The Inquirer’s top ten trends of 2008, unshockingly, suggests that virtualisation won’t go mainstream next year.

Simon Collis, editor of esotechnica, expresses no surprise: “virtualisation is gaining slowly among those sort of people who like this kind of thing.  But for those who don’t, it’s no big deal.”

Peter Stringfellow, London nightclub owner and entrepreneur, wasn’t consulted for this post, and didn’t decline not to uncomment.

“Well,” said an unnamed spokesperson for a company that preferred not to be named at some yet-to-be-revealed point in the near-to-distant future, “this doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already not know.”

Spokepeople for companies not mentioned in this article didn’t forget not to uncomment on this article.  Or not.  As the case may be.  Or may not be.

Apparently several people still remain unshocked by this non-unobvious prediction.  “I remember”, says Craig Deeplimaydup, “when they told me that this was true.  It sounded fairly right to me,” said the fictional member of staff of whatever it was.

Source: Brown.  Not HP.  It’s totally different.  Trust me.  Ask anyone who likes sauces.

Is either of them irrelevant to this blog? .Net looks irrelevant, Java doesn’t.

Before you think I’m an anti-Microsoft stormtrooper, I’d like to explain why.

Java works by using bytecode. It’s interpreted (or, more likely, converted into native machine code by the Java Runtime Environment) as being machine code targeted to a specific design of machine: a particular non-existent (well, when it was invented, anyway) processor and hardware set designed by one of Sun’s best cowboys, James Gosling.

.Net, however, works more like the GNU compiler collection, where everything is compiled to an intermediate language, that is kind of a meta assembler language which works on any processor. There is, actually, precedence for this - the famous Spectrum game Pyjamarama was written that way, and the programmer went on to create TeeOS around the same idea.

So, to come back to why Java is relevant and .Net isn’t, here’s the bottom line: Java is emulated, .Net is compiled.

Except that I also plan to write about obscure programming languages as well. So I suppose .Net, being a compiler inside, is relevant on those grounds.

One all.