Keyboard Rant
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
Look at it this way, it's the perfect key to use to show an Easter egg. I mean come on, what would your keyboard be without it? Use it, you know you want to.[^]
Jeremy Falcon
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
I had forgotten about my KVM which uses that horrible excuse for a key.
kdmote wrote:
vestigial remnant
You left off "redundant". I spend most of my day in a DOS box, but I rarely use that key because Ctrl-S / Ctrl-Q still work just fine and are close together on the left-hand side of the keyboard.
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
kdmote wrote:
Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin?
Absolutely! I love to turn it on for my coworkers when they leave their computer unlocked and then watch them waste hours of time trying to navigate around Excel and try to troubleshoot the problem. When they finally ask me for help I tell them it must be a virus. Great fun!
-NP Never underestimate the creativity of the end-user.
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I've never used it in Windows, but in DOS I used it with Microfocus Cobol to pause code listings.
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
He did mention the dark ages :laugh:
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH
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That's because it's never used for anything else! :laugh:
The difficult we do right away... ...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
I for sure see no real use for that key in modern times. I've never used it (on Windows), and for sure never will. On my laptop, it's on the same key as INS (you would need to press Fn to get it - so yeah, some manufactures have gotten the idea :D ) Best, John
-- LogWizard Meet the Log Viewer that makes monitoring log files a joy!
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
Yes, I do when I want to browse though documents without moving the character blinker (I forgot its proper name, sorry, not my native language). Maybe it's beacue I use the PC from the Dark Times...
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP. -- TNCaver "When you have eliminated the JavaScript, whatever remains must be an empty page." -- Mike Hankey
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
Scroll Lock is massively useful. I have a utility (written by a CP member, not me) that sits in the background and toggles Scroll Lock on and off periodically. It does a dandy job of defeating the screen saver lock policy set by the IT gestapo.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
I use it with my IOGEAR KVM switch. Bang on the Scroll Lock twice, and it switches between the two computers connected to it.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11 Those who do not remember the past, are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not remember the past, cannot build upon it.
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
There is some consolation in more modern laptops going without Scroll Lock. The key will die eventually. I still find XON-XOFF useful. Say I've got a massive Visual Studio compile going in a dos box and there's some interesting error messages early on. I can't just move the scroll bar to go back and see because the compile is spewing more and keeps taking me back to the bottom of the stream. Typing ^S (XOFF) stops the incoming text and I can browse around to see what happened. Satisfied, ^Q (XON) resumes the flood. Works on Linux, too.
Dang! My '58 Renault Dauphine has another flat tire.
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
And what about the '7' key? Who here has actually used that?
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
What would we do without the scroll lock? If you set HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters\CrashOnCtrlScroll = 1 and the press <ctrl> + <scroll lock> you will generate a BSOD! Including a current memory dump. Surely this is in every programmer's repertoire!
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Probably, to support legacy applications. You'd be really annoyed if you couldn't use software you rely on because your new computer didn't have an "Alt Gr" key so you couldn't enter the accented characters it needed. :laugh:
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
I've never had a keyboard with that key on it. :rolleyes:
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies. -- Sarah Hoyt
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What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
For those too young to know.. :) Scroll Lock is a throwback to the days of teletypes. It used to pause the output being printed at the terminal end. Back before PCs, even back before modems, teletypes where hardwired to the host. The serial interface (you young whippersnappers would call it a UART) used hardware handshaking (RTS/CTS/DTR/DSR), and that's how the sender would find out that it couldn't send the next character. Later came the ctrl-S/ctrl-Q flow control (because that worked through a modem), but before then, it was Scroll Lock. Seriously, I understand your pain. My son had a similar problem with that key just a few weeks ago. That kind of pain is why keyboard manufacturers started putting lights on the keyboards to indicate the state of the scroll lock feature. Its mostly unused these days. I wish they'd remove it and replace it with something useful, like an "Any" key :)
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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Scroll Lock is massively useful. I have a utility (written by a CP member, not me) that sits in the background and toggles Scroll Lock on and off periodically. It does a dandy job of defeating the screen saver lock policy set by the IT gestapo.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
Software Zen:
delete this; -
What in the flippin' elephant is the Scroll Lock button for on my keyboard?! That little blister cost me a couple hours of work! All of a sudden last week the arrow keys and command keys stopped functioning properly in Excel. I couldn't navigate anywhere properly. I was pulling my hair out for days, spending a half-hour here and there scouring the web to figure out what the problem was. I thought it was an Excel keyboard setting that I had inadvertantly modified. NOPE. Turns out it was the stupid little "Scroll Lock" button which had gotten stuck in the Locked position (with a corresponding tiny little light far, far away from it on the corner of my Microsoft keyboard. Thanks MS!) What gives? Why in the world are all the keyboards in the world wasting valuable real-estate on a vestigial remnant of an ancient operating system? In the US alone there are over 300M keyboards. If each one dedicates 1 square centimeter for this relic of absurdity, that equates to a total of over 7 acres of squandered space -- that's over $15000 in wasted real estate costs (in average land prices)! I say let's all just pop these little buggers off and sell them all to Dubai to create a floating island. Have any of you ever intentionally used this little plastic cretin? (I mean -- since the dark ages)
