The Latino hit

Obama's DREAM executive order is still reverberating through the campaign. It was well timed, just five months before the election, after the Republican primaries and after Republicans 'came home' and Romney's numbers bounced, just before a Supreme Court decision on immigration which would amplify Obama's message. Obama carefully used Sandra Fluke and Trayvon Martin to drive a culture war wedge between Republicans and most Americans back in March, then he endorsed gay marriage in May (giving a significant boost to pro-gay marriage efforts in a number of states). Immigration was the remaining big wedge issue. With immigration Obama was much less subtle. Each of these moves frame cultural issues in a way that puts Obama in a positive light to most Americans, and in a way that sends the Republican base into an alienating frenzy. Romney ends up caught between American values and an increasingly marginalized base. On immigration in particular Romney is effectively skewered and unable to respond coherently, while Obama opens up more opportunities in swing states, which generally have large and growing Latino populations. Conservatives tend to think of these moves as merely addressing the Democratic base, but in fact they present a stark choice to white Americans: do they want to turn back to the past or move forward into the future. Most of white middle class America is moving forward, and enough identify with Obama's vision of America's future to give him a sufficient share of the white vote.

Windows Phone 8 and Nokia

Microsoft has put another nail in Nokia's coffin with yesterday's Windows 8 announcement. Nokia is being squeezed from both ends of its market: it's low end devices can't compete with Chinese Android smartphones, and it's high end Lumia 900 is equivalent to a mid-range Android phone at best. Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will not run on current Windows Phone 7 phones (it is too fat for those platforms) so Nokia will have to come up with a new line of much higher end phones that can run Microsoft's new, heavier OS. Those phones will not compete on price with high-end Android and iPhone phones, so Nokia's high end business will go nowhere. Nokia has no mid-range line, other than the now obsolete Windows Phone 7 handsets. And Nokia has just laid off many of the people who were working on a lighter, low-end OS, so they have no low-end platform with which to preserve their low-end business.

With this move Microsoft has finally abandoned the decrepit Wince kernel they had attempted to reskin as Windows Phone. But by dropping a bloated NT kernel into an embedded environment they made their usual mistake of assuming that Moore's law will make up for crap software performance.

Engadget ran almost a dozen brief takes on Window 8 mobile, but to me they read as curiously detached from any awareness of the reality of mobile hardware. These commentators seem to have completely bought into the pointy-headed notion that mobile and desktop platforms are now basically the same and that a unified OS, from kernel to UI, can serve them equally well. Write once, run anywhere is a common mistake that amateur programmers and people removed from actual development on these platforms make, the most recent major failure being Java, which morphed into so many different solutions over the past twenty years that it lost all coherence and became primarily a database language.

Mobile, tablet and desktop are distinct UIs, and require distinct interactive metaphors. Their display, memory, cpu, battery and bandwidth constraints are also distinct, and applications must respect each device's limits. A kernel designed for the ever expanding capabilities of desktop computers will never fit well into the tight confines of a mobile phone. Microsoft's developer support, which is also geared to the ever expanding desktop, will never cultivate developers who can build apps that run well on tablets and phones. They will develop crippled versions of desktop apps, just as Microsoft web development tools encourage web apps that are crippled versions of ancient client server applications.

Whither Nokia?

All Things D's Ina Fried reports on Nokia's latest earnings call. "The company said that its smartphone business is even weaker than expected amid stiff competition from Apple and Android products." As expected, Android is squeezing them on the low end, according to Elop:

The strength of Android, particularly as it pushes down in price point, is clearly something that has caused a lot of challenge.

In choosing Windows phone Nokia jumped from a burning platform into the fire. Nokia is closing facilities and firing tens of thousands of workers in an effort to stay afloat, but cutting staff won't win people over to the Windows phone platform. Sales of the Lumia 900 haven't had any impact on Windows phone market share, even after massive promotion from Nokia, Microsoft and AT&T. News of Nokia restating earnings and Q2 forecasts undercuts their claim that the phone is performing as expected.  They must change course to survive in the market. Nokia can't become Apple, so their choice is to adopt Android or fade out.

Update: Dan Rowinski at ReadWriteWeb weighs in on Nokia's options:

Elop today said during a conference call that Nokia needs to “compete with Android aggressively.” To do that, it must develop not just one great Windows Phone in the United States, but several. The Lumia 900 is a good device, but it is available only through AT&T. Nokia needs at least one major device on every U.S. carrier and then a mid-range device that spendthrifts will look to if the top phone proves too expensive. And it means teaming with Microsoft (which has said it will help) to create Windows Phones that are available across the world at entry-level prices.

 But there's no such thing as a great Windows Phone, much less several. The Windows Phone kernel is wince, app developers won't adopt it now any more than they did a decade ago, and squeezing it down to work well on entry-level hardware is a fantasy.

My Raspberry Pi

I got my Raspberry Pi from Newark.com last month.

Took me a little bit to get it working. My Nook simple touch micro-USB adapter works fine. My first microSDHC card in an adapter didn't work so I had to run out to Radio Shack to get a compatible SDHC card, but once I did and loaded their Debian image everything worked fine. 

I got MPD and NFS set up and tried using it as a music server. The forums are right, the PCM drivers aren't there yet. The sound was barely decipherable. I'll try a USB DAC.

Transferring lots of files to it over rsync via ssh killed the RPi, but NFS seems to work fine. I also want to get Go running on it.