Do you hear that, mister Gates?

Whenever I'm asked if something has been hacked, or broke, or generally gotten-into, I always correct the inquirer.

"It's not a question of 'if', it's a question of 'when'."

Never has this been more true than this morning. Gradually waking up, and paging through the feeds at Digg, I come across this article. You may read the content if you see fit, but if not, I'll sum it up quickly for you.

A 19-year old reverse engineer (my 19th year was never so cool) is working on, basically, pulling DX10 components out of Vista and making them work with XP, bit by bit. The design calls for an external launcher application, and it's extremely early in development, but I digress.

Years ago, when Windows XP first came to the House, we all poked and prodded at it, and generally scrutinized it. That was nearly six years ago now, and since then, the operating system has matured, stabilized, and become the operating system of choice for the House (at least, so far as LAN-ready OSes is concerned). However, we were told that Vista would be the only operating system to support DirectX 10, in effect, a forced upgrade that has forced most of us to write off DirectX 10 games entirely. This project promises some relief from that, some salvation from the railed upgrade track that Microsoft is attempting to firmly guide us to.

Regardless of the success of this project, however, and the sudden press that threatens to draw the attention of that grand behemoth known as Microsoft, one thing has been proven. The sound, mister Gates, is that of inevitability. Independent of propriety, of closed source, of forced upgrade tracks, it is never a matter of 'if' the item in question will be broken, hacked, and generally worked around.

It is a matter of 'when'.