Second off, sorry for the lack of updates lately.  I haven’t been feeling well.  I took my wife to the hospital for tests a while back and, of course, got sick.  (Because hospitals aren’t exactly places of congregation of the healthy.)  I got “well” in that I kicked the disease quickly enough.  But because I had to get some time-critical work done, I hadn’t been taking days off to rest, so it was just a struggle day-in, day-out, with weekends barely just giving me enough time to keep going.  I literally could pull myself together just enough for work.  I didn’t have enough left in me for blogging.  So anywhen, sometime in the future I’ll go through my notes and backdate posts, as I tend to do.  Now that I can take time to recover.

Third, the main point of this blog.  So I’ve been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky lately.  I recently-ish bought it on Steam for dirt cheap.  Even though I hate, detest, abhor Steam, and almost always make sure to buy the disk instead of the music, game, or movie because of rights issues, this one time I caved and “downloaded” the game.  From Steam no less.  I’m a hypocrite of convenience.  I hate myself.  But I’ll get over it.

Anyway, so I’ve been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky and enjoying it.  I think it might actually even rate as one of my favorite video games.  I wish I’d bought it sooner.  It’s a lot better than the first.  Not just in being more of a challenge, or in being able to do simple basic things like repair an item, but it just all plays / feels / works so much better.  I especially like the upgrades and the item maintenance.  (Even if I still don’t understand why you can’t do stupid things like permanently tack weld a scope to a Viper 5.)  Except for, you know, the bugs.  Those darn little things that forced me to restart the game because the main plot device broke and I was eternally stuck.  Nerf!  Oh well.

But so the thing is, just this weekend the darn game kept crashing.  Not even crashing out of the game, but in a weird in-game-ish stuck thing where it was like the underlying engine was still running, but the 3D graphics portion had crashed.  So there was no longer a user interface.  It just became a black screen with a mouse cursor.  That’s it.  Sometimes it’d be in the middle of playing.  Sometimes just in the menu trying to load a game or change 3D settings.  (Trying to debug the crashing.)  And sometimes even while the advertisement logo movies played while starting up the game!  It was absurd!

After much gnashing of teeth, trying offline mode in Steam, even trying to set the CD key in multi-player even though the single-player game doesn’t really use the CD key, I was going crazy.

Until I thought about it.  I’d just seen Windows do an update.  Could that somehow be it?

Yep!

I know, I know, I really should turn off the automatic updates because Microsoft does throw  out some real turds.  And this was one of them.

Update KB2670838 happens to update Windows 7 with some changes to Direct3D, DirectDraw, etc.  Yup.  Damn.  And sure enough, Microsoft “fixed” Direct 3D just enough to make S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky incredibly completely totally bonkers unstable.

Well nerds to that!

So I uninstalled Windows Update KB 2670838 and sure enough, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky is nice and stable again.  Imagine that.

So if you still play S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky, I hope you find this blog because chances are, right now you’re not playing it because of this bug in Microsoft’s “fix” to whatever problems they thought they had.

Or, honestly, goodness how many other video games are crashing right now because of KB2670838.  Heck, programs in general.  Movie players.  Who knows what else uses those engines?  I don’t know what Microshaft is thinking about releasing that PoS, but that update was most definitely neither thoroughly tested nor kosher. 

So be warned!  If you play video games, pay close attention to how often things crash after you install KB 2670838.  You just may find yourself uninstalling that particular Microsoft update!

The brains of every living thing aside, the MIT smart-bacteria is still missing one vital feature: the ability to read stored information back. So the computational logic is still somewhat missing as it’s only one-way. But it’s a huge breakthrough all the same.

Now, you might just be wondering, what, exactly, is this actually good for?

Well it’s certainly not going to revolutionize computers for a start. Reading DNA is not exactly something that we can do quickly. But in that our squishy organic bodies aren’t exactly conducive to machine melding, this opens up a whole new world of medicine at the very least.

For example, tests for cancer can be, well, rather invasive, what with the poking and the prodding and the cutting and all. Biopsies are a b____. But imagine a world in which your doctor could give you a yogurt beverage laced with these genetically engineered bio-circuits programmed to detect cancer. You drink. You poo. And then the hospital examines the resultant DNA output and viola, you know if you have cancer or not.

Part of what makes it so effective is that bacteria like to reproduce themselves, and as they do this, the information stored in the DNA becomes duplicated as well. That’s what DNA is there for. This creates a high redundancy of the information that makes it much easier to extract the resulting data than trying to find a single solitary bacteria cell before it dies. The more they multiply, the easier it is to find a copy. So it’s actually conducive to working with our own biology as by the time that smart-poo makes it out our back ends, there’s plenty enough redundancy of the data to be found.

And similar to your smart-poo future of easy disease identification, likewise in the future your doctor could even offer you a much less dangerous form of chemotherapy where the drugs are embedded with biological circuits that self-destruct only when they’ve reached a targeted area, delivering the medication only to the cells that were targeted. The beauty of a biological circuit that can alter its own DNA is that it can be “programmed” to self-destruct by intentionally making its own genetic material non-viable once it has completed its mission. It’d be a much safer solution than flooding your whole body with medication, and would make you a whole lot less ill.

Another such application of a bio-circuit is that you could make bio-sensor strips of a suspended bacteria gel that change colors when they detect pre-programmed drugs, toxins, diseases, or even explosives. Imagine no longer needing the nose of a dog, but using a simple strip of gel that absorbs particulate from the air. The simplicity and low cost would allow these bio-sensors to be utilized anywhere and everywhere.

Not to mention, potentially, being a mechanism which can one day be used to re-write DNA in living hosts to cure someone of a genetic disease. Bacteria programmed to use recombinases to alter targeted ‘bits’ of DNA are an awfully close to being the very tools you’d need to fix our own genes.

The ability to engineer a biological circuit can go a great way to changing our whole world.

And there’s always the Dark Side. Cynics will no doubt point out that any tool that can be used for good can also be used for ill.

So it may come as something of a sigh of relief that we’re still a long way off from any of this. But the building blocks that were once separate are now being put together. It’s fast becoming a question of “when” rather than “if”.

Yes, from Apple, the same company that brought you Antennagate, now we have the Sync of Doom! (I love saying that!) What happens when you have an Apple iOS calendar app syncing to a Microsoft Exchange server for calendar information? Well, usually nothing unexpected.

But!

… If you do that and happen to change a single instance of a reoccurring event, an Apple bug will cause the iOS app to infinitely attempt to sync with the Microsoft Exchange Server.

Flooding all servers in between your iPhone and the Exchange Server with useless sync attempts, often dragging those servers to a crawl.

Not to mention causing your iPhone to chew up your 3G or 4G data plan like it was nothing.

Or for that matter eating up the battery of your iPhone by keeping the phone constantly communicating wirelessly and never able to go to sleep internally.

As the Sync of Doom! from Apple’s buggy iOS calendar app continues trying over and over and over to sync to the Exchange server.

Basically, this is really a bug that should have been caught long before release.

But wasn’t.

The Sync of Doom!

Brought to you by Apple.

There is some good news however. If your phone is suffering from the Sync of Doom! you can manually make it stop. Disabling and then re-enabling the connection to the Microsoft Exchange server seems to fix the Sync of Doom! (Which is basically to turn your calendar off, and then back on.)

Of course when the Sync of Doom! bug will actually be fixed is another matter entirely. It hasn’t happened yet, that’s for sure. When Apple will get around to releasing that fix, you’ll just have to wait to find out.

So if you’re an iPhone user and your calendar data comes from a Microsoft Exchange Server, you’re going to want to be extra careful.  Consider this your warning.  There’s a bug, but with diligence you can prevent it from eating up your data plan, eating up your battery life, and bringing networks to a crawl.  It’s not a virus.  It’s just Apple being Apple lately.

Electric cars seem to have a few issues when it comes to traveling distances. Batteries just take too long to charge, and don’t hold as much juice as we’d like. Not even the great and mighty Tesla (the car company, not Nikola) has managed to solve that problem just yet.

However, chances are, sometime in your life you’ve seen (in real life, or on TV) an electric train, subway, trolley, bus, or other wheeled vehicle of some type that runs on electricity provided by a grid that it’s connected to. You know, that really tall hook thingy that grips those overhead wires? Or the dreaded train/subway rail that you’re not supposed to touch? It’s a common enough concept and makes sense in limited areas. In fact, it’s more energy efficient for a vehicle to grab its power as it travels than it is to lug around a big gas tank.

So why don’t electric cars use the same approach?

Well, all of those wires overhead everywhere could get awfully difficult to maintain for one. And if you used something lower to the ground, chances are some numbskull would electrocute him/her-self crossing a road.

Well, that is, unless you asked Tesla (Nikola, not the car company) to come up with a solution.  (Wardenclyffe Tower anyone?) Sadly, being dead, no one thought to ask Nikola Tesla how to power an electric car without plugging it into the road. So it took us an awfully long time for we mere mortals to think of this: We could always charge an electric car wirelessly as it drives.

Thanks to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science soon two electric busses will be able to travel along the road from Gumi station by recharging their batteries wirelessly from induction loops embedded in the road along the route. No zappy-zappy to humans. It’s effectively the same technology that lets some cellphones and even toothbrushes recharge wirelessly, only applied to moving vehicles.

And if you eat the cost to put this same kind of technology into urban areas, you could easily design a gridwork of roads where electric cars, busses, trolleys, etc. can recharge themselves as they drive. All without wires.

It could become a green-city utopia.

Even major highways, tollways, turnpikes, etc. where longer distance driving is done could be augmented with sections of induction charging to allow electric cars, that drive on the right roads, to eat up the miles indefinitely without ever needing to stop for a charge, which would make electric cars infinitely greener and more convenient than their gas-guzzling compatriots at that point. Imagine driving thousands of miles without ever having to stop for fuel even once.

In theory, it’s possible. And Korea is the one showing us how.

More specifically, copyright does not protect “names, titles, short phrases or expressions”, including, “catchwords, catchphrases, mottoes, slogans, or short advertising expressions.” Those are covered under trademark law, not copyright law, and it’s a whole different ballgame.

Also not protected by copyright law are, “listing of ingredients, as in recipes, labels, or formulas.” Which in software terms is the same thing as APIs.

So on these grounds, copyright does not cover APIs.

Hence Google hasn’t infringed Oracle’s copyrights by using the Java APIs in Android.

So ruled Judge Alsup.

The court of law set its standards for modern interpretation of aged laws not designed with software engineering in mind.  And frankly, pretty much everyone but Oracle agrees with this, gets it, and is perfectly content with it that way.

But losing once wasn’t enough for Oracle. They’re adamant that their misinterpretations of law are correct and so they’re appealing that decision.  Which, in theory, they have the right to do.

Of course having potentially billions of dollars at stake might have something to do with their pig-headedness.

But I’m starting to think it’s more of a mental deficiency, to be honest.  Here’s how Oracle’s appeal begins:

Ann Droid wants to publish a bestseller. So she sits down with an advance copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – the fifth book – and proceeds to transcribe. She verbatim copies all the chapter titles – from Chapter 1 (“Dudley Demented”) to Chapter 38 (“The Second War Begins”). She copies verbatim the topic sentences of each paragraph, starting from the first (highly descriptive) one and continuing, in order, to the last, simple one (“Harry nodded.”). She then paraphrases the rest of each paragraph. She rushes the competing version to press before the original under the title: Ann Droid’s Harry Potter 5.0. The knockoff flies off the shelves.

J.K. Rowling sues for copyright infringement. Ann’s defenses: “But I wrote most of the words from scratch. Besides, this was fair use, because I copied only the portions necessary to tap into the Harry Potter fan base.”

Obviously, the defenses would fail.

Defendant Google Inc. has copied a blockbuster literary work just as surely, and as improperly, as Ann Droid – and has offered the same defenses.

Clearly, the state of mind over at Oracle must be questioned if this is their idea of how to write a lawsuit.

The ironic thing is that Oracle’s cute little story of little miss Ann Droid in no way re-examines how APIs should be protected under copyright. It appears that Oracle seems to think that they’ve somehow made a point here, but it only goes to show just how much they’ve actually missed the point, in my opinion. Because essentially their little story of Ann Droid is exactly what anyone working with APIs would and has had to do, by definition. You could no more sue Libre Office for reverse-engineering Word document reading, or Foxit for PDF viewing, or Linux’s Samba and Wine for writing Windows API names and recipes for that matter.

Oracle’s whole short story of Ann Droid centers on writing a book, not on APIs.  And seems focused on confusing the laws of copyright, of trademark, and potentially even of patent depending on how you try to interpret what they’re saying and how it could possibly relate to software.

And, in fact, anti-competitive lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft for not documenting their Windows APIs more clearly. (Sometimes if at all.)  To intentionally block competitors from using APIs is not kosher.

So how Oracle can somehow think that they’re special and that their APIs are copyrightable is beyond anyone’s ability to comprehend.

But writing a short story about Ann Droid writing a Harry Potter knock-off is a whole new level of WTF?!  It’s childish.  It’s apples to oranges.  It’s ignorant.

Again, Oracle doesn’t seem to comprehend where one law ends and the next begins. They seem to think that trademark law and patent law are all a part of copyright law now, as if the three weren’t completely different things.

But then maybe it’s not gross incompetence / ignorance after all, so much as just desperation.  Surely they must know that without a shadow of a doubt they’d lose hands down in a patent law battle, and likewise in a trademark battle. Copyright is the only battleground left that they can even remotely try to claim, and that’s still the longest of long-shots as that is also a clear and obvious lose for them. But with potentially billions of dollars at stake, I guess Oracle figures that it’s worth the chance to play the part of complete and utter fools … just in case they somehow magically conjure up a courtroom equally as foolish. Which, let’s face it, just ain’t gonna happen, even if they try to invoke the magic of Harry Potter.

Frankly, I hope the appellate court slaps them down hard. These ridiculous antics of Oracle are demeaning to the whole judicial system and to software developers alike. But then with so much Java egg on their face already when it comes to security and patches lately, maybe Oracle figures that they’re already chock-full-o’-idiocy, so why not got that extra mile and become the laughing stock of everyone?

I can honestly see a future where no one uses Java anymore not because of security concerns, but because they simple no longer want to have anything to do with Oracle.

That’s right, this Patch Tuesday covers a lucky 13 security bulletins that close up a whopping 57 security holes. If you weren’t feeling insecure before, just think of how all of those vulnerabilities compromised your PCs. On the one hand it’s good that Microsoft is fixing these things. On the other hand, WTF?! 57?

From Internet Explorer (of course) to ActiveX DLLs (again, rather expected) to Windows kernel win32k.sys (doh!) this Patch Tuesday is a whopper that you really shouldn’t miss. Of course if you have automatic updates turned on, then you’re not going to miss it. Then again, if you find that sometimes the patch is worse than the bug, this is one you’ll want to keep apprised of.

Meanwhile Adobe Flash also recently released a patch and Java, well, those Java patches have been pretty half-baked and that mess is still trying to be sorted out while Oracle tries to convince the world to not just drop Java entirely from the web browser.

Security, gotta love it!

Of course, if you are an Itanium customer, then you probably aren’t in the least bit surprised.

Itanium has pretty much always been a rocky road for Intel. The whole shebang of Itanium started out with some lackluster performance and some highly questionable future purpose.  Itanium was either to be the golden child of computing, or a whole lot of smoke blown up your skirt.  And especially once AMD reminded people that they do servers too, the road of Itanium looked awfully rocky. Since then updates to the Itanium line have often been delayed (sometimes horrendously so) and have rarely met Intel’s own original expectations, let alone any customers’.

Still, for Really Big Iron … what else can you do? Itanium customers have little choice but to hold on for the ride and hope for the best, if they can’t be bothered to think a little smaller.

Well, turns out that Intel’s recent Kittson update is no different.

First on the chopping block? Gone is the long-rumored miraculous Xeon-Itanium uber-socket. Yep. That rumor/feature has been churning practically since Itanium first reared its ugly head into the beyond-x86 world. But people really thought it would actually finally happen with Tukwila. It didn’t. Then Poulson. It didn’t. Then Kittson. Now Intel says that’s a big NEGATORY as well.

Sorry!

(For those wanting to sound like IT experts, guess what you have a very high chance of predicting not happening for the next iteration of Itanium also…  And the one after that…  And the one after that…)

But it’s not all bad, right? Okay, so Kittson loses the socket panacea, but we all expected that anyway because honestly, what numbskull would want the world’s most outrageous socket for a cute “little” (by Itanium standards) Xeon anyway?  At least Kittson will still be fabbed with Intel’s shiny energy-saving 22nm Tri-Gate process, right?

Umm … no.

That’s gone too.

And, as a result, it remains to even be postulated what extra speed, cache, or even core changes whatsoever can be expected to be found in Kittson now.

For all practical purposes, Kittson is looking to just be … err … well … just another Poulson.

For those of you wondering just why Intel has let so much slip from Itanium’s grasp this time around … well … it’s pretty obvious, really.  If you’re wondering, you must have had your head in the sand or something.

Intel has seen the future (or the present, really) and the future is ARM eating up Intel’s server dominance. The future isn’t BIG Iron. It’s small iron. Cars are doing it. Now computer processors are too. Efficiency is the new black.  Smaller is, well, not necessarily better, but an emerging market at the very least, if not the buzzword of the day.  Green is where the green is. There’s money to be made in them there ARM chips. The only reason Intel hasn’t keeled over dead from a mass exodus to ARM in the server market is because ARM just hasn’t offered 64-bits … yet. 32-bits isn’t enough anymore, and quasi-there forty-somethings are half-asterisked solutions at best. But that’s all a-changin’. The answer my friend is blowing in the wind. On the horizon is true 64-bitness. It’s no longer a question of if, but when.

To fight that, Intel is pushing hard to reduce the energy consumption of their x86 chips. Not just because then they’ll (they hope) gain back all of that phone and tablet processor market that they already lost, but also because the other barn, the one that hasn’t had all the cows wander out after the door was left open, is at the eleventh hour of opening as well: the microserver.

And to be fair, there is something to be said for the increased agility of a lot of small chips … for certain uses.

Some not exactly stunning attempts have been made to push ARM into servers. (Personally, I rather liked the Lego-block cased Raspberry Pi “supercomputer”.) Intel still has a chance to not lose the microserver battle by bringing both Atom and their usual x86 offerings into ARM-level power consumption.

And that, of course, means that their shiny new 22nm Tri-Gate fab and related resources have to be applied to the battles that they can still win, not to Itanium, which, let’s face it, has pretty much been a lost cause since its very inception.

Intel announced this intention already. And to their credit, Atom just may even bite back a chunk out of ARM in phones and tablets yet if Intel really does push their SoC Atoms onto their most energy-efficient process to give the world a true ARM alternative.  Especially when it can also run Windows.  The real Windows.  Not that RT malarkey.

So it should come as no surprise then.

But it’s not always so easy to put two and two together. Or perhaps denial isn’t just a river in Egypt. Yes folks, because Intel is concentrating on low-power Atoms, Cores, and Xeons to save their server bacon from an ARM farm, it will leave Itanium’s process upgrade to be performed in another cycle.

But then, as Itanium customers, you really should be used to disappointment by now.

So what to do while you wait? Why not try to visualize whirled peas?

And if you’re HP? Heh heh. Sorry, Charlie! Only the best-tasting server iron gets to be Intel-Kist. Didn’t you hear? Efficient and agile is in. Big and bulky is out. Green is the new black. Sorry if that’s going to make you see red. Such is the way Ye Olde Cookie crumbleth after all. That writing has been on the wall for so long that even vagrants are strumming tunes to it on the street corners.

But then, as an Itanium customer, you really should already know that too.

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised that Itanium has even lasted this long.  It’s a product in search of a market.  It’s an ideal without a need.

But still, you’d have to be pretty daft to have continued to expect it to have any kind of decent future at t his point. It’s been living on borrowed time for longer than time has been able to be borrowed. You just might want to kind of sort of possibly think of potentially transitioning over to a different platform sometime. Maybe.

Eventually.

Just a thought.

Except for Apple, it seems.

The one and only party to continue to plead themselves innocent and fight on.

It’s hard to believe that this lawsuit has drug on since April of 2012 when the case and evidence is pretty straight forward. A part of the terms of Apple’s contract with book publishers to make their e-books available through Apple was quite clear and simple: The ebooks could not be sold elsewhere for less. Prices had to be identical (or more) to Apple.

If that isn’t the very definition of “price fixing” then I clearly don’t know what is!

You can’t really say that all of the other publishing houses agree on that, as by settling they completely avoid having to admit any culpability and with that magic escape hatch from the trial can neither be found guilty … nor innocent, I would point out. However, it now can be said that not a single publishing house thought that the court case was one worth risking being found guilty during.  Not a single publishing house thought that the lawsuit was worth fighting.

Except for Apple.

The lone warrior.

Adamant in their innocence.

And it’s beginning to look like as the only one actually new to book publishing, Apple is perhaps the only one of the lot of alleged colluders  to not fully understand the laws involved?

Now that Apple finds themselves all alone it should be interesting to see how long their continue to tilt at windmills before caving in and settling. Because we all know, Apple can’t possibly let this lawsuit actually come to completion, not when the very contract that they wrote up is all of the evidence that anyone needs to decide on a verdict of guilty.

On the plus side, now that no one is swallowing Apple’s bitter pill anymore, expect the last of the e-book prices to return to sane levels again.  Except, of course, for those from Apple, who wouldn’t know competitive pricing even if it bit a chunk out of their logo.

I mean it.

That said, this OrGreenic frying pan is absolutely positively the best pan I’ve ever owned.  It is the real deal.

Unlike Teflon-coated non-stick pans that mostly don’t stick, OrGreenic truly takes non-stick to a whole new standard of, well, non-stickiness. You literally almost can’t even use oil or grease in these pans because even the grease won’t stick to the pan. It just dots up and pools instead of coating the pan.  It’s like herding ducks. That’s your first indication that here is something better than Teflon.

And where every other nonstick pan that I’ve used over the years scratches and becomes less and less non-stick, sometimes sticky to the point of being worse than just simple cast iron, the OrGreenic pans really don’t seem to scratch. At all. Partly because they’re so non-stick that you really don’t have to scrub at them. Ever. They’re ridiculously easy to wash.  But also because the non-stick coating is darned hard compared to Teflon.

So they’re easy to cook in. They’re easy to clean. And because you need little (or even no) oil to cook with, they’re healthier too.

But wait, it’s also been scientifically proven that Teflon, when heated sufficiently, also offgasses some toxic fumes that in some people results in flu-like symptoms. But not OrGreenic!

And the build quality is pretty darn good too. The handle is attached solidly. The pan is dense enough to actually use. Nothing bends, wobbles, or dents. I would even so much as dare to call it commercial-grade quality. For the price that’s amazing. Also showing absolutely brilliant thinking is that the handle is all aluminum, so you can put the pan straight into an oven with confidence.

Frankly, the only bad thing about OrGreenic pans is that near as I can find, it’s just the one pan size. There’s no set of many pieces. There are no glass lids. It’s just the one frying pan, and that’s it for choices.

But for my money, I can’t think of a single more worthwhile kitchen purchase than an OrGreenic pan!

Seriously!

I’ve been using it for months now and still smile every time.

I give it six and a half perfect omelets out of five. I give it twelve dancing chefs out of ten. OrGreenic is the bee’s knees. It’s the pan-pan that can-can and to use it will have you high-stepping too! It’s the best technology a kitchen could ever have.

So you’re hip. You’ve got your very own Raspberry Pi, right? And you’ve probably spent at least twice what you paid for your Raspberry Pi just to get it running.  Because as cheap as it is, keyboards, mice, etc. all add up.

Well, you’re already behind the fad, because those of you on the B-List just got gamed by the As.  You’ve overpaid for your Pi.  You’ve got too much hardware.

That’s right. When Raspberry Pi was first launched, it was launched as the much more usable B model, with that lovely ethernet port, 512MB of RAM, and two USB ports.

Which we all know, you don’t really need, right?

Well, the trimmer, slimmer, more fit (it’s the same size actually) Raspberry Pi A model has finally been released. It has only 256MB of RAM, no ethernet, and just one measly USB port. But it’s cheaper. And without all of that superfluous (allegedly) hardware, Model A consumes around just one-third of the power of Model B.

Which makes your Raspberry Pi A-game oriented at low-power uses such as, powered by the sun perhaps. Or maybe a hydrogen fuel cell? Or … who knows? The Pi’s the limit. Chances are though that your first USB peripheral is going to be … a network adapter. Probably some compound Wi-Fi / Bluetooth gizmo so that you can hook up a wireless keyboard and mouse as well as access data from World + Dog. (And then yank it out once whatever you’re developing is done?)

But the point is, we finally have the much-promised Raspberry Pi Lite.

Microsoft Surface – Finally Going Pro

For those of you who fancied the concept of a laptop that converts into a tablet … by means of ripping the keyboard off … but were too afraid of Windows RT on ARM to touch the Microsoft Surface, well you’re about to finally get your hands on the fatter glutton x86 flavor with the rotund resource-hungry full version of Windows 8. Yes, that’s right, in just a couple of days Microsoft is going to unleash the Microsoft Surface Pro onto the world.

Umm …

Yay?

Seriously folks … I don’t get it. Congrats, it’s finally a Microsoft Surface that you can actually (almost) use? Well, I guess there is that. But why anyone ever thought that Windows RT was in any way useful to begin with is beyond me. Congrats, it’s Windows … only without the ability to run your programs.  Because even if everyone were to suddenly recompile all of their applications to run on ARM, which they won’t, Windows RT still doesn’t have that lovely part of the Windows kernel that lets applications run.  It’s just Windows Phone … on a tablet.  So they called it Windows RT instead of Windows Phone because if they told you that their tablet ran Windows Phone you’d probably expect that it could actually be a phone?  I guess?  I don’t know. The whole concept of Windows RT is just plain dumb. It’s Windows CE. It’s Windows Phone. It’s Windows RT. It’s not Windows.

Well, that horsehockey is finally done and gone as the Microsoft Surface Pro is everything it should have been with a full x86 CPU running a full version of Windows 8 that runs real applications and not just “apps”. Huzzah!  All your software needs are met on the Pro version of the tablet.

(As if Microsoft couldn’t just put an Intel Atom – or AMD Fusion – into a Surface tablet to have run a full Windows 8 on, just with lower hardware specs than the Pro.)

But at the end of the day, the Microsoft Surface Pro is still just a convertible laptop where the keyboard is removable instead of swiveling into a concealed position under the monitor. And it’s still running Windows 8, not Windows 7. So you still probably don’t actually want the thing for actual everyday use, let alone to do real work on.

But at least soon it’ll be an option. Finally, a Surface tablet that you can almost use.

And if Microsoft hasn’t sold you on the benefits of Windows 8, well, you wouldn’t be the only one.  When was the last time that you saw a Windows commercial?  No, not a Surface tablet commercial, I mean an actual, “This is Windows 8.  It’s better than Windows 7 because…” commercial.  Advert  in a magazine?  Ad on the internet?  Any advertisement?  Anywhere?

For that matter, why is Windows 8 better than Windows 7?  Oh, right, because it’s harder to use, especially if you use a mouse and keyboard like the incredible vast majority of the world does.  Good.  Got it.  Sorted.  Well gee, I’m sold!  How about you?