New Cross Platform Emulator

I know, we've all seen them before, but...

[grelmar]

Transitive Corporation [transitive.com] of Los Gatos, California, claims to have come up with a universal emulator that will let you run software from any platform on any other platform.

Kinda like the Rosetta Stone of the computing world.

Now, we've all seen these things before, and they've all been processor munching monstrosities that were flaky, at best. So, realistically, I'm not holding my breath.

HOWEVER, they've done some tech demos, and there has been a impressively gooey response from the Tech press:

Business Wire [home.businesswire.com]:

provides 100% functionality, transparent interactive and graphics performance, near-native computational performance, and allows virtually any processor/operating system pair to be supported.

Wired Article [wired.com] (yeah, yeah, Wired, I know, The Weekly World News of computing, but it was where I spotted it, so...)

Now, IF the technology proves out, and IF MS or Apple Doesn't go out of its way to break it, does this potentially mean the OS Choice simply won't matter anymore?

Will this make our lives easier? So long as we build end user apps that we know will work on the "Universal Emulator" are we going to feel safe that our apps should work everywhere, if the Emulator becomes widespread enough?

[Duckula]

Oh yeah? I call Gödel and claim being able to create a platform this emulator is unable to emulate (hence the "near-universal" appelative I guess :)).

By the description it sounds like the technology used on Nintendo64 emulators a while ago, some kind of dynamic recompilation.

[amznVibe]

Business Wire is a press release by the company itself. Wired is giving coverage to the press release. There has been extensive talk about this for the past day or so on Slashdot. My bet is that some heavy marketing spin has been applied to a product that is no better than VMware or VirtualPC. Anyone that has worked with emulation knows this complete hype.

[grelmar]

Thanks, I was wondering about the lack of it being picked up on any "real" feeds (Wired doesn't count).

I just don't have the patience to wade through slashdot most of the time.

Too bad, though. It would be nice, one day, for someone to come up with a decent emulator. It would solve soooooo many issues.