Rob Lambert.com

Mike was wondering out loud last week why computers have “CAPS LOCK” buttons on them. What is the point? Even if I feel like YELLING IN AN EMAIL, I typically just hold down the left shift key with my pinky while I type with my other 9 digits. I can see why it might have ocassionally been useful on a manual typewriter since it was so hard to push down the keys, but do we still need it?

<rant>
I wonder how many hours of programmer time and feature request meetings and QA time was spent on putting the little caps lock warning feature on the Windows login page? I wonder how many hours have been lost by people typing their passwords wrong too many times because caps lock was on an then getting locked out of whatever system that they were trying to login to.

I wonder how many fights were started when someone mistook an email written in all caps as yelling. Or what the domino effect has been when someone mistook an ALL CAPS EMAIL as the person being angry at them, and then the recipient’s blood starts to boil and is impatient on their commute home from work because they are so upset, then they get into a fender bender, which results in an all-out brawl in the street between the email recipient and the random victim of the fender bender, which results in a massive gaper’s delay, which results in a 100 car pile up accident, which eventually leads to a war and then eventually leads a butterfly flapping his wings in China, etc etc.

So computer makers, I plead to you, before a poor butterfly in China dies an early death from overexhaustion from wing-flapping, please, REMOVE THE CAPS LOCK! Or leave the button there and let’s use it for something else! Maybe we can use it for something less annoying if it is accidentally hit, like maybe copy or paste or that cool OS X “show all my open windows” feature or rm -rf /

Oh, and don’t get me started on the absurdity of the verbiage in Windows “CNTL-ALT-DELETE helps keep your computer safe.” </rant>