Now that the usual round of end of year regurgitations of the past years IT events has ended we may further indulge ourselves by examining the pundits procastinations for their worthiness, or lack thereof. As ever, we were dished up a list of happenings which the IT scribes believed warranted our special attention. What our computers feel about such matters remains to be seen but some brave souls did manage to come up with various musings on what the future may hold for us, and them, (our computers that is) in this age of technical speculation. Whilst these ritualistic utterings have become a feature of the holiday silly season, why not build on this truly great and ancient tradition and comment on the level of veracity of the scribes from our much beloved land of nerds? They got it all wrong.At this point I should point out that anyone who may somehow be sensing that a little smoke can be seen wafting from the previous sentence is undoubtedly projecting their own fantasies onto this highly technical, not to say scientific analysis of modern IT life in the new Millennium. As our earliest and most primitive (?) ancestors well knew from long experience in the field of fire starting, you most definitely can have smoke without flame.
To backup this most original of claims I shall elaborate on a little matter which none of the scribes seemed to have noticed (or none of the scribes who I managed to stumble across in my vague meanderings around a tiny fraction of the internet during a period when there is bugger all else to do.) During the aforesaid 2002 a truly revolutionary state of Operating System Independence was attained. Well okay, the first few wobbly steps towards this truly miraculous and blessed state of being were realized but as every baby knows, the longest journey must start with the first faceful of dirt.
Due to the long suffering efforts of the good people of the WINE project we saw the proverbial light at the end of the longest and darkest of desktop tunnels; BEING ABLE TO CHOOSE OUR OWN OS.
Now WINE has been around for quite a few years but it was not until it dawned in the craniums of some at least half awake people that things started to happen. To cut a rather long and complicated story short, it became clear that trying to develop an API translation program that enabled all programs written for one OS to run on another OS was too complicated and was taking too long.
Instead they decided to concentrate on a program that enabled a small section or group of programs written for one OS to run on another OS. Lo and behold, SUCCESS!
As all good nerds are aware, we truly blessed and upstanding folk who so wisely and courageously use any one of the many wonderful and varied incarnations ( or should that be incantations) of LINUX on our desktop computers may now run programs written for another OS. Well, some of them at least.
Not only do programs such as Crossover Office allow us to run certain Windows programs on Linux based distro's, it does so reliably and practical as fast as they run (or indeed fail to run) on MS operating systems. At least that is what all the reviews on this subject claim. Being merely a pundit myself I naturally haven't tested them to try and find out. Still, since these tests were run on computers and we know that computers don't make mistakes and since the results were posted on the internet and we know that we can believe everything on the net, they must be right.
To a lesser degree, Transgaming X have done the same in their truly laudable efforts to allow us to play Quake and The Sims on the desktop OS of our choice (as long as we have the brains to make the right choice of OS, as I am sure all the readers of this web site have.) The next step, of course, is for one of those lazy, open source modders to do something about enabling us long suffering gamers to import a character from Quake into The Sims, especially the multiplayer and online versions.
Of course it is much more difficult to make something as complex and advanced as a modern computer game run on a non-native OS compared with a mere business office suite. This is how it should be since every modern thinker knows what is, and is not, important in this most up to date and sophisticated age.
Now clearly this is just the beginning. Not only are both the above mentioned companies dedicatedly and efficiently working to improve their offerings to a grateful public, others can learn from their shining example and do the same thing in other areas. For example. What is to stop a bunch of bright ,young talented software engineers from Apple looking at (err, learning) (err, copying) the ideas, principles and code used by the WINE project and related companies and developing their own versions which allow games and other important programs from another OS to run on those stunningly fast desktop computers that use the Mac OS?
- "Desktop Revolution, Part I"
- "Desktop Revolution, Part II"
