Morning, Compsoccers!
We seem to have reached 8th week, which is slightly surprising. Here at Compsoc Towers, we have one final talk for you this term, which is... tomorrow night!
Hardware Virtualization Technology ==================================
Date: Wednesday 29th November Time: 20:00 Place: Denis Sciama Lecture Theatre, Denys Wilkinson Building
Martyn Spink and Geraint North will speak about Transitive[0]'s QuickTransit®[1] technology, which allows software compiled for one processor and operating system to run transparently on a different processor and operating system without recompilation or patching. The most famous use of this technology is probably Apple's Rosetta[2], which allows applications compiled for PowerPC Macs to run on the new Intel-based Macs. Martyn and Geraint will show this in action as well as demonstrating another use of the technology.
[0] http://www.transitive.com/ [1] http://www.transitive.com/products/ [2] http://www.apple.com/rosetta/
I'm still in a small amount of shock that it's even possible to do this at a reasonable speed. (They even manage to use hardware graphics acceleration on the new platform in some cases!) The PPC -> Intel switch seemed to work without any major hiccups for Apple, and tomorrow we can find out why. :-)
If you are unsure where the Denys Wilkinson Building is, then http://tinyurl.com/yeqtzg should help!
Right, I should stop sitting here deleting all messages with the subject line "$person wrote:" every five minutes. I was planning to include some more abysmal poetry here, but I fear the angry mob congregating outside my door with pitchforks and vats of boiling oil...
See you tomorrow,
wjt -- Will Thompson, Oxford University Computer Society President http://www.ox.compsoc.net/