DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

More details about Transitive’s hardware hypnotizer / visualizer, mentioned in this space previously, are available in ExtremeTech’s analysis, Transitive Debuts Virtual CPU Tech

The QuickTransit technology uses a core kernel, with a modular back end that plugs into the target hardware. Likewise, a series of modular front ends provide a limited number of architectures that the technology can virtualize, with more on the way.

For now, the company is offering four target modules — in other words, the physical processors the technology will run on: Itanium, Opteron, the Pentium 4 X86 architecture, and the PowerPC.

On all four architectures, the QuickTransit technology can virtualize any mainframe OS, the company said. In addition, the Itanium, Opteron and X86 back-ends will virtualize the MIPS architecture. Both the Opteron and X86 products will also allow a virtualized POWER or PowerPC architecture to be run on it; likewise, a PowerPC chip can also run an X86-designed OS, such as Windows, on top of it.

I just finished doing my small part to stop the INDUCE act, aka “Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act of 2004” or S. 2560. I called Congressperson Nancy Pelosi, Senator Orrin Hatch, Senator Barbara Feinstein, and Senator Barbara Boxer. I spent ten minutes now in hopes that my DVD burner and digital camera won’t become controlled substances.

If you want to help, find your senators’ phone numbers. Call in and politely express your reservations about S. 2560. Here’s why the bill should scare you.

According to opensecrets.org, the TV/Movies/Music industry contributed over a half-million dollars to Barbara Boxer’s 2004 campaign. I can’t compete with that. But I can sure call her and tell her I think the new INDUCE act sucks.

My vote is not for sale, but Boxer can lose it by endorsing legislation I find offensive and wrong-headed.

Read more at Wired: Big Anti-Induce Campaign Planned

You’re confident, assured. You’re standing tall. You’ve done what you came here to do. You have nothing to fear. You have the Champion Toilet from American Standard: “Flush once. Never look back.”

There’s another great line in the ad: “Designed to handle whatever life throws your way.” What image is going through your mind right now? Personally, I’m thinking of a Macho Beef Burrito from Del Taco, which I believe would make a much more effective flush-test than 41 rubber tubes.

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.

I’ve been looking for a directory like this for a long time… How to recycle almost everything. Type in your ZIP code and away you go… everything from dirt to CDs, packing peanuts to mattresses to eyeglasses.