Okay, the latest Windows update added something that I actually find useful. Now when you hit the numeral lock key an icon appears onscreen saying either "num lock on" or "num lock off." The caps lock key has always had a light that goes on when your caps-locked, but for some reason the num lock didn't. But now it's okay.
The thing is, I never want to have the numeral lock on. I prefer to use those ten buttons on the side for scrolling shortcuts and use the number keys at the top of the keyboard. This is apparently a weird preference, as I'm reminded whenever I work in an office.
2 comments:
I appreciate you looking for something nice to say, I know it can't always be easy. Just this afternoon we were talking about how nothing gets invented anymore, instead what already exists gets tweaked. Apple has introduced no new products since Steve Jobs died. Wozniak was the inventor and Jobs specialized in sales and design - in 1985 Woz left the company. It gets pretty complicated, but essentially the same is true of Bill Gates and Paul Alan. Amazing products were made by people who were enthusiastic amateurs.
But those were some of the big developments that followed others from earlier times; you just have to remember their names to conjure up the accomplishments of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, James Watt, Alexander Graham Bell.. There may well be more but that's all of them I can think of right now and that's probably enough - no sense in going back as far as the Renaissance, although the modern technological age did begin there. There's a long history of ships and buildings but nobody remembers who built the first ones - never mind the wheel.
What I'm getting at is that developments were coming along fast by the 20th century and that appears to have come to a halt. I'll let you think of your own examples. So we're left with a keyboard that has a 'num lock' where once it didn't, maybe they'll change it back next month in their new improved version. The tweakers are in residence.
Everything went into infrastructure. We live in a thoroughly networked world now. There are good things about this. It makes it harder to commit a genocide and then convince everyone that's not what you're doing. But networking can also encourage a kind of conformity and discourage the kind of enthusiastic amateurs you're talking about.
The Wright Brothers as well. Yeah, those are the big names from the somewhat distant but relatively recent past. William E. Sawyer is a name that more people should know but very few do. He was instrumental in the development of the electric lightbulb and pioneered the electric switch. But he's so obscure now that I've never even seen a picture of him. Proof for any who need it that even in that great age of scientific advancement building a better mousetrap wasn't an absolute guarantee that the world would beat a path to your door.
Another factor in what you're talking about is the presence of something that might not technically be monopoly but comes pretty close. Between the 80s and 90s the home computer market boiled down to Apple and the various manufacturers who worked with Microsoft. It's been pretty much impossible to break in since then, and as a result any idea held by someone outside those power structures is held to be irrelevant.
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