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?

Windows 8 is (finally?  barely?) a reality and if you’re worried about the confusion between Windows OS and Windows Phone OS, or even between Windows 8 (x86 / PC) and Windows 8 RT (for ARM), then worry not … for long. At least according to Microsoft god founder, Bill Gates. One day (though when that one day may be, no one really knows) Windows will be just one operating system for all devices, regardless of hardware.

“We’re certainly sharing between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 – sharing the user interface, sharing some of those development tools, and over time we’ll just get to do more and more of that,” says Gates, adding, “It’s evolving literally into being a single platform.”

Well, we’ll believe it when we see it, won’t we? Technical predictions by anyone are just educated guesses at best, and far flung hopes at worst.  I’m not sure which to classify this as except for certainly a mix of both, even if it does come true.

Though, honestly, The Gates future where Windows is just one OS for all devices isn’t all that far-fetched … in the wrong way. If you think about how Intel’s Medfield SoC Atom line is right now revolutionizing phones by bringing x86 to the smartphone in a way that’s just as power-sipping as ARM, but with better performance…  Well, what’s to stop anyone from adding phone features to the garden variety version of Windows and just calling it a day? It’s certainly something that I’d look forward to. Who would even need a separate OS for phones then?

But just because it’s easy, and it’d work, and I’d even buy into it, that doesn’t make it the “right” way to go about it. It’d be akin to putting a whole whale on a lazy susan and calling it sushi for the masses.

What Bill Gates clearly means is that by indiscriminately cramming the Windows Phone API and user interface directly into a Windows OS where it doesn’t belong, it’s creating a platform where if you only program for Windows Phone … err … I mean Metro … err … I mean … umm … help me out here Microsoft … what are you calling it today?  But if you write your app to the base set of the Windows Runtime environment that was born of Windows Phone (and that’s a really big if) then your app (and no, you can’t really call that an application, because it’ll be missing far too much to be useful to people on desktops who need more from their applications) can be run on either Windows 8 on your desktop or Windows Phone 8 or even Windows 8 RT on your ARM tablet.

In theory.

Maybe.

If you’re lucky.

The catch is, it’s a really really really tiny subset of the Windows kernel.  If you can even call it that. Because with Win 8 / Win Pho 8, that’s not even actually the true Windows OS kernel at all. It’s just a significant part of the WinPho 8 kernel crammed into Windows 8 as an ad-hoc add-on. Where many would argue it doesn’t even belong. It’s like attaching a Curves onto the back of a McDonald’s and calling it a health center. Not only would is it not a fit for everyone, but it’s really almost completely missing the point to anyone!  In the end, we’re told, we just have to get used to it.  It may be all wrong.  It may be a nightmare to use.  But get used to it or to some other OS.

But I guess, grudgingly admitted, it’s at least a start. And that’s what has got The Gates so enthused. Because he doesn’t seem to appreciate the wrong-footedness of that start.  He’s just happy (real or put-on to convince the plebs) that Windows 8 is no longer ridiculously behind the user interface methodology anymore.  In theory.

So I think what Billy really intimates is that, one day, eventually, he hopes (well, we all pretty much hope, don’t we?) the Windows Phone kernel will be better paired to the Windows kernel so that Windows Phone will grow to be as capable as a desktop / laptop / tablet running a full version of Windows, to the point where Windows features will come to the phone. (Instead of the other way around.)  And by features I mean user interface as much anything.  So that at some point years from now using a phone and using a PC aren’t really so different from each other, if at all.

Maybe.

Granted, to me, that’s an approach doomed for failure.  Your PC is a highly powered machine with capabilities to run several large monitors simultaneously where you could actively be using many programs synchronously with one another as well as satellite applications of other uses.  What do I mean?  I’m a computer programmer.  My typical desktop lately involves the office’s instant messenger, the office’s email, one Visual Studio instance for Python, one Visual Studio instance for C++ extensions to Python, a command prompt (sometimes two), a file explorer for copying-pasting libraries when they get built, a text file where I keep instructions, and multiple web browser pages up for looking at documentation and researching how world+dog resolved problems.  So the primary task of “programming” for me right now involves typically two instances of Visual Studio, two instances of a command prompt, one file explorer, one text document in WordPad, and on average something like four open Firefox sessions.  That’s 10 windows.  Just to “program”.  Of which I flip between and read from all nearly at the same time.  Which one I “work” in changes highly frequently.  And that’s not even adding the complication of when I crank up a vSphere virtual machine to work inside of for very specific platform testing!  And, as I said, two satellite office communication layers, email and instant message, which also have to always be available.

Thank goodness I have multiple monitors for all that!

And you just couldn’t do that on a phone.

Which is what scares me about Windows 8 and Microsoft trying so hard to turn our PCs into phones.  I can’t afford that kind of unproductiveness from nonsensical limitations based on a platform I’m not working in just because someone aimed at supporting the lowest common denominator!

But even then, were that to be what Billy expects, that’s still the wrong way to go about it. Bloating Windows Phone isn’t much better than duct-taping the Win Pho API into an added layer available to developers in Windows and calling it a duck.  Just because two platforms are related does not make them the identical, no more so than your Aunt Louise is your Grandpa Joe.  If you expand the phone experience to do everything that the PC can do, you’ll have a very slow phone that requires a ridiculous amount of memory.  Just as if you limit the PC to the limitations of a phone, you’re going to end up hamstringing every PC user out there who works for a living.

If anyone at Microsoft is listening (and I highly doubt that they are, since they seem to be quite oblivious to the wants and needs of their consumers) what the right way to merge Windows Phone and Windows into one operating system is to take the full Windows x86 kernel that we all know and love/loath for desktops, and trim the fat until it can fit on even a relatively cheap phone. Preferably rejiggering the kernel in such a way as to not only minimize resource consumption, but to also compile for x86 or ARM equally … or at least potentially, with a reasonable amount of effort.  And then offer additions and expansions to those who have the hardware to use them.

You know, like Linux…

Ish.

Not that Linux even completely gets it right.  But by this day and age, Microsoft should certainly have the manpower to try to get there…

Hey, those of you interested on running Windows 8 on ARM, guess what!  The cake ARM is a lie.

But as if that we’re bad enough, we now have some more official word on just exactly how ARM will be supported. No, there will be no lightened kernel to run Windows with. Microsoft is not taking a page from Linux in any way. If you install Windows 8 on an ARM processor, you don’t get Windows. You get Phone. That’s it. That’s all that you get.

What does that mean?

That means that you can only install “apps” on Windows 8 ARM, and so far sounding like only through a Microsoft app store no less. Called, imaginatively, the “Windows Store”. There will be no running of full Windows applications, at all, ever, on Windows 8 ARM. (Though I don’t expect it will take long for people to “unlock” their Windows 8 ARM to install their own apps manually at the very least.)

At least as far as I can tell by reading between the lines. Because, frankly, Microsoft is not being very frank and clear with us on this matter. In theory it may be possible that Windows 8 ARM will actually be a full version of Windows, and not just Phone. In theory. In practice however this is of very little value if you cannot install an application onto it because of being locked in to the Windows Store. Further, even if any old application could be recompiled for ARM, there are bound to be bugs and kinks to work out. And that’s even if someone bothers to try, which most software companies will not!

How do we know these things?

Because Windows has been here once before.

Only back then it wasn’t ARM, it was the DEC Alpha. Microsoft made an NT4 compilation of it. And it almost even worked. Except when it didn’t. Because almost no third parties bothered to support it in any way. And in fact even Microsoft kind of didn’t, as their compatibility system, basically an emulator-on-demand as far as I could tell, failed often. Very often. And worse, on things as common as most major installation packaging systems. So just trying to install non-Alpha software often crashed. You couldn’t even get to actually trying to run the software. That was Microsoft’s idea of support. And third parties. It was an absolute failure!

And now Microsoft is doing it all over again with ARM.

So even if Microsoft at some point tries to claim that your x86-compiled applications can be installed and run on Windows 8 ARM, the cake is a lie.  It will never happen if third party software producers don’t likewise port all of their software over as well, which they won’t!

What you are effectively getting if you install Windows 8 ARM on your tablet is … Windows Phone 7+.

Not Windows.

If a software vendor completely ports their application for WinRT then that’ll run on Windows 8 ARM. But most won’t, because that’d be a lot more work than just recompiling for ARM, and most won’t even bother recompiling, let alone porting.

That’s the only truth.

Except that it’s actually worse than that! Because while you should be able to run Windows Phone 7 apps on Windows 8 ARM / Phone (Is there anyone who will be running Windows 8 on a PC that will actually want to run Windows Phone 7 apps?) you will not (if I’m reading things correctly) be able to run Phone (yes, Metro, we went over this in the first Windows 8 rant) apps on your Windows Phone 7 smartphones. They may be similar platforms, but not identical. Windows 8 apps are built on Windows Runtime (WinRT), where as Windows Phone 7 apps are Silverlight and XNA. Windows Phone 8 is backward compatible with Windows Phone 7, but not vice-versa. It is not a forward-compatible design. Sorry all of you Windows Phone app developers. (All two of you.)

It even sounds like Microsoft is taking this a segmentation further, and that Windows 8 will only be for tablets. Phones will be stuck on Windows Phone 7. So it’s not just a matter of backward compatibility, but also about … modem form factor? I mean seriously, what’s the difference between a 3g-capapble 4 inch tablet and a smartphone? Not bloody much!  And far less yet between a 4g tablet!

But so anyone who ever envisioned of running Windows on ARM, sorry, you’re SOL. The tabletard has commanded that “Thou shalt not be productive on ARM.” The most you can do on ARM is still run apps. No soup applications for you!

You can think of Windows 8 ARM then being just another tablet OS like iOS and Android. It might say Windows 8, but it’s not Windows.

And actually, I’m kind of okay with that part. Honestly, what I want is a full-blown Windows smartphone/netbook combo device. You know, a PCphone. A Smarter phone. ARM may be The Next Big Thing, but I’m actually okay with x86 being the processor to make Smarterphones happen. It’s not like Intel and AMD both aren’t trying to make low-power mobile chips for just this purpose. (Why nVidia or even -gack!- Via doesn’t do so though is beyond me.)

Still, it’s very disappointing that Microsoft didn’t take this opportunity to do ARM right by any sense of the imagination. To have actually run a full-blown Windows OS on ARM would have been nice to see. Of course with what that could do to the server world, maybe it was done this way for a reason.

Yes, this is a rant. It’s not politically correct. This one perhaps more so than most of mine. If you want to complain, that’s nice. Send all of your complaints here.

Microsoft is the new tabletard.

Microsoft just released the hounds on the Windows 8 NDAs and I think it’s well and good to finally admit that we have a new word: Tabletard. For those unfamiliar with this word, please see commentard, twittard, celebritard, ad nauseum. And no, I do not mean people who are stupid about tables. I mean people who are stupid about tablets. Of which, now, apparently Microsoft is one of them.

Why do I say that Microsoft is a tabletard? Simple, look at what Windows 8 is. Take Windows 7 and Windows Phone 7, mash them together in the worst possible way, and tada! You now have Windows 8.

When first announced that Windows 8 would have a Metro mode and Windows 7 mode (which within this rant I will refuse to use as a term and will from now on call Phone, because that’s all it is), I rather figured that the Phone part would be something gimmicky that you can on the side. Like how Windows 7 has that Windows XP Compatibility mode. Call me crazy, but I had rather assumed that Microsoft was rational enough to comprehend that PC users use PCs. That Windows was the primary OS people want on their Windows box. That the Phone part is just there to run “apps”.

Apparently Microsoft doesn’t get it.

I guess I can’t entirely blame them. Ubuntu obviously missed the boat on that one as well.  More so than Microsoft, by a mile.

Still, it’s rather ludicrous to suddenly assume that every device you ever install your OS on is now a tablet or phone, and that it has no keyboard or mouse. You’d have to be a flipping moron to make that assumption. I mean you would literally need to be mentally retarded to assume that. Hence why Microsoft now joins Canonical (the folks responsible for Ubuntu) amongst the ranks of tabletards.

I’m already sick and tired of Windows 7’s Start Menu. I didn’t like it any better when it was Windows XP’s. The “Classic” Start Menu is what I vastly prefer, because as someone who actually works for a living, I have a lot of applications which I use. There’s simply not enough room in the psychic ever-failing-to-predict Start Menu that Microsoft has been trying to replace the classic Start Menu with forever. I am constantly using the “All Programs” button any time I can’t have my Classic Start Menu. Which is really freaking annoying.

I do not want my icons hidden.  I do not want my Start Menu shrunk.  I have a lot of icons that I need.  I have a lot of programs that I regularly use.  Stop trying to make me click a lot of extra times to do everyday tasks, Microsoft!

Now enter Windows 8, which replaces the bad Start menu with something even worse: Phone! (Remember, I am not calling it Metro.) Yes, that’s right, now a bunch of tiles make up your Start Menu. Tiles which will mostly lack any and all useful information for people like me who will be using Windows to run applications, not Phone “apps”. It takes up even more room. It’s uglier. And it’s even less useful. Huzzah?

Likewise, you get a schizophrenic experience in Windows 8. If you run a Windows application, it operates just like you’d expect. It’s the Windows experience that you know and love. But if you run a Phone app, it runs fullscreen, and with all of the finger-swiping interactivity that you’d come to expect from apps. Will people be able to figure out what to do when the run an app instead of an application?

And the bigger question is, how well will the dichotomy of application/app … aka app(lication) even work when navigating Windows. So far that’s one that people have been keeping rather quiet on. Will Alt-Tab even work at all? How does Aero handle applications vs. apps? Will navigating from within an app be like apps? Will navigating from within an application be like applications? Frankly, even if these questions are answered right now, until the final binaries hits the silicon, I’m not going to believe for a minute that tweaks and refinements won’t happen, or features of navigation change entirely. It’s a messy messy world that Microsoft is creating by treating apps as apps within Windows.  And it’s a mess the way that Microsoft is cramming Windows Phone 7 into Windows 7 and calling it Windows 8.

Seriously, is it so hard to comprehend that most people are not going to find Phone in any way useful on a desktop PC? Now if you want to enable some goofy Phone interface, as an option, I’m all for that. After all, tablet PCs like my Viliv S5 could very well use some finger-friendlier navigational aid. (Something Viliv tried to accomplish with Cube UI, but failed badly.) But again, Phone should be an option, not forced upon everyone. Not everyone has a touchscreen. Not everyone even owns a smartphone, let alone wants to navigate their PC like it were one, using a mouse instead of a finger no less. In fact most do not! A phone is a phone and a PC is a PC and never the twain shall meet in many people’s minds. So any defaulting to phone behavior or navigation on a PC’s operating system is A Bad Thing! The kind of thing that only a tabletard would design.

Obviously, I want a smartphone that can run an x86-based architecture. It’s not that I have anything against ARM, per se, just that I want to be able to run some actual software. No more apps! It’s about time we bring applications to the smartphone.

I want a real version of Microsoft Windows. Not Microsoft’s stupid upcoming port of Windows 8 to ARM. Blech! No, I want a real version of Windows. Not because I love Microsoft. Or Windows. It’s about application compatibility really. Such is life. Ideally, I’d love to be able to dual-boot my real x86 smartphone between some version of Linux and good old Windows when I need it. (Or maybe since I won’t likely be gaming on it, I’ll just VMware my Windows from Linux for a single-boot virtualized solution.)

I want a noise-canceling microphone system so that people can still hear me even if the wind blows gently by.

And the ability to switch to speakerphone, of course.

In fact, you know, I want to reiterate this here, I want it to be usable as a dratted phone! Seriously! It’s a phone! Make it one! Let’s make the calling quality of this thing actually usable, eh? All of these freaking phones that barely can even work as a phone is just ludicrous. It should be a phone first and everything else second. Call quality is the priority!

I want real on-device storage. A simple SSD hard drive solution is peachy keen with me. Maybe an SD card slot or two. Even microSD. Whatever. NO CLOUD! Really. None. I have no desire whatsoever to run everything through some slow 3G/4G network. Nor to pay an arm and a leg (or suffer penalizing slowdowns from my provider) for my allegedly “unlimited” data plan, just so that I can route everything through some nebulous “cloud” instead of storing it on my local device where I wanted it in the first place anyway, taking up tons of bandwidth and wasting my time with this slow procedure. Seriously people, until cellular network providers get with the 21st century, providing truly unlimited, unfettered, and unmolested data plans at reasonable rates, not to mention true 4G, “the cloud” is pretty much the worst idea ever. EVER! (Did you hear that Apple?)

I want two audio jacks. Not just a headphone jack, but also a microphone jack! So that I can plug in any old headset. I mean honestly, how hard can that be?

I want some kind of hybrid HMDI / DVI / VGA port or dongle so that I can plug in anywhere I need when I want a big screen or projector device.

I want at least one USB port, preferably two.

I want radio madness. Cellphone, obviously. 4G, of course. Wi-Fi, no doubt. GPS, for sure. Bluetooth, a given, v4.0 (or later depending on when this actually happens) would be nice. And while we’re at it, why not up the ante with any or all of the following: Wireless USB, Wireless HDMI (or some such HD-capable wireless stream), FM radio, digital FM radio, or even digital TV. Let’s see just how many antennas we can fit into a single device and have them all still work. And, to save power, each can be turned off individually of course!

I want the touchscreen to be multitouch and to be very responsive. These days both should go without saying, but sadly…

Haptic … but only if it works right. (On my Viliv S5 for example, haptic will vibrate as if you pressed the screen even though the screen may not actually have registered the press. I don’t know how this is possible, but it happens so often and provides so many false positives on feedback that I just had to turn it off.)

A slide-down hardware keyboard. Not the stupid netbook-style, but the simple slide down type you’d expect on a smartphone. Don’t be fancy. Keep it simple.  Maybe add a trackball with left and right mouse click buttons.  Maybe. Or even the option to add a keyboard to the back of the device. Let it plug in somehow to convert the phone into a netbook-ish-thingy. Not ideal, but still better than a touchscreen software keyboard.

These new dock-into-a-laptop-like-thing phones are also a neat concept. Or at least would be for an actual Windows-running x86-based smartphone. Then your phone really could be a laptop! Maybe it could even include things like an optical drive, an additional hard drive, extra USB ports, a long-life battery for serious usage as a computer, etc. Even the multifunction HDMI / DVI / VGA could be supported through the dock where the smartphone natively has mini HDMI, but through the laptop dock provides DVI+VGA as well.

I want a widescreen display with a MINIMUM of a 768 vertical resolution AT ALL TIMES! No matter how I rotate the phone, even when horizontal widescreen, I still want at least 768 vertical pixels. 800 would be just fine. But 600 or less, which is all too common unfortunately, just isn’t enough for some applications. Although … with Windows 8 having two visual models, one oriented towards phones / tablets and one for good old computers, perhaps docking the phone could be done in such a way as to make the phone-based user interface visible on the phone while the computer-based user interface shows up on the dock’s screen. I wonder if Windows 8 will be able to do both simultaneously…

And you know what, here I’m sure I deviate from the norm a bit, but I’d actually be just fine with a 5 inch screen form-factor, so long as there was minimal framing around the screen. I really honestly prefer my phone to not be the size of a gnat. I like being able to read what’s on the screen without zooming in all of the time.  Or squinting so much. But at the end of the day, it’s still a phone, so even if I’ll no doubt get a holder for my belt, it should still be able to fit into my pocket. (Considering that I can just barely fit my Viliv S5 into most of my pockets, a little trimmed down from that form factor would be fine.) So no bigger than that, but as big as that would be peachy. Not necessary, but welcome all the same.