News Survey finds 40% of university students in Japan don’t know the copy-and-paste shortcut keys

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The smart phones killed those keyboard shortcuts.

Those university students seem to think they'll never use a real keyboard upon graduation....
 
This survey is from Japan, which must really skew the results. From my understanding, PCs are very unpopular in that country, making it an outlier compared to the rest of the modernized world.

As further anecdotal evidence, just take any lazy PC port of a Japanese game. They often don't seem to have any idea about the standard, established keys like WASD for movement, ESC for pause/main menu, and so on, and slap their layouts all over the place. Remember Dark Souls using END instead of ESC for main menu?
 
BX4096 said:
This survey is from Japan, which must really skew the results. From my understanding, PCs are very unpopular in that country, making it an outlier compared to the rest of the modernized world.
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Wrong. A the article says: "Of the 519 university students, based all around Japan, the survey says that nearly all of them own a laptop or desktop, with just 5.8% saying they owned neither".
 
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I'm not surprised; even here in the US Colleges and Universities are now requiring a mandatory online elective in basic computer proficiency as more and more classes go digital. The Uni my younger cousin went to has a mandatory questionnaire that asks about computer proficiencies like this, in addition to basic terms like webcam, scrolling, media player, etc. And when I took up a side course at a local college for learning another language, they also had a similar mandatory computer proficiency questionnaire.

So even if it IS Japan, I'd believe it of students in the US too, given that the results of the questionnaire stated I was in the top 10% of current students (at that local college) who knew most of the standard programs (MS Word/Excel/Access, Email systems, Skype, etc), basically all the definitions (some on the border between being "tech savvy" and being a casual computer user), and most shortcuts (I only missed out on 1 or 2 Win10 era shortcuts).
 
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I feel like its the natural progession of what technology younger people are using. 10 or 20 years ago (or earlier), the commonly used tech was laptops, desktops, and even phones with physical keyboards. If you wanted to communicate and get around those earlier internet days, learning skills like fast touch typing, keyboard shortcuts, file systems, etc. was really useful. Nowadays, the first tech device many start out and place a large emphasis on are smartphones and tablets so things like keyboard shortcuts aren't as widely appreciated or learned at a younger age compared to previous generations.

It's not really anyones fault just like its not really anyones fault that not as many people know how to write in cursive or know how to drive an automatic, but it can possibly be a detriment to deeper technological literacy. Thats why tech literacy/proficiency classes in K-12 education (and college/university) are more important now than ever, considering how much more society is built around said technology.
 
I've had several new coworkers show up in the past year, all in their early twenties. All of them attempted to use their (company issued) smartphone for every effing basic task (note taking, reports, corporate website access, composing emails that don't look like a toddler wrote them). ALL of them now use a paper note pad and a laptop now in addition to the phone. It's about using the right tool for the job and using their phones they just could not keep up with the expected pace of work. Smartphones are dead useful and provide features in the field that we simply never had before (High resolution camera, TEXT MESSAGING, POCKET INTERNET ACCESS!!!!) but like any device/tool they have limitations. And yes, NONE of them knew ANY shortcuts. They know them now. They are all pretty fantastic people too.
 
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Being a primarily Linux user, it bugs me that Windows had to use Ctrl-C for "copy". In Linux, that will send your program a SIGINT, if it's a console app. For most such programs, that will result in them exiting.
 
While it's excusable to not have used them in an OS setting since drag-and-drop is more elegant, in even basic Office use (Excel and Word) keyboard shortcuts are far faster and more elegant. Heck, all the time at work, and even in forum posts and IMs, Ctrl+Shift+V (paste without formatting) is very useful. I can say I have never used Ctrl+A and Ctrl+N (had to look them up) myself and though I knew what Ctrl+S did I never used it, while Ctrl+P I've really only started using since Microsoft's switch to a less productive UI that removed the print button from the toolbar.

I will say I've been using computers since the pre-Windows era, and I did just discover by accident the other day that when renaming files, you can press Tab to move to the next file automatically.
 
I can't help but be a little skeptical about a survey that finds people have poor tech proficiency, from a company that sells tech proficiency training. It says they got their data from an online survey, but no other information about how they reached those people/who that survey was advertised to.
 
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bit_user said:
Being a primarily Linux user, it bugs me that Windows had to use Ctrl-C for "copy". In Linux, that will send your program a SIGINT, if it's a console app. For most such programs, that will result in them exiting.
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Ctrl-C has been the Windows shortcut for copy since before Linux was invented. You should be bugged by Linux making that poor decision.
 
As someone who lives in Japan, the fact this is a Japanese study is obviously skewing the results. Many Japanese people don't own a computer and are usually not that experienced with them. I've seen workmates print out documents, edit them by hand with a pen, then type those edits back into the document.
 
fireaza said:
As someone who lives in Japan, the fact this is a Japanese study is obviously skewing the results. Many Japanese people don't own a computer and are usually not that experienced with them. I've seen workmates print out documents, edit them by hand with a pen, then type those edits back into the document.
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They don't fax the document back to themself? 🤣
 
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bit_user said:
Pfft. You think hitting Ctrl-C to interrupt a process originated in Linux??

It was a "thing" at least as far back as SunOS, possibly even further.
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Doesn't matter who used it first. If it is already well known because of someone else, don't use it for something different.

"I may have invented it [ctrl-alt-del], but I think Bill [Gates] made it famous." David Bradley
 
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voyteck said:
Wrong. A the article says: "Of the 519 university students, based all around Japan, the survey says that nearly all of them own a laptop or desktop, with just 5.8% saying they owned neither".
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Owning one and using it are two different things. I can't find the article I once read on the subject, but here's a quote from a 2018 Quora post that seems to more or less mirror the numbers I've seen there:

In 2016, the Japanese government conducted survey of internet usage by youth. Among high schoolers, 90% use smartphone while only 30% use laptop and 15% use desktop. Because desktop and laptop usage overlap, only like a third of Japanese highschool students use PC. The same study site study in US, where, among internet user between 13–17 years old, 98％ use either laptop or desktop while only 64％ use smartphone. In UK among , 12- 15 years old, 92％ use PC.​
 
bit_user said:
Being a primarily Linux user, it bugs me that Windows had to use Ctrl-C for "copy". In Linux, that will send your program a SIGINT, if it's a console app. For most such programs, that will result in them exiting.
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Then the question arise: How many percent of Linux users do know about he middle mouse (or wheel) button "paste any previously highlighted text" ?

This is my most often workaround for the terminal issue. Otherwise just use Shift+Ctrl+C and likewise when paste.
 
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