DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

One of the neat ideas in Po Bronson’s novel The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest is a software “hypnotizer” that allows many types of hardware to run the same piece of software. You can think of this as the Java VM, except in the book, the “hypnotizer” isn’t slow, nor saddled with unfamiliar UI widgets, nor will it crash your web browser. Ahem.

The promise is huge — imagine if you could really run Windows apps on your Mac (without the kludginess of an OS emulator like Virtual PC), or vice-versa. Imagine the money software developers could save, not having to port apps any more: Mac developers would suddenly have access to the other 95% of the market… Windows developers would suddenly have access to the 30 or 40 of us who haven’t yet sold out to the Man.

A company called Transitive may have finally found the Universal Computing grail. According to Wired,

A Silicon Valley startup claims to have cracked one of most elusive goals of the software industry: a near-universal emulator that allows software developed for one platform to run on any other, with almost no performance hit.

Transitive Corp. of Los Gatos, California, claims its QuickTransit software allows applications to run “transparently” on multiple hardware platforms, including Macs, PCs, and numerous servers and mainframes.

The vendor, according to Wired, claims “100 percent functionality,” including “accelerated 3-D graphics and about 80 percent computational performance.”

This could be amazing.