Windows

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Dropbox And Other Major Apps Need To Get On Board With Windows On Snapdragon.

The PC revolution, I think had enjoyed a pretty remarkable binary portability: one that I think today’s users just take for granted. CP/M while a bit tricky, did surprisingly well for the hardware variations. MS-DOS managed to improve the concept of copying some shit and expecting it to run on your computer. And then there was Windows, which has probably had one of the strongest ABIs for decades while Unix systems came to prefer the portability of source code over the resulting redistributibles.

Today, the concept that you can download some program and that it won’t run because your processor architecture isn’t an Intel chip made within the past ten to twenty five years, is less familiar to everyday Windows users. As opposed to folks who have managed multiple flavors of Unix system across several processor architectures.

In many ways, I think the ease of jockeying binaries around on floppy diskettes and bulletin boards is as important to our computing history as the rise of sharing the source code over the Internet. But the systemic effects kinda work the other way as well: it’s hard to maximize the value of multiple processor architectures if you’re surrounded by binaries that won’t run, and it isn’t so practical to just solve the problem with virtualization and translation.

I think it is telling that modern methods of binary software distribution tend to address the problem from the get go. Installing packages on my Debian systems are pretty much the same whether they’re x86 or ARM based, and that’s probably true of the many supported architectures. Dealing with native code on Android  has long dealt with the issue of bundling binaries for different Android ABIs as well. The path from random ass files to a structured delivery from a repository has its upsides.

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https://youtu.be/VES1KHFa_vk

It’s probably sad that when such machines were less well suited for propping open a window, and more suited to getting work done, I probably would have loved such a machine. I always wondered what use that form of Windows might be, especially when I learned there was a sorta-port of vim to CE.

The reality is, while by the time I reached the stage of wanting such machines, I didn’t really like Windows. But the reality is, what I really wanted was a device that was portable and capable of doing text editing and file management. In a better way than setting an e-mail to yourself off a phone.

When I was younger, the sexist thing a phone might be able to do is send an e-mail. That was part of why I looked at the launch of the T-Mobile G1 with sad, watery eyes; because I realized the devices I wanted were coming down the pike, and at my age, I may as well have wanted a Camaro for that kind of price tag, lol.

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Windows 10X Leaks Show A Mobile OS World I Want No Part Of

There’s probably two kinds of people that crept out of their terminals over the decades. Those that want what they’re used to, and those who want something new. You can hazard a guess as to which the author is.
Personally, I don’t really care about having a “Desktop” experience on my laptop, so much as desktop class processing power. Why? Because it’s software that’s become the bottleneck.
There’s a reason why we still say “Desktop” experience but laptops came to dominate the PC world. As the laptop form factor evolved: it came to run the same software as the microcomputers people were already using. We were just pulling off a functional desktop, and no one had the resources or the inclination to optimize software for a mobile device, nor learn how to navigate it. Yet laptops largely came into the own because they are mobile devices, and able to run the same applications as our desktops with close enough processing power to be worth it. Whether your mobility is every day or every month, a laptop is a mobile device compared to hauling a tower, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a cart with a car battery around.
So needless to say, the most fucks anyone has had to give in the land of desktops is where laptop capabilities and older desktops intersect on specs. Beyond that, software developers don’t tend to distinguish much between desktop and laptop.
But now phones and tablets exist, and make your desktop centric human interface guidelines look more like a calculator watch than something that adapted your fingers. Laptops are becoming more tablet like over time, and the software experiences have to adapt to the changing norms of hardware or face the long roads to obsolescence and extinction. 
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Happy fun times: when you power on your computer, and your Bluetooth keyboard doesn’t want to power on. Being lazy, rather than fetch my trusty USB keyboard I simply used accessibility features to login.

Windows NT decided my Bluetooth dongle was nadda, and only gave a faint blue like power was coming through the port but no goodness. Migrating to a neighboring USB port, and lo and behold: it suddenly lights up. I seem to recall that some ballocks like this, is how it ended up in the port it was in.

I’m pretty sure that the day I believe a Windows desktop ever does Bluetooth, or even USB things well, the deepest levels of hell may have frozen colder than can be measured.

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Things a smidge useful about having been around a while, and stuck in heterogeneous computing environments.

One of my routine tasks when Cream reboots for updates every now and then, is to run a simple script that runs my post bot for sending my blog posts to D*. The issue that the Intel chipset likes to hang on reboots over USB things is a different issue than making sure software starts up on sign in.

In *nix land, the cheesey, read simplist, method is just insert it into your X session script (Yes, I still use xinit :P). Fancier session managers, XDG autostart, and gasp, systemd user units, also exist. Of course there’s always more than one way to do it. Not to mention that when its your box, you can abuse the system level parts ^_^.

NT on the other hand, I remember the easiest way. Go stick a shortcut to the script in the startup directory and be done with it. That’s “%APPDATA%MicrosoftWindowsStart MenuProgramsStartup” in this day and age.

My scripts are pretty simple. The first is a wrapper (post-bot.cmd) that goes to where I keep my post bot’s install, and runs this daemon.cmd script:

@ECHO OFF

IF EXIST %VIRTUAL_ENV% GOTO post_loop

:load_venv
    ECHO Loading venv
    CALL .pythonScriptsactivate.bat
    GOTO post_loop

:post_loop
    ECHO Running
    python .pythonScriptsrss2diaspora-spider -v -s dataconfig.txt 
    ECHO Looping
    TIMEOUT /T 900
    GOTO post_loop

Which is sufficient for making sure it runs every fifteen minutes without having to care about much more than the box rebooting. So whenever my blog’s RSS feed updates, my posts eventually get converted to markdown and pushed to Diaspora without me having to care too much.

Yay, for laziness!

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Surface reveals new holiday lineup and introduces a new category of dual-screen devices built for mobile productivity.

Yippee ki yay, Surface!

The refreshes of the existing stuff are somewhat less exciting; I might care more if the regular laptop can drive a eGPU over Thunderbolt, otherwise it’s mostly iterative goodness.

Far, far more interesting to me is the Neo and the Duo.

Surface Neo is the device I’ve long wanted to see someone build, and have a snow balls chance of not screwing up the productivity side of the software. The keyboard trick, is where I shout, “Fuck, yeah!”. Pretty much it matches up with the oh so wish it becomes a product, rumors from earlier this year.

Duo on the other hand is a long overdue device IMHO. Thanks to how Nadella era Microsoft has played out, I’ve been kinda wanting to see a Microsoft based Android device. It might not be as technologically innovative  as something like the Galaxy Fold, but it’s a step in the right direction.

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Ahh, I’m reminded of what really makes me hate NT: hardware support.

Ever since my good cable got a tad bent at the connector, I’ve only had two cables that really like to drive my Xbox One controller. One that’s like 3 meters, and one that’s like 30 centimetres: neither of which is particularly fun with my desk. But at least they work, if you deal with the cable lengths.

So, I figure let’s try the wireless adapter for Windows. Well, guess what? It’s shit.

The “Slim” model 1790 now available doesn’t work with Windows 10, 1903, up to date as of what Microsoft lets my desktop get. As far as the base operating system is concerned there is no driver for this device–none, nadda, zilcho!

If you browse the go fetchy it catalog referenced in places like this and this, and get a bit creative in pointing Windows at various entries and fine one that’ll actually match the device: the most you’ll get is an error code: “The software for this device has been blocked from starting because it is known to have problems with Windows. Contact the hardware vendor for a new driver. (Code 48)”. If you give up more easily than I do when I’m tired and almost ready for sleep: you’ll just get a message saying it didn’t find squat that works with the driver you extracted.

Because why would you expect Microsoft’s driver’s to work with Microsoft’s hardware? That’s a lot to ask, I guess.

In my experience there are really only three kinds of drivers for Windows.

  1. Those that just work, and often those come with the Microsoft’s install.
  2. Those that almost never work; and
  3. Those that are about as stable as drunk with ten shots of rum in’em.

On the flipside scenario 3 is why error codes like 48 exist. Not being able to use a piece of hardware is frequently better than it turning the rest of your experience to crap.

For the extra curious nerd, the device reports itself as usb vid 045e pid 02fe in the device manager’s GUI. 0x45e being MS’s USB vendor id. Dunno what their product ids in the wild are, and I’m not buying multiple adapters to find out.

The Microsoft Xbox One Wireless Adapter for Windows kit also comes with a really nice but rather short length USB extension cable. Which aside from being an overpriced cable when you consider the wireless adapter is actually a paperweight until MS fixes the driver, does in fact solve my real problem. I.e. if I was smart I would’ve just bought a decent cable in a length > 0.3 & < 3.0 meters long instead of MS’s wireless adapter. Ha! 🤣

Thus my real solution is to take the extension cable that came with the useless wireless adapter, plug in my too damned short cable I wanted to replace, hook up my controller and go play a damned game before my head droops and hits the desk.

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I find it a bit amusing how Special Folders have evolved, and less so how programs have perverted them. At this point, NT and X desktop environments mostly agree about the dumping grounds in your home directory or “User Profile”. Programs not so much.

One of the things I do find amusing is this compat trick:

C:UsersTerry>dir /A:H Documents
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 9278-0228

 Directory of C:UsersTerryDocuments

2015-02-28  20:24                 0 Default.rdp
2019-08-14  21:31               402 desktop.ini
2019-07-02  23:22         My Music [C:UsersTerryMusic]
2019-07-02  23:22         My Pictures [C:UsersTerryPictures]
2019-07-02  23:22         My Videos [C:UsersTerryVideos]
               2 File(s)            402 bytes
               3 Dir(s)  295,411,253,248 bytes free

C:UsersTerry>;

A long time ago the content was like “My DocumentsMy Pictures”. And then eventually when the concept of multiple users took off, we ended up with “%UserProfile%My DocumentsMy Pictures” and so on, until we finally ended up with the modern path. Kindly, some Microsoftie decided ‘Users’ was a lot nicer than ‘Documents and Settings’ as far as prefixes go for where you store user profiles.

So while %UserProfile%Pictures is the legit place on my modern system: if for some reason you still wanted to access them through the documents folder: hidden junctions will redirect you. Thus keeping old software working. Once upon a time this was probably important for keeping software written for Windows 95 and early NT working.

Curiously there is a hidden junction of “Documents and Settings [CUsers]” at the top of my %SystemDrive% but there are none for the really-damned-old “My Documents” at the top of the drive. I wouldn’t be surprised however if compatibility trunks for older software faked those.

Also, I kind of feel glad that I haven’t really touched a live Windows 9x install since the Pentium 4 was still sexy ^_^. That might sound less fun if you consider that I know where to reach for install discs that makes XP look young enough to be playing with Fischer Price…. but I’m not interested in running a virtual machine to jog the ol’ meatbag memory.

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Special bonuses to running the built in OpenSSH service on your W10 install: being able to SSH in and taskkill a fullscreen game that is stuck.

Because apparently the “Hey, let me freaking alt+tab to taskmgr!” problem remains possible even after decades ^_^.

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MSPoweruser: Bill Gates calls losing the smartphone market to Android his “greatest mistake”.

In times equally long past I would have guessed it smart phones became a thing: they’d probably run something derived from Windows CE or be a tad Palmy. Meanwhile what I would have wanted back then would probably had looked something like PDAs from Sharp and Nokia.
Today, be it for better or worse: Android is insanely successful. It is to mobile what Windows is to PC in just about every sense of the word. Except it grew up with underpinnings built around Linux and Java rather than DOS and C. It also has had the benefit of hindsight: as those creating it came from a world populated by Windows and Unix based systems.
Microsoft is doing pretty well today. Hell they’ve even made some nice software and services. But they are dead as the platform for mobile. Want to use Microsoft things on the go? Your phone runs probably Android. If not well it sure won’t be running a Microsoft operating system!
For about the last five years or so, I’ve kind of wondered if in about another thirty years: will Android eventually overtake Windows. Much as Microsoft pretty much became the gold standard as Unix vendors fiddled and burned.
One thing is for sure: the Linux kernel ain’t disappearing anytime soon 😜.