My understanding is that it recompiles to the new hardware using only the binaries. Programs with self modifying code and/or run time compliation would seem to be a problem to me.

Vaporware Vaporware Vaporware Vaporware Vaporware Vaporware

Wait, does this mean WinDell users can run iLife? Beacuse then we are screwed.

Yeah - I have to agree - vaporware. These guys aren't they same people that ran FWB awhile back, are they? I'll believe it when I see it.

On the other hand. If it's true, some interesting things could happen in our current computer world. Buying hardware just on looks and not worrying about software compatibility could play right in Apple ideology.

Why do publishers let their reporters cover this crap? This story pops up about as often as message 419 (the Nigerian email scam). Publishers should offer this story as a press release and then fire any editors they have that don't have their BS detecters going off.

on my AMD 3400..and it is stable too. Now I can have my headless Mac made from all the latest and greatest PC hardware. Yeh I made it myself.

Actually, I think more people might switch to OS X development if this works. They would get a lovely development environment with the ability for losers still using windows to run their program.

Transitive’s initial focus has been to work with computer OEMs. To date, we have closed six of the world’s largest computer OEMs. Each of these computer OEMs is seeking broad ISV and customer-written software support for their platforms. We anticipate that two of these computer OEMs will deploy products enabled by our technology by the end of 2004 and early 2005. Unfortunately, strict confidentiality obligations prevent us from saying more about these relationships at this time.

Transitive has also recently begun working directly with ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) and Internal Software Development Groups. We expect announcements of relationships with these companies to coincide with public announcements with our computer OEM customers.

Please refer back to this web page for updates on our customer successes.

i don't see any reference to running Windows apps on OSX or vice-versa. seems to be that it mentions 'emulation' between 2 Unix/Linux-like operating systems. so Linux apps on OSX might work... but i see nothing about Windows apps on OSX.

The second quote on Transitive's press release (http://www.transitive.com/news_quicktransit.htm) is from our old pal Rob Enderle. He is one of many "analysts" quoted on the page. I don't know what this means, but any time I see Enderle quoted, I swallow a big chunk of salt before I read further. Just some food for thought.

Jon

Wow apparently these guys have managed to violate the fundamental properties of how our computers work and create something that pretty much could not work the way they claim. But hey at least they've gotten a lot of publicity. If I'm not mistaken they have also developed a new type of gasoline that will allow any existing car to reach its destination by opening a rip in space/time. No mechanical changes are needed! Also I'm pretty sure these guys are gonna be shipping Duke Nukem Forever to stores for the busy 2004 Holiday season!

If this happened, Apple would have to focus on the "gadgets" (iPod) and the Software (OS X). OSX would stand a great chance to be the OS of choice, if you took their proprietary hardware out of the equasion. Sure, you could still buy the cute hardware (probably at a premium), but you wouldn't have to. I would love to have spent less on the hardware and had the same experience as I have on my mac. In today's world, that's not possible, and I am happy with every penny I spent.

I know some PC's are literally made of garbage, your "AMD/Intel" machine for OSX probably would have to have 'certified OSX parts' in it (minimum system requirements, brands, quality (ie - apple could sell the "OSX approved" logo to hardware makers....

OSX would probably become the standard, because it's easier to use than windows and it wouldn't require special hardware anymore. But by the way, there would continue to be developpers for it because it would become the standard and because you'd want to buy software that was OSX approved.

But... this emulator... it'll happen someday, but not today. I don't believe it at all.

Some hacker will figure out a way to get a Windows virus/worm into a Mac using this little bit of software. Aggghhh!

Some hacker will figure out a way to get a Windows virus/worm into a Mac using this little bit of software. Aggghhh!

Are your talking about PearPC? Wasn't that discontinued? And it is as slow as molasses going uphill.

the computing industry, and four years later???

http://www.starbridgesystems.com/home4.html

And how bout those OLED displays, they draw to much current and the blue compound burns out after a couple hundred hours. Lot of hype, but for all practical purposes "vaporware"

Down the tube...

I can't believe WIRED ACTUALLY printed this is drivel. I've got some beachfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you too.

Vaporware anyone?

File this right next to cold fusion...

A closer look to their web site reveales that they support only Unix/Linux-like operating systems and there is even no mention of MacOS X. I guess it should be relatively easy with their technology to let any Unix based program run on MacOS X but to support the other way round would be much harder for them. Support for Windows based programs might be never available, at least not in the near future.

With those limitations their product becomes much more realistic and is probably not just vaporware. For the Mac it could be an easy way to have access to all variations of Unix/Linux-based applications without the need of recompilations, but we will still have to rely on MS to bring MS Office to the Mac or to use products like VirtualPC

What's that old saw about any deal that looks too good to be real isn't...

I'll believe it when I see a box on the shelf at my local Apple Store.

If it worked, it would still be a Windows program with the same look and feel running on OS X ... just about as tolerable as VPC. OS X is about the consistancy of the user experience, a Windows program running on OS X just wouldn't be that desireable. Don't get me wrong, I've got a few programs that are only available on Windows and need to use VPC to run them, would love to just run them natively (even if they'd look crappy in OS X). However, I'm confused as how they would interact with the operating system, clipboard, plugins, etc.

, 2002 we'ed have flying cars.

Mr. Al Gore why don't you invent anti-gravity propulsion?

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acdc1174 wrote:
File this right next to cold fusion...

I actually believe cold fusion works. I don't believe this software works as advertised, but cold fusion, yeah!

That will work for me.

Pick up a copy of Popular Mechanics/Science...The Tabloid of the technical world. Use to be my favorite magazine when I was a kid. After a while you start to wonder what happened to all that technology that was just around the corner.

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Quote VSeward
I actually believe cold fusion works. I don't believe this software works as advertised, but cold fusion, yeah!

That's why DOD is funding low level research into cold fusion. It just might work to some degree. I ran across a story about that a couple of weeks ago.

Well, cold fusion might "kinda work", much like this program "kinda works". I thik we are more likely to see cold fusion first though.

Are you guys talking about the same cold fusion? One person seems to mean Macromedia's Cold Fusion, and the other seems to be talking about the physics quest to creat cold fusion in nuclear reactors.

Or maybe you're joking and I don't get it. Sorry.

Note the fine details. Most importantly, this thing isn't an instruction level interpreter / emulator. They actually perform offline anaylsis and compilation of the code and recompile it into an alternative representation. It seems to be somewhat similar to an optimising assembler, except the optimisation transforms the code to a different platform.

Obviously, there will be some efficiency loss. Beyond that, the translation code is going to need to be very careful about how it deals with endianness, interrupts, memory accesses, function pointers and peripheral interaction, all of which can be very different across architectures. There's also a question of whether the translator is smart enough to recognise "oh, that's callback X to a USB driver; let's swap in the native call" without messing up other code.

But viewed correctly, it's not a fundamentally intractable problem, just a very difficult one to get right.

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Nom wrote:
Note the fine details..

...But viewed correctly, it's not a fundamentally intractable problem, just a very difficult one to get right.

Ignoring the fact that what you just described will never work very well, the fact remains that even if it did, it is simply NOT a solution to the problem they pose in the article. It would take years of work to get something that would accurately translate from one architecture to one other. Thats hardly "universal". And what about running some Windows App on my Mac? So the app is translated in PPC byte code. What about the Win32 subsystem and common dlls that the app needs in order to run? Do I have to recompile Windows? Yeah thats gonna work real well! These guys wanted publicity and they got it. But they will be forgotten just as quickly.

It's a GREAT idea. But I doubt it would work (if it exists) as people might think. A program must be compiled. And even a piece of thinware that would allow the compiled program to run cross-platform would have to emulate the entire OS for the compiled app to truly work properly. For instance, You might be able to buy the less expensive Mac OS X version of MS Office so you could run it on your Windows machine, but how will your printer driver handle your Word docs?

This is one example of many, many intense and difficult programming issues related to making applications run "seamlessly" even on the OSes for which they are intentionally programmed. I tend to think that attempting to make those applications work on foreign platforms with foreign hardware and third-party peripherals with mere software would be folly, and that announcing such a program is much worse than that.