laptop layouts tend to cramp things in (and so put buttons in rather non-standard locations)
you think laptops are bad, you should try netbooks!
Good point with netbooks, my mom has one and half her Function keys are used by pressing Fn+F1-6, everything is just out of place on it.
God, my laptop has its media control, brightness and wifi enable/disable keys shared with the function keys, by default pressing that row will enact the media commands etc and holding Fn is required in order for me to press F7 or whatever I was after. My old laptop had a simple key labelled Fn Lock. Pressing it would simply lock the Fn Key on, and that was preserved through system reboots and even booting into different OS's (it was dual booted). Current laptop doesnt have that key, its a BIOS setting instead….. Considering I always reconfigure my machines BIOS settings slightly it wasnt a major issue, but having the key instead would have been nice as when watching films etc I do genuinely wish to go back to media first.
I dont know if this counts, It kinda is part of computer hardware, and part just the country itself, But the fact that 'Y' And 'Z' Are switched on keyboards in diffrent countrys.
Ex:
Germanys Keyboard:
http://upload.wikime...sion1-large.pngAmerican:
http://eurkey.steffe...pics/eurkey.png(WIndows 95 :D/> ^)
Notice The Z and Y.
This is actually one of the reasons I hate apple. I am english, an english and american keyboard is different. shift-2 is " instead of @ (they are simply swapped) and we have a few other keys moved too.
Apple have what they call a UK keyboard. Their UK keyboard moves the \ | key to be in the UK location next to Z, introduces the double height enter key and changes shift-3 to be £ instead of #. But they don't move # into its UK place, it becomes alt-3 which is simple enough I guess. But it is still just a weird hybrid of UK and US keyboard layouts, not a true UK layout. Seems really pointless to me, they are spending money on a UK keyboard which is then just wrong, why dont they make it a real UK keyboard? I went to write a python script on my dads mac, this should be easy. Instinctively I go for shift-2 for " and end up writing @Enter Selection@, had to google how to insert a # to begin a comment line. Really really really awkward for what is supposedly a UK keyboard. Even more bizarre actually, it does generate normal UK keyboard scancodes for the incorrect key locations, you press alt-3 for a # and it will generate the normal UK scancode for the # key which does mean at least other OS'es recognise it as a standard UK keyboard and OSX works with a standard UK keyboard.
Anyone who is thinking about buying an apple computer in the UK and will be programming on it, buy a normal windows keyboard at the same time.
One thing that bugs me is SD card slots. The cards themselves have these little slide tabs on the side, to "lock" and "unlock" them. These don't actually do anything - it's up to the card reader to determine where the tab is, and act accordingly.
Only thing is, the little bit of metal that senses where the tab is is notorious for breaking (resulting in a card reader that acts as if all SD cards are read-only). There are a lot of bad designs certain manufacturers implement, but that's one that's fairly well standardised.
The tab is pretty useless, but did you know that there is a command when operating a card in SPI mode to enforce write protection? Most card readers dont have the ability to interact with that command at all, but you can build a device from an arduino easily enough to enable/disable write protection on the card itself regardless of tab position. You can also hardware alter your card reader to read the tab as being writable easily enough too if your card breaks.
