have different functions, right? This keeps getting passed over. Backspace erases before the cursor, delete erases after. Forget key combos, both keys have very important functions as they stand. If you want to delete text, you only have to land somewhere in the block instead of clicking at one pre-specified end. Click the middle, backspace a few times, delete the rest, boom. Very convenient. My wife never learned what the Shift key was for until well after she'd learned to type in school. She'd needed a cap, one key said cap on it, logically she pressed the caps key and went from there. To this day, she still thinks of Shift as a punctuation key and Caps Lock as the caps key. She types 60+wpm like that, and it's hard to argue against. If I had learned to type that way, coding would probably be easier. My shift fingers could use some variety.