[this is called out of the box thinking, and as with all out of the box
thinking, some ideas may not
always be as practical as alternative ideas ;-) ]
How about if you bypass the operating system too and write a program in
binary.
A true engineer comes up with a whole spectrum of ideas *before* choosing
which one to go for. Without creativity, you may not find a decent solution.
But it's a well-understood thing in psychology that (narrow-minded) people
very often ridicule people who come up with surprising suggestions or
statements because this is an instinctive mental world model preservation
reaction: the human brain simply does not like inputs which severely
challenge its model of the world. If I say "The universe is made of cheese",
virtually everyone will instinctive laugh *before* consciously and
critically thinking about the statement. This is normal, since a decent
mental model is key to the organism's short- and long-term survival. But
engineering is the business of creating working solutions, and that requires
suspending our instinctive mental conservatism in favour of letting the
neurons go wild for a bit, in the hope we see solutions we'd otherwise never
have found just trying to rely on what's already in our brain.
For the record though, hundreds of video games written in the 80s and 90s
*had to be* written by bypassing machine OSes. It was the only way to
achieve what the marketplace expected of the games at the time.
And last but not least, a few years ago I worked for a company where another
team had this major database performance bottleneck (the database wasn't a
live thing, though it was huge). They just couldn't get the performance they
needed, so some guy (not me), came up with the idea of going behind the
facade and hit the data files themselves (no idea if it was Oracle, I wasn't
on that team)... and that solved their problem. Instead of struggling with a
program that needed days to run to completion, they managed to write a
solution that ran in a few hours, if I recall correctly.