You know why I hate computers? Because no matter how many years of experience you’ve got under your belt, they can still make you feel like a village idiot.

Case in point: I’ve recently bought a professional sound interface by M-Audio, the Audiophile 2496 PCI card. It did not initially work in Ubuntu but did in Win7. So I did things normal people usually do like install some software, play some games, configure things here and there, and after a few restarts, BAM! No sound coming out of my headphones.

Neither in Ubuntu nor in Windows.

So on I go and Google things like usual, and boy did I learn more than I’ve ever wanted to about the inner workings of audio in Linux! Indeed, I went ahead and taught myself the basics of digital audio so that I don’t stare at terms such as S/PDIF only thinking I had an idea what they meant. Nothing helped, though; no sound was coming out of my headphones.

What does a desperate man do in such a situation, then? Re-install Windows? Nope. Re-install Ubuntu? Sure, it was getting slower by the day and I figured it was about time anyway. No sound from my headphones at the end of the day, however.

What does a desperate man who’s lost all sense of self-worth by that time do, then? Pull some cards out of PCI slots and put then in again in different ones! And lo and behold, the music comes to life once again!

One would think that computers and operating systems would have learned a thing or two about IRQs and shit come 2010. Apparently, this is not the case. Or it is, but my computer has never revealed why it suddenly went silent. Or why it spoke again. Once thing is for sure, I’ll never again admit to being a computer expert.

Adobe is not going to war with Apple and will abandon its code translation tools. Hence no avalanche of Flash developers suddenly being able to target iPhone/iPad. Funny, I thought Apple updating its terms would lead to an uprising that would ultimately lead to mobs breaking the walls of their walled garden.

Microsoft couldn’t even ship a  media player with Windows without getting slapped with an anti-monopoly fine from the EU commission but Apple can apparently do whatever they want even though they are the undisputed leader in their smartphone niche.

But perhaps Adobe’s defensive statement “the iPhone isn’t the only game in town” isn’t just about sour grapes. It really isn’t. When a close friend and a devoted iPhone addict recently admitted that my Droid (Milestone in the EU) felt markedly faster in every way, I saw that as a turn of the tide. Developers won’t be voluntarily submitting to Jobs’ despotic rule when they have an alternative that is no longer “just” viable but actually superior in some ways.

Every now and then we hear the Web is the new OS. But is it big enough, fast enough, smart enough?

To the extent that you can make do with a MacBook, Google Docs, and Twitter while sipping late in a hip geeky cafe, yes, your Use Cases are covered. Their list is still growing.

Assuming for the sake of the argument that the Web will indeed render the Operating System irrelevant, why talking the PC manufacturers into ditching Microsoft and building their own shit?

Extrapolating the (questionable so far) success of the cute little darling Litl, which is a utility gadget for browsing the web while shaving (screenshot #3 at the homepage), the writer at Daring Fireball says:

If a small startup can build the Litl, why couldn’t a big company like Dell or Sony? People today still love HP calculators made 30 or even 40 years ago. Has HP made anything this decade that anyone will remember fondly even five years from now? Inkjet printers?

If Palm can create WebOS for pocket-sized computers — replete with an email client, calendaring app, web browser, and SDK — why couldn’t these companies make something equivalent for full-size computers?

Indeed, the very same companies who grew big in the PC ecosystem precisely because it is an ecosystem built on ONE platform – Windows – should now abandon it and create their own, each of them?

That reminds be of the bizarre decision of Samsung to develop their own smartphone OS, Bada, and put it side-to-side with their Android offering. That Google pulled it off with Android is only a testament to the messy state of mobile operating systems, not a challenge to do the same on PCs.

It boils down to this:

1. Either PC OS is irrelevant and Web will overtake everything, rendering billions of dollars invested in creating a brand new OS a wasted investment, or
2. The desktop still matters, in which case good luck creating the partner infrastructure Microsoft has been building for the past 25 years or so.

Either way you are screwed. The OS wars are being re-fought on mobiles but there is no undoing the past quarter century of PC history.