I'm afraid to compare. Are the other versions of the video as startlingly loud as the YouTube one? That's a pet peeve of mine, especially on YouTube where the videos are rarely normalized with each other in volume.
Pluto's smaller than our moon. Is it a planet?
on
Pluto Making a Comeback
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Common human consensus had Pluto as a planet and pretty much still does today.
Geez, you make it sound like they're just some random cranks who got together. This was a meeting of the IAU. Common human consensus had tomatoes as not being fruits and dolphins as fish before people sat down and came up with a consistent definition.
Pluto's essentially grandfathered in from a time when we hadn't yet found other objects in its size class. I hope you realize that Pluto is only about 2300 km across while our own moon is about 3500 km across. Are we in a double-planet system, or is there some logical reason you can think of for making a smaller object than our moon a planet while our moon is undeserving of the status?
I think it's high-time we demoted it as nothing more than an oversized trans-Uranic asteroid. I mean, it doesn't even operate on the same elliptic plane as the planets do and it has a "moon" that's half its size. The only reason anyone cares is a knee-jerk anger over having some childhood lesson overturned.
Other posters have asked what right does the world have to prevent Iran (or any other nation with imperial ambitions and/or dangerous ideological imperatives) from building atomic bombs. That's your answer... you can build them but God help you if we think you're crazy enough to use them.
The problem with MAD in the modern age vs. the Cold War is that in the Cold War both the US and the USSR assumed that each other would be responsible if a nuke went off in one of their major cities. In fact, the preferred delivery vehicle would've been visibly launched from the home country for no other purpose but nuclear death hours in advance.
Now days, nukes are everywhere, and there's no clearly defined us-vs.-them line. Furthermore, if and when a major US city is nuked, the delivery vehicle will be land or sea based instead of a ballistic missle, and it will be a shadowy terrorist organization that does it instead of a publicly visible military.
If Iran wants to nuke us, it will do so by proxy and leave the US unable politically to retaliate with an immediate strike because doing so raises the possibly of committing genocide in a potentially innocent country. That breaks down the entire Mexican standoff nature of MAD and could lead to a series of cascading attacks from allied countries and international condemnation by surviving 3rd parties.
Also, Ahmadinejad uses a lot apocalyptic rhetoric in speeches. The possibility that he's some sort of fanatic that wants to kick off armaggedon is raised constantly as a spectre by US pundits, and there's the possibility that there's some shade of truth to their rhetoric that worries me.
The article says that Perelman earned "more than enough" in America in his early career to last the rest of his life, but he's living with his mother on a diet consisting of "bread, cheese and milk." I doubt a extra cash is ever overlooked by someone that is frugal.
I disagree. If he is convinced that he has "enough," then he really means it. Even while living in America, he had to live an ascetic life to earn enough money to save up to pay for the rest of his life in Russia. To a person who had access to the sort of money to live a more extravagant life and who didn't in the past, a prize like this means nothing financially.
His needs are met. Any other raise in his standard of living is just more expense and more distraction. I envy people like this who can be happy with nothing but the basics.
I never saw any of the crazy, high-tech toilets when I was there in 2000, but my host family had what I thought was the simplest and greatest idea that every toilet should have. When the toilet needed to refill the top tank after a flush, it did so through a spigot that poured the water over the top of the toilet into a lid-sink for washing your hands. There was no reason to separately turn on the sink to wash your hands when the was water that was going to go to waste being poured into a tank right in front of you.
Simple, low-tech, water-saving, and it gives a strong reminder to wash hands immediately after flushing. I cannot see why all toilets don't have that simple change. It's brilliant.
The good news: There is a version of Settlers of Catan for the computer! The good news 2: It's written for Java 1.1.8 and works for everybody. The good news 3: It works in any Java-supporting browser. The good news 4: You don't need any account anywhere to play. The good news 5: It's completely free.
It also has a decent, if human-hating. AI. Most people will be playing solo against 3 computer opponents, and those that do want to play against humans will often insist on FNT (fast, no-trade) games.
What makes you think that Slashdot could ever touch myspace? They have about the same volume of hits per day on average, and myspace is a lot more multimedia-heavy.
True... I wonder why some manufacturer doesn't make an LCD display with an easily replaceable backlight(*). I'd pay extra for a display if I knew I wouldn't have to throw it away in a few years.
If you're fiscally responsible enough to be willing to pay money up front to save money later, then why aren't you fiscally responsible enough to pay a repair shop a couple of hundred bucks to replace a tube instead of paying a few thousand bucks to replace a perfectly good TV?
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
Huh. I've never heard that sound from an LCD before, but I know it's not due to the same cause becausse LCDs have absolutely no reason to have a flyback transformer (which gets the name "flyback" from how it paints the beam across the screen).
Not having heard it, I'll just have to say that maybe the AC who responded is right. I've never investigated the matter.
It's not rose-tinted glasses for me.
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
I do remember errors and crashes, but they weren't as important to me as having a desktop metaphor that just worked. Remember pop-up folders? Remember how you used to be able to organize programs in the Apple menu? Remember how the File, Edit, etc. menus never used to move around on you? Remember icon and list views that actually maintained consistency? Remember how creator/filetype codes actually worked (when you didn't have to interact with files from foreign systems)?
I think the reason I stopped loving the Mac OS was the Dock. That horrible abomination. The Dock put an end to pop-up folders. It put an end to launching programs from the Apple menu. It put an end to knowing where your applications were so that you could open them without even really looking at them. It put and end to window-shading and replaced it with the mouse-over hunt-and-peck for minimized windows.
The Dock embodies everything that is bad about the Windows taskbar but manages to do it all worse. It's a terrible application launcher, a terrible running program manager, and generally a terrible waste of desktop space just to be pretty. Oh, and I hate have the trash move around.
The sad thing is that since Mac OS X came along, I've completely stopped using the Finder and now only use the Terminal to manipulate files and launch applications. Irony of ironies -- Apple has made me a predominantly CLI user.
For that reason, and that reason alone, I vociferiously HATE Mac OS X. It killed everything that made me love the Mac in exchange for fixing all the things I really didn't care that much about -- a trade-off that didn't have to be made. They could've had both like the started to in the early days of Rhapsody, but no -- Jobs wanted the Dock and he wanted something "lickable." I still use Mac OS X, and even recently bought a Mac Mini to replace my aging, first-revision PowerMac G4, but I'm primarily a Linux user now.
I just still have need for a few apps, but that's as far as my loyalty to the platform goes. I'll be happy when I can one day just simply ditch it and stop paying a premium for an OS I drive by CLI that doesn't even have a good way of organizing your workspace.
Whenever I used a Mac running one of the earlier systems, I always tried to have some lightweight audio app running. It accomplished the samething without all the hassle.
[Pauses.] [Rereads post in bewildered disbelief and the horror of dawning realization.] [Smacks forehead repeatedly into desk in shame.]
Now I wish I hadn't recycled the machine years ago so that I could try this out and see if it would work ADB and audio shared the same portion of the bus. I feel like a clever idiot now.
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
Interesting... Back in 90 in College, I found the same thing/info... And now out of habbit, whenever my computer seems to bog down, I find myself spinning the cursor. EVEN though, I know it has NOTHING to do with current problems. It's just "back there" in my subconscience. I usually laugh when I catch myself doing this type of stuff...
I find myself strangely bonded with you by the shared trauma of having owned a Performa 5200. <g> Fortunately, it only took me a year to shake the instinct of having my mouse around after I got my next computer.
Even now, if I hear a CRT that is "about to go bad" it drives me nuts because the sound just jumps out at me even in a crowded room. Haven't noticed it with LCD's yet.
Drives me crazy too. I almost can't wait until I get old enough to lose the upper range of my hearing.
You won't hear it from LCD's though, because the noise comes from the flyback transformer that powers the electron beam. LCDs don't really have a need for the same kind of transformer since they aren't throwing tens of kilovolts into projecting the beam.
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
No, you don't want to hear the stories about third and fourth repair visits to 5200 owners...because even the modem could cause the problem you describe. Good motherboards after bad, until the isolated and fixed the problem.
I remember hearing that, as well as the whole unterminated SCSI port nonsense. "Fortunately," I had a Jaz drive, so I didn't run into that latter one. It's good to know that they fixed it with a ROM upgrade, but can you imagine trying to explain to customers before that that they needed to jiggle their mouse because their machine was a Frankenstein monster of patched together busses?
Re:Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 1
Interestingly, in spite of the sluggishness and the frequent crashes, I was a passionate Mac advocate back in the day. Now, with machines that never crash that have great performance, I couldn't give a flying rip about Macs anymore.
I think it's because of how much the Classic Mac UI was important to me and to how much Mac OS X gave up all of it's advantages senselessly when they went about fixing all their disadvantages. In spite of all the hardware problems, Classic Mac OS just clicked right with me, and I've never has as productive of a desktop environment since then.
Performa 5200 and the mouse vs. network ritual.
on
Computer Voodoo?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I used to have a Performa 5200 back when I started college, and if you're not familiar with the machine, it's arguably the worst Macintosh ever made. Ever. The only thing it excelled at was displaying grainy TV on the TV tuner card you could get for it.
Read that second link for all the gory details of why the follow scenario works, and you'll shudder.
I used to note in college that when doing particularly fast FTP transfers that saturated by 10-Base-T card that the machine would often lock up within a minute of starting the transfer. For months, I fiddled around and noticed that if I was actively working that this didn't happen. Eventually, I found the article I mentioned and realized that if I kept moving the mouse constantly, the machine wouldn't get in whatever weird state locked up the machine and I could finish my transfers. That's right -- to run FTP (or any other sustained, saturated transfer), I had to sit there moving the mouse in circles through the entire transfer.
Essentially, the "Left 32" bus described in the article was shared by the 16-bit Apple Desktop Bus (for mouse and keyboard) and the 16-bit networking card (as well as audio and the 8-bit SCSI controller). So long as I kept interrupting the bus with input from ADB, the networking card was unable to flood the controller that had to make sense of all the different bit-widths and clock speeds between the various busses hanging off of it, and the machine wouldn't lock up.
I remember having a McAfee trial on my computer, that would regularly make up infections. Yet, when a slightly updated version of a worm comes out, you're unprotected.
That's weird. Is it just the demo version? I've never had any anti-virus software ever detect ANY viruses (false positive or not) on ANY machine I've ever worked on since the old days of floppy viruses.
What kinds of things were you doing to trigger it?
I assume that we're ignoring the fact that it's usually nigh-impossible to find the people who started the whole rumor mill going or that it's impossible to sue EVERYBODY involved in mob harrassment or that you may have actually done what you're accused of like the woman who was infamously harrassed for letting her dog poop in a subway car and refused to clean it up, etc.?
Well, the main problem is that suing people can take years and is basically closing the barn door after the horses have run free. It in no way stops the harrassment, which will die out on its own long before then and leave smoldering distrust and disdain in people's minds towards you. Suing is far less effective than preventing it from happening in the first place. All suing is is vengeance, and vengeance is always a thing for after the damage has been done.
It's useful for people who use the numeric keypad to do long stretches of numeric entry. The reason it and the + key on that side of the keyboard are so large is because they simulate and old tape-reel calculator where the primary thing you would do is type a number, hit +, and repeat until the end where you'd hit enter/=.
Also, it's useful for obscure terminal formats like V103 on VOS or old IBM 3270 terminals where "next line within field" and "confirm entry of field in form" are semantically different and where arrow keys have their own separate purpose. Admittedly, these are uncommon situations in modern computer use.
No, remove Numlock, and eliminate the concept. We have an entire full set of numbers right where they've always been, at the top of the keyboard, as well as the various mathematical signs in their normal locations. Theres no need to duplicate those keys elsewhere.
You obviously don't know any accountants or anyone else who has to input numbers frequently who has learned how to ten-key. I once had a support job that required frequent dialing of phone numbers where I learned to ten-key on a desk phone, and I've found the skill to be utterly invaluable when using Quicken to track my spending years later and for other tasks involving lots of numeric input. There's really no better way.
Why do you think there's a market for USB Numeric Keypads for laptops like you see in the keyboard and mouse section of every computer store?
Windows key+D == Minimize all windows. You've got 100 things open and want to get to something on your desktop? Use this! Also, if you don't do anything, it's a toggle!
"Doctor, doctor! It hurts when I do this!" "Well, then stop doing that."
Seriously, I never have been able to understand how people who have multiple windows stacked over each other get any work done. I've watched too many coworkers do the whole shuffle and hunt for windows thing. I grew up using a Macintosh, where the desktop model suggested keeping all your windows visible at once and later added "windowshading" to make this easier. Since then, I've used UNIX systems where multiple desktops are common. The whole "maximize everything and alt-tab or hunt the task bar" model of use just has never made any sense to me (and is a large part of why I hate many of the UI changes in Mac OS X)..
If you use a good Windows multiple desktop manager like Virtual Dimension, the need for such a key combo disappears.
Also, I just put explorer in the quick-launch section of the task bar, so Windows-E is not of much use to me either.
Ah, shift-lock. Memories. The keyboards that I took typing class on in high school had a shift-lock instead of a caps-lock key. I forget whether or not my C64 and Vic-20 had shift-lock or caps-lock keys because I was more interested in drawing pretty pictures on the screen with the extended character set and color codes at that age.
(Yes, I learned to touch type on a typewriter. No, you may not touch my brow-ridge or see my stone axe collection.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm afraid to compare. Are the other versions of the video as startlingly loud as the YouTube one?
That's a pet peeve of mine, especially on YouTube where the videos are rarely normalized with each other in volume.
Common human consensus had Pluto as a planet and pretty much still does today.
Geez, you make it sound like they're just some random cranks who got together. This was a meeting of the IAU. Common human consensus had tomatoes as not being fruits and dolphins as fish before people sat down and came up with a consistent definition.
Pluto's essentially grandfathered in from a time when we hadn't yet found other objects in its size class. I hope you realize that Pluto is only about 2300 km across while our own moon is about 3500 km across. Are we in a double-planet system, or is there some logical reason you can think of for making a smaller object than our moon a planet while our moon is undeserving of the status?
I think it's high-time we demoted it as nothing more than an oversized trans-Uranic asteroid. I mean, it doesn't even operate on the same elliptic plane as the planets do and it has a "moon" that's half its size. The only reason anyone cares is a knee-jerk anger over having some childhood lesson overturned.
WTF Whiners (Score:1)
by netDopey (197020) on 10:53 PM August 27th, 2006 (#15991938)
Ok, I only read the posts that were rated 4+, but...
I'm sorry -- did somebody say something? I couldn't hear over all the important people.
Honestly, where else are you going to find terms that match with glowing things that aren't supposed to normally?
Other posters have asked what right does the world have to prevent Iran (or any other nation with imperial ambitions and/or dangerous ideological imperatives) from building atomic bombs. That's your answer ... you can build them but God help you if we think you're crazy enough to use them.
The problem with MAD in the modern age vs. the Cold War is that in the Cold War both the US and the USSR assumed that each other would be responsible if a nuke went off in one of their major cities. In fact, the preferred delivery vehicle would've been visibly launched from the home country for no other purpose but nuclear death hours in advance.
Now days, nukes are everywhere, and there's no clearly defined us-vs.-them line. Furthermore, if and when a major US city is nuked, the delivery vehicle will be land or sea based instead of a ballistic missle, and it will be a shadowy terrorist organization that does it instead of a publicly visible military.
If Iran wants to nuke us, it will do so by proxy and leave the US unable politically to retaliate with an immediate strike because doing so raises the possibly of committing genocide in a potentially innocent country. That breaks down the entire Mexican standoff nature of MAD and could lead to a series of cascading attacks from allied countries and international condemnation by surviving 3rd parties.
Also, Ahmadinejad uses a lot apocalyptic rhetoric in speeches. The possibility that he's some sort of fanatic that wants to kick off armaggedon is raised constantly as a spectre by US pundits, and there's the possibility that there's some shade of truth to their rhetoric that worries me.
Madman Armageddonjihad
Nothing lends a man more credibility to his arguments than a pithy mangling of another man's name.
The article says that Perelman earned "more than enough" in America in his early career to last the rest of his life, but he's living with his mother on a diet consisting of "bread, cheese and milk." I doubt a extra cash is ever overlooked by someone that is frugal.
I disagree. If he is convinced that he has "enough," then he really means it. Even while living in America, he had to live an ascetic life to earn enough money to save up to pay for the rest of his life in Russia. To a person who had access to the sort of money to live a more extravagant life and who didn't in the past, a prize like this means nothing financially.
His needs are met. Any other raise in his standard of living is just more expense and more distraction. I envy people like this who can be happy with nothing but the basics.
I never saw any of the crazy, high-tech toilets when I was there in 2000, but my host family had what I thought was the simplest and greatest idea that every toilet should have. When the toilet needed to refill the top tank after a flush, it did so through a spigot that poured the water over the top of the toilet into a lid-sink for washing your hands. There was no reason to separately turn on the sink to wash your hands when the was water that was going to go to waste being poured into a tank right in front of you.
Simple, low-tech, water-saving, and it gives a strong reminder to wash hands immediately after flushing. I cannot see why all toilets don't have that simple change. It's brilliant.
Go to jsettlers.com.
The good news: There is a version of Settlers of Catan for the computer!
The good news 2: It's written for Java 1.1.8 and works for everybody.
The good news 3: It works in any Java-supporting browser.
The good news 4: You don't need any account anywhere to play.
The good news 5: It's completely free.
It also has a decent, if human-hating. AI. Most people will be playing solo against 3 computer opponents, and those that do want to play against humans will often insist on FNT (fast, no-trade) games.
What makes you think that Slashdot could ever touch myspace? They have about the same volume of hits per day on average, and myspace is a lot more multimedia-heavy.
Actually, I was going to point out that C is B as well, for fission.
True... I wonder why some manufacturer doesn't make an LCD display with an easily replaceable backlight(*). I'd pay extra for a display if I knew I wouldn't have to throw it away in a few years.
If you're fiscally responsible enough to be willing to pay money up front to save money later, then why aren't you fiscally responsible enough to pay a repair shop a couple of hundred bucks to replace a tube instead of paying a few thousand bucks to replace a perfectly good TV?
Huh. I've never heard that sound from an LCD before, but I know it's not due to the same cause becausse LCDs have absolutely no reason to have a flyback transformer (which gets the name "flyback" from how it paints the beam across the screen).
Not having heard it, I'll just have to say that maybe the AC who responded is right. I've never investigated the matter.
I do remember errors and crashes, but they weren't as important to me as having a desktop metaphor that just worked. Remember pop-up folders? Remember how you used to be able to organize programs in the Apple menu? Remember how the File, Edit, etc. menus never used to move around on you? Remember icon and list views that actually maintained consistency? Remember how creator/filetype codes actually worked (when you didn't have to interact with files from foreign systems)?
I think the reason I stopped loving the Mac OS was the Dock. That horrible abomination. The Dock put an end to pop-up folders. It put an end to launching programs from the Apple menu. It put an end to knowing where your applications were so that you could open them without even really looking at them. It put and end to window-shading and replaced it with the mouse-over hunt-and-peck for minimized windows.
The Dock embodies everything that is bad about the Windows taskbar but manages to do it all worse. It's a terrible application launcher, a terrible running program manager, and generally a terrible waste of desktop space just to be pretty. Oh, and I hate have the trash move around.
The sad thing is that since Mac OS X came along, I've completely stopped using the Finder and now only use the Terminal to manipulate files and launch applications. Irony of ironies -- Apple has made me a predominantly CLI user.
For that reason, and that reason alone, I vociferiously HATE Mac OS X. It killed everything that made me love the Mac in exchange for fixing all the things I really didn't care that much about -- a trade-off that didn't have to be made. They could've had both like the started to in the early days of Rhapsody, but no -- Jobs wanted the Dock and he wanted something "lickable." I still use Mac OS X, and even recently bought a Mac Mini to replace my aging, first-revision PowerMac G4, but I'm primarily a Linux user now.
I just still have need for a few apps, but that's as far as my loyalty to the platform goes. I'll be happy when I can one day just simply ditch it and stop paying a premium for an OS I drive by CLI that doesn't even have a good way of organizing your workspace.
Whenever I used a Mac running one of the earlier systems, I always tried to have some lightweight audio app running. It accomplished the samething without all the hassle.
[Pauses.]
[Rereads post in bewildered disbelief and the horror of dawning realization.]
[Smacks forehead repeatedly into desk in shame.]
Now I wish I hadn't recycled the machine years ago so that I could try this out and see if it would work ADB and audio shared the same portion of the bus. I feel like a clever idiot now.
Interesting... Back in 90 in College, I found the same thing/info... And now out of habbit, whenever my computer seems to bog down, I find myself spinning the cursor. EVEN though, I know it has NOTHING to do with current problems. It's just "back there" in my subconscience. I usually laugh when I catch myself doing this type of stuff...
I find myself strangely bonded with you by the shared trauma of having owned a Performa 5200. <g>
Fortunately, it only took me a year to shake the instinct of having my mouse around after I got my next computer.
Even now, if I hear a CRT that is "about to go bad" it drives me nuts because the sound just jumps out at me even in a crowded room. Haven't noticed it with LCD's yet.
Drives me crazy too. I almost can't wait until I get old enough to lose the upper range of my hearing.
You won't hear it from LCD's though, because the noise comes from the flyback transformer that powers the electron beam. LCDs don't really have a need for the same kind of transformer since they aren't throwing tens of kilovolts into projecting the beam.
No, you don't want to hear the stories about third and fourth repair visits to 5200 owners...because even the modem could cause the problem you describe. Good motherboards after bad, until the isolated and fixed the problem.
I remember hearing that, as well as the whole unterminated SCSI port nonsense. "Fortunately," I had a Jaz drive, so I didn't run into that latter one. It's good to know that they fixed it with a ROM upgrade, but can you imagine trying to explain to customers before that that they needed to jiggle their mouse because their machine was a Frankenstein monster of patched together busses?
Interestingly, in spite of the sluggishness and the frequent crashes, I was a passionate Mac advocate back in the day. Now, with machines that never crash that have great performance, I couldn't give a flying rip about Macs anymore.
I think it's because of how much the Classic Mac UI was important to me and to how much Mac OS X gave up all of it's advantages senselessly when they went about fixing all their disadvantages. In spite of all the hardware problems, Classic Mac OS just clicked right with me, and I've never has as productive of a desktop environment since then.
I used to have a Performa 5200 back when I started college, and if you're not familiar with the machine, it's arguably the worst Macintosh ever made. Ever. The only thing it excelled at was displaying grainy TV on the TV tuner card you could get for it.
Read that second link for all the gory details of why the follow scenario works, and you'll shudder.
I used to note in college that when doing particularly fast FTP transfers that saturated by 10-Base-T card that the machine would often lock up within a minute of starting the transfer. For months, I fiddled around and noticed that if I was actively working that this didn't happen. Eventually, I found the article I mentioned and realized that if I kept moving the mouse constantly, the machine wouldn't get in whatever weird state locked up the machine and I could finish my transfers. That's right -- to run FTP (or any other sustained, saturated transfer), I had to sit there moving the mouse in circles through the entire transfer.
Essentially, the "Left 32" bus described in the article was shared by the 16-bit Apple Desktop Bus (for mouse and keyboard) and the 16-bit networking card (as well as audio and the 8-bit SCSI controller). So long as I kept interrupting the bus with input from ADB, the networking card was unable to flood the controller that had to make sense of all the different bit-widths and clock speeds between the various busses hanging off of it, and the machine wouldn't lock up.
Now how's that for some serious computer voodoo?
I remember having a McAfee trial on my computer, that would regularly make up infections. Yet, when a slightly updated version of a worm comes out, you're unprotected.
That's weird. Is it just the demo version? I've never had any anti-virus software ever detect ANY viruses (false positive or not) on ANY machine I've ever worked on since the old days of floppy viruses.
What kinds of things were you doing to trigger it?
Ever hear of defamation or libel?
I assume that we're ignoring the fact that it's usually nigh-impossible to find the people who started the whole rumor mill going or that it's impossible to sue EVERYBODY involved in mob harrassment or that you may have actually done what you're accused of like the woman who was infamously harrassed for letting her dog poop in a subway car and refused to clean it up, etc.?
Well, the main problem is that suing people can take years and is basically closing the barn door after the horses have run free. It in no way stops the harrassment, which will die out on its own long before then and leave smoldering distrust and disdain in people's minds towards you. Suing is far less effective than preventing it from happening in the first place. All suing is is vengeance, and vengeance is always a thing for after the damage has been done.
It's useful for people who use the numeric keypad to do long stretches of numeric entry. The reason it and the + key on that side of the keyboard are so large is because they simulate and old tape-reel calculator where the primary thing you would do is type a number, hit +, and repeat until the end where you'd hit enter/=.
Also, it's useful for obscure terminal formats like V103 on VOS or old IBM 3270 terminals where "next line within field" and "confirm entry of field in form" are semantically different and where arrow keys have their own separate purpose. Admittedly, these are uncommon situations in modern computer use.
No, remove Numlock, and eliminate the concept. We have an entire full set of numbers right where they've always been, at the top of the keyboard, as well as the various mathematical signs in their normal locations. Theres no need to duplicate those keys elsewhere.
You obviously don't know any accountants or anyone else who has to input numbers frequently who has learned how to ten-key. I once had a support job that required frequent dialing of phone numbers where I learned to ten-key on a desk phone, and I've found the skill to be utterly invaluable when using Quicken to track my spending years later and for other tasks involving lots of numeric input. There's really no better way.
Why do you think there's a market for USB Numeric Keypads for laptops like you see in the keyboard and mouse section of every computer store?
Windows key+D == Minimize all windows. You've got 100 things open and want to get to something on your desktop? Use this! Also, if you don't do anything, it's a toggle!
"Doctor, doctor! It hurts when I do this!"
"Well, then stop doing that."
Seriously, I never have been able to understand how people who have multiple windows stacked over each other get any work done. I've watched too many coworkers do the whole shuffle and hunt for windows thing. I grew up using a Macintosh, where the desktop model suggested keeping all your windows visible at once and later added "windowshading" to make this easier. Since then, I've used UNIX systems where multiple desktops are common. The whole "maximize everything and alt-tab or hunt the task bar" model of use just has never made any sense to me (and is a large part of why I hate many of the UI changes in Mac OS X)..
If you use a good Windows multiple desktop manager like Virtual Dimension, the need for such a key combo disappears.
Also, I just put explorer in the quick-launch section of the task bar, so Windows-E is not of much use to me either.
Ah, shift-lock. Memories. The keyboards that I took typing class on in high school had a shift-lock instead of a caps-lock key. I forget whether or not my C64 and Vic-20 had shift-lock or caps-lock keys because I was more interested in drawing pretty pictures on the screen with the extended character set and color codes at that age.
(Yes, I learned to touch type on a typewriter. No, you may not touch my brow-ridge or see my stone axe collection.)