From Windows 8 to Raspberry Pi, we pick the top IT stories of 2012

Windows 8: like it or loathe it, the OS dominated news in 2012.

Aurich Lawson

The year in IT was filled with big changes, as Microsoft unveiled the future of Windows and former enterprise stalwart Research In Motion continued its distressing fall toward irrelevance. The year in IT also had its uplifting stories, from the birth of the Raspberry Pi to Red Hat's success pairing financial success with a vision true to its open source ideals. And, of course, the year in IT also had its share of bizarre and perplexing stories, with the meltdown of Mitt Romney's tech team and the rise and fall of the Windows tech support scammers. Here are our choices for the most interesting stories of the bunch—and we look forward to bringing you many more in 2013.

Windows 8 launch

October 26th saw the release of Microsoft's latest—but not necessarily greatest—operating system: Windows 8. (Read our review.) The scope was ambitious. Windows 8 is striving to be an operating system that can comfortably handle iPad-style touch tablets while still running and working with decades of mouse-and-keyboard-driven desktop applications.

The result? An unpredictable hybrid. It's chock full of welcome features and improvements over Windows 7, and it really is the first version of Windows to sport a proper, usable touch interface. But with these improvements come rough edges a-plenty, and an experience that just isn't quite joined up.

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Flushing the crapware: A guide to reinstalling Windows 8 on a new PC

Installing a clean copy of Windows 8 on a new, crapware-infested PC is even easier than it was in Windows 7.

Andrew Cunningham

We may have a new version of Windows, but one story is still the same: buying a new Windows 8 PC means that you're also buying a bunch of OEM-installed software that you didn't ask for. This software ranges from the innocuous (Office 2010 demos) to the unnecessary (paid anti-virus trials, despite Windows 8's baked-in antivirus scanner) to the actively useless (WildTangent games and unending superfluous system tray icons).

Much of this software can simply be uninstalled with no harm done, but if something goes wrong with your PC and you need to reinstall Windows, all of that crapware will usually come right back with it. For years now, most OEMs have neglected to include a "vanilla" Windows install disk with their computers, opting rather to include some sort of "restore partition" with all of the crapware baked in—this makes it difficult to perform a truly "clean" install of the operating system. On some computers, like the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga, these recovery materials dramatically reduce the amount of drive space accessible by the user.

To help out those of you who are planning to buy new PCs—or got them from Santa Claus—but don't want to deal with all of this junk, we're going to update our original Windows 7 bloatware removal guide for Microsoft's latest operating system. Parts of the following will be transplanted from that article where appropriate, but while the reasons for performing a clean Windows install are the same, the actual process is often surprisingly different.

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Programming for all, part 1: An introduction to writing for computers

Aurich Lawson

Computers are ubiquitous in modern life. They offer us portals to information and entertainment, and they handle the complex tasks needed to keep many facets of modern society running smoothly. Chances are, there is not a single person in Ars' readership whose day-to-day existence doesn't rely on computers in one manner or another. Despite this, very few people know how computers actually do the things that they do. How does one go from what is really nothing more than a collection—a very large collection, mind you—of switches to the things we see powering the modern world?

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

—Carl Sagan

At their base, even though they run much of the world, computers are one thing: stupid. A computer knows nothing. Its brain is little more than a large collection of on/off switches. The fact that you can play video games, browse the Internet, and pump gas at a gas station is thanks to the programs the computers have been given by a human. In this article, we'll take a look at some of the basic concepts of computer programming: how a person teaches a computer something and how the ideas encapsulated in the program go from something we can understand to something a computer understands.

First, it needs to be said that programming is not some black art, something arcane that only the learned few may ever attempt. It is a method of communication whereby a person tells a computer what, exactly, they want it to do. Computers are picky and stupid, but they will indeed do exactly as they are told. Therefore, each program you write should be like an elegant recipe that anyone—including a computer—can follow. Ideally, each step in a program should be clearly described and, if it is complicated, broken down into smaller steps to remove all doubt about what is to happen.

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How can I get out of my own head as the only developer on a project?

Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 80+ Q&A sites.

BenCole Asks:

I've spent the last year as a one-man team developing a rich-client application (35,000+ LoC, for what it's worth). It's currently stable and in production. However, I know that my skills were rusty at the beginning of the project, so without a doubt there are major issues in the code. At this point, most of the issues are in architecture, structure, and interactions—the easy problems, even architecture/design problems, have already been weeded out.

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Ars readers confirm: We want dual-persona smartphones

Two smartphones, one dual-persona phone, or none of the above?

LGEPR

The rise of the smartphone has turned the workplace into a bring-your-own-device kind of world. In many cases, IT shops would like more control over the devices employees use for work, even if they are employee-owned. That's why the idea of the dual-persona smartphone—two phones on one device, separating work and personal applications—has become popular. But while dual-persona phone technology is being driven by employer demand, it turns out users want them too.

We polled Ars readers earlier this week to find out if you would like a phone that completely separates work and personal applications from each other. To be honest, we figured dual-persona phones wouldn't be that popular because of the inconvenience of putting work applications in an entirely separate part of one's phone. The poll results show otherwise.

The question we posed was "Would you use a dual-persona smartphone?" With 3,710 votes in our unscientific poll, 33.56 percent of readers said, "Yes, sign me up. I want a phone for work and personal stuff, but with a wall of separation between." Another 22.37 percent said, "Yes, but only if my employer paid for it." A further 18.54 percent said, "I'd consider a dual-persona smartphone if it's implemented in a more user-friendly way than current versions."

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Still putting your PGP-protected PC in hibernate? $300 app can hack it

truecrypt.org

Cracking PGP, TrueCrypt and other strong encryption packages just got more affordable, with the release of a $300 package that can pluck decryption keys out of computer memory in certain cases.

Thursday's release of the Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor poses the biggest threat to people who leave their Mac laptops or FireWire-equipped PCs in hibernate or sleep states while encrypted drives are mounted. It has long been possible to use the FireWire or Mac Thunderbolt interfaces to retrieve the contents of volatile memory on machines that are password-protected but not powered down. But until now, it has cost closer to $1,000 for an easy and reliable way to use that data against people using strong full-disk encryption programs.

The new product from Moscow-based ElcomSoft changes that. Like Passware, which Ars first chronicled in 2009, it's able to comb through memory dumps and locate the cryptographic keys stored inside. But at a third the price, Forensic Disk Decryptor could bring that capability to a much larger customer base.

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Microsoft killing off Expression suite of Web and design tools

Microsoft has quietly announced that its Expression suite of Web and design-oriented tools is being killed off and phased out.

Vector graphics drawing tool Expression Design 4 has been end-of-lifed. No new versions will be developed, and it's no longer for sale. You can now download it for free, and it'll continue to receive security patches as necessary until at least 2015. Microsoft is offering no replacement or alternative to users of the product.

The same has happened to HTML and CSS authoring tool Expression Web 4. It's no longer for sale and no new versions will be released, and it's now available as a free download. Instead of developing Expression Web, Microsoft will continue to extend and improve Visual Studio's HTML, CSS, and JavaScript capabilities, with the IDE now being the company's sole actively maintained Web development tool. The SuperPreview Remote service that allowed developers to view their pages in a range of browsers hosted on Microsoft's servers will operate until the end of June 2013.

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