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Lame Duck Challenge Ends With Free Codeweavers Software For All
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Tue Oct 28, 2008 06:30 AM
from the well-that-didn't-end-as-planned dept.
from the well-that-didn't-end-as-planned dept.
gzipped_tar writes to tell us that The Codeweavers "Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge" has ended in surprise and free software all day Tuesday (October 28, 2008) at the Codeweavers site. A while back Codeweavers gave President Bush a challenge to meet one of several goals before he left office. One of these goals was to lower gas prices in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, which has since transpired. "How was I to know that President Bush would take my challenge so seriously? And, give the man credit, I didn't think there was *any* way he could pull it off. But engineering a total market meltdown - wow - that was pure genius. I clearly underestimated the man. I'm ashamed that I goaded him into this and take full responsibility for the collapse of any savings you might have. Please accept our free software as my way of apologizing for the global calamity we now find ourselves embroiled in."
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Technology: CodeWeavers Package Google Chrome For Linux and Mac 239 comments
jfbilodeau writes "The fine folks at Codeweavers performed an 11 day experiment in getting Google Chrome working on Linux and Mac. Their efforts resulted in the Chromium proof of concept. 'Not only does this give Mac and Linux users a chance to see what all the hype is about, it also lets the world see just how far Wine has come and how powerful it truly can be. In just 11 days, we were able to bring a modern Windows application across to Mac and Linux.' Caveat: their implementation is free as in beer but not free as in speech."
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And the web site was already slow this morning... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that this was a good marketing ploy. I hope their servers can stand the strain.
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Funny)
Slow??!? It's dead Jim.
Parent
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdotted? We wish. Right now on the low bandwidth page they are blaming the meltdown on digg. Oh for the good old days when they automatically would have assumed it was us. Let's rally around and hit their site a couple of times to show that our dentures still have bite and a slashdotting is to be feared!
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Re:Slashvertisement (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, it worked on me.
a) Good software.
b) For free.
c) Because Bush is an idiot.
That's three for three, Jim.
Parent
Re:Slashvertisement (Score:5, Informative)
This challenge has been up on their page for months. They clearly had several posted goals, unlikely ones, and that if any of them were completed during Bush's term then they would give away copies of their software to celebrate.
Replace that whole mess with "We said we would do this if X happened. X happened, so here's your free copy!" and I fail to see how this is a troll or classical advertisement.
Parent
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Insightful)
P2P is worthless for live broadcasts because those should be handled by multicasting. There's absolutely no reason to have multiple people separately downloading the same thing at the same time. It's when people want to download the same thing at different times that P2P is useful: multicasting won't work, and a standard HTTP server would have to re-send the same thing.
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Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Insightful)
15 Mbps? Holy crap. Talk about overkill.
The problem is not that the video is live, it's that you're sending it massively undercompressed. Make your video smaller, use better techniques. Then you don't need to have redonkulous bandwidth needs.
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Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Interesting)
Multicast, sir. Like SureWest [surewest.com] is already doing.
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Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Informative)
> Technically they ALL have 15 Mbit/s connections
Much greater than that actually, but the vast majority is used up by inefficient television signals.
A normal analog TV channel uses 6 MHz of bandwidth, in that same space DOCSIS 2 can send 28 Mbps up and 38 Mbps down. That's more than enough to feed all of the televisions in your house with with its own HD signal (which is about 6 Mbps). DOCSIS 3 can bond up to 10 channels, offering about 500 Mbps. If analog is completely turned off, 1 Gbps are a very real possibility.
So the problem here is bandwidth allocation, not theoretical performance. If the cable carriers would be willing -- and they aren't -- you could have multi-Gbps feeds into your house right now.
Maury
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Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing you can always count on is the ineptitude of government.
That being said... The President of the US actually has very little to do with the economic health of the nation. See below:
SeekingAlpha [seekingalpha.com]
American Spectator [spectator.org]
Mackinac Center [mackinac.org]
Further, most experts agree that the *actual* problem of this current market collapse stems to four things:
#1 - The CRA expansion in 1995, which put 30% more people on the housing market than there should have been, creating an incredible sellers' market in which housing, which previously had roughly paced inflation, spiraled up until people were looking at "house value" increases of over 200%.
#2 - The change in the Fed's policy when Alan Greenspan was appointed chair, which changed from relatively aggressive use of the Fed Funds Rate to deflate economic bubbles and contain damage (the cause of the late-'80s "recession" for example) to allowing bubbles to grow and grow under the idea that lowering the Fed Funds Rate after the fact would "clean up the mess" and that there would be "better growth" under the bubble... unfortunately economic bubbles are more like cysts or abcesses than blisters.
#3 - The abrupt change between a far-too-liberal and far-too-conservative method of valuing a lot of mortgages. Prior to the Enron debacle and Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, the "valuation" of many of these loans (which were being used to back other securities which in turn backed more securities) was at 100% of the loan hidden in "tier 3" assets (e.g. "things we can't put a price on at this second so we'll estimate it and get back to you later) on most companies' balance sheets. This is called "mark-to-model."
Post-SOX (and coming to today because it takes years for large companies to bring everything in line with new reforms like that), the companies were required to mark the mortgages to their actual market worth (e.g. what they could get if someone bought the mortgage from them this minute). Unfortunately, since they were all being massively marked down as someone tried to PUT a market worth to them, there were suddenly MASSIVE amounts of these loans on the market, and as a result they were getting marked down to literally pennies on the dollar. This shift to "mark-to-market" accounting on the loans is what pulled the rug out from underneath a lot of other securities whose backing could be traced back to them, as well as requiring the banks (which had been using these loans as collateral on the balance sheets) to start holding back a lot more capital to service their existing accounts.
There needed to be a middle ground in this, but there wasn't.
#4 - The 1999 dissolution of the 1933 Glass-Steagall reforms, which had previously prevented investment banks from owning other financial institutions, caused much of the "piling-on" of securities backed by other securities backed by other securities backed by... well, it turned out, nearly-worthless (in the mark-to-market sense) loans.
The only part Bush plays in this is that he (a) signed SOX (which passed nearly damn unanimously from the Congress and could easily have been a Veto Override anyways) and (b) he let Greenspan, and then Greenspan's hand-picked successor, run the Fed.
P.S. I'm not a fan of Bush by any means, but fair's fair - he doesn't get the blame for this one and I'm a bit disappointed in the person who posted this and the person who posted an ill-considered, ill-thought, ill-informed rant on this contest.
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Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:4, Insightful)
Another factor which contributed was the Basle-1 and -2 capital adequacy requirements - particularly the latter. This is another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. These rules were intended to force the assorted banks to have enough capital, in order to forestall exactly the liquidity crisis which has happened. But Basle-2 particularly allowed the riskiness of loans to be weighted so that less risky loans required less capital. So when the front line mortgage lenders reached their Basle limits, they invented the Securitised Investment Vehicles with weighted riskiness, and sold them on, thus recapitalising themselves for more lending. But the SIVs were badly designed and didn't pass the risk where everybody thought they did, leading to the melt-down. So a standard pit in to prevent the liquidity crisis actually contributed to it.
Another bad side effect of SIVs is making it much more difficult to be lenient on mortgages. When a lender forecloses, they typically only get about 50% of the original value of the home. Often the borrower trashes the house before they leave (a factor of US "limited recourse" mortgages"), and they they are selling in a saturated market. Much better, therefore, to write off, say, 25% of the mortgage without foreclosing and leave the borrower in possession. But if you have sold off the mortgage in many slices to several other investors, this becomes effectively impossible.
Parent
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I would give President Bush more credit than that, anyways.
What we are seeing right now is the fulfillment of Jefferson's prophecy: "If the American people allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent that their fathers conquered."
What Bush HAS done is ensured these banks that they have government support as they do their dirty deeds, so that they themselves don't go bankrupt as they take homes from individuals who can't afford their homes.
So thanks, Bush, for empowering the banks to further the exploitation of the American people.
Does anyone realize yet that this is class warfare?
Parent
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Interesting)
And somehow you managed to miss the creative ways that subprime mortgages were turned into high-quality investments.
No, I mentioned that regarding the using of the subprime mortgages as a "base" collateral underneath certain securities, which were then used as collateral on other securities, and so on. The idea (as I'm sure you'd know if you'd actually read the article or had a solid grounding in economics) was that the banks were, in fact, deliberately trying to hide the actual backing of the securities.
You should also include an SEC rule change that allowed Lehman and the rest of the gang to overleverage themselves.
It appears you are speaking of the 12:1 rule, also known as the "net capital rule" - which was not the real problem so much as the OTHER portion of the issue, which traces directly back to what I had mentioned: the fact that companies were managing to hide the subprime loans and other bad securities on their "tier 3" balance sheets with Mark-to-Model accounting.
Was this rule change a bad thing? Most definitely. But the problems already existed prior to the rule change, because the larger problem of the bad accounting existed before the rule change as well.
Amazingly, both of those happened on Bush's watch. No wonder you missed them.
Most people didn't notice the second because had it been a change made in a healthy market, without other accounting frauds already occurring in those companies, it probably wouldn't have mattered. It might have been more sensible to raise the cap a small amount (say, bump it from 12:1 to 14:1 or 15:1) but that still wouldn't have addressed the underlying problems of Bad Assets Backing Bad Assets.
Again, I don't care what happened under Bush's watch, or Clinton's watch, or Bush41's watch, or Carter's watch, because the President has little to no control over the economy. His authority is pretty much limited to appointing the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the various members of the SEC, and in both cases Bush's actions (confirmed by overwhelming majorities of the US Senate, which yes includes a vast amount of Democrats) were merely to rubber-stamp the handpicked successors of the previous occupants of the various positions. Technically, he can't even fire them (unlike Cabinet members) without Senate approval. That's how limited the President's role is.
And no, I don't think it would have been any different with John Kerry in office. Why would it have been? John Kerry has no better grasp of economics than George Bush (though both probably have a hell of a lot better grasp than either Barack Obama or John McCain do) and would likely have made the same appointments, because the "handpicked successor" route has been the way it's been for at least 3 decades.
I'll say it again: No, I didn't miss anything. I don't care about the politics of it. YOU, on the other hand, seem desperate to find some way in which you can scream "OMG It's Bush's Fault." Please stop, step back for a moment, realize that George Bush is not actually Lucifer B. Satan, and look again at the total situation.
The cure isn't getting Bush out of office. That'll happen whether he wants to go or not. The cure is, unfortunately, the equivalent of having your car in to the dealership to have sugar and water contamination removed from the fuel, power steering, and lubrication systems. It's going to suck for a while and there's no way around it but it has to happen, because too many sectors of the market have relations to the housing market or to other bubbles that (a) still need cleaning up or (b) haven't popped yet.
Five years from now, housing prices will likely be about where they are today (and more in line with what they should have been assuming a normal growth in the market pacing inflation, rather than the abnormal 200%+ spikes we saw for roughly the past decade or so). There will be a LOT less people actually on the market for a home, because a lot less people will be unable to get major
Parent
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:4, Funny)
Ergo, your analogy is flawed. And it's not about cars, so it's doubly flawed.
Well, he gets points for comparing Bush to a monkey
Parent
Implied Conversation (Score:5, Funny)
Bush: Hank, we still need to get gas down below $2.79. The economies are tough. What can we do?
Palson: Mr. President, I'm with you on this. As you know, we are having severe margin calls with some of the investment banks. Rather than save a Wall Street's CEO's ass like we did with Bear Stearns and AIG we could just let them fry in the hot sun. The public hates them anyway. Let's see, overnight accounting data shows that Lehman Brothers is close to the edge. I won't do anything and let them slip into the beyond.
Bush: Hank, I knew I got the right man for the job. Bit what does this do with oil?
Paulson: This will be a real kick in the pants to the arabs. The commodities bubble will deflate like the Hindenburg. They won't be able to give the stuff away. All this "peak oil" talk will be shown for the scam that it is
Bush: Sounds great Hank. What could go wrong?
Paulson: Nothing really. A week later everyone will forget Lehman Brothers even existed.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm - apart from the implied conversation going the wrong way round - AIG was saved AFTER the White House showed how tough they are by letting Lehman's go to the wall...
slashdotted? yeah, right (Score:3, Interesting)
I just downloaded the crossover-pro and crossover-games packages at over 600Kb/s each. Whoever's running those servers knows how to handle their traffic.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Downloading works ok. It's the free serial number that gives problems.
"Unable to find available serial number! Please go back and try your request again in a few minutes while the system generates more."
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The serial number sign up is slashdotted even though the downloads come down just fine. The script keeps giving an error about being unable to get more serial numbers or it times out or resets. They know how to handle the bandwidth, but the GCI requests are killing them.
Since they are giving away the unlocked versions, I guess you only need a serial number if you want support.
Go figure (Score:4, Funny)
Huh? and Site Down... (Score:3, Interesting)
This will probably kill my Karma, but...
It amazes me how many people get personally offended and go on flaming rampages every time Bush is labeled a scapegoat. Yet at the same time- these very same people likely (and rabidly) supported Bush's government while we were going to war against other scapegoats for other countries. How very hypocritical.
That said- Codeweavers is an excellent company that has done a lot to push Linux into the mainstream. Unfortunately it seems this marketing move of theirs has backfired- and their server isn't just slow, but completely down.
SN Registration Extended (Score:3, Informative)
*Alert* This serial code will have a short shelf life. The original plan was that it would be valid only today. But the response has been overwhelming for our server, so that site is not working.
Given that, we intend to honor the serial codes through the end of October, with the hope that our server will get time to recover.
Please try the registration again tomorrow. We will be putting direct download links to the full version live on our site shortly, please check our main page to get a full download.
Limit 1 copy per customer. Download only.
What a joke (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless GWB was in the office of every bank in America that gave a mortgage to someone who could not afford it, don't blame him. The President really has little effect on an overall economy. Most of us work for CEOs who have much more impact.
Direct download links (Score:5, Informative)
Their low-bandwidth page also contained direct download links for unlocked versions of their products. The page is down, but the downloads still work (they come from a different server). So if you're only interested in having an unlocked version, you can help keep the load on their registration page down. Here are the links:
Obligatory Bushism please (Score:3, Funny)
I clearly misunderestimated the man
Fixed.
Hearty congratulations are in order ... (Score:4, Insightful)
My hat is off to you. I shall raise a toast to you as soon as I start drinking today.
How ignorant of you (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you Codeweavers. You deserve a huge round of applause.
Re:Before I hit their site (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Before I hit their site (Score:5, Informative)
They also employ the WINE maintainer and ensure that their code is implemented up the tree.
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Re:Before I hit their site (Score:5, Interesting)
Codeweavers are nice. They do the cross-over office product which is built on WINE but smooths out any install issues amongst other things and they're a really friendly company (when my trial product expired, it told me a joke about men in black coming to inspect my PC). I think they contribute a fair bit back as well. And I don't mind the odd marketing ploy if it's as amusing as this one sounds. Sadly can't tell as I can't get onto the site, either.
Parent
Re:Before I hit their site (Score:4, Informative)
Their main product is CrossOver - an easy-to-use installer and front-end for WINE (they also do a lot of the development on the WINE library itself and feed those updates back into the Open Source codebase).
Since I can't reach the site, I've no idea if this is the product they're actually giving away...
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Re:Before I hit their site (Score:4, Insightful)
They create software that allows Windows apps to run on Linux. Totally awesome. And it's just as well if you don't visit their site, which is being thrashed pretty hard. I mean, if you don't know what CodeWeavers do, you probably don't need to download their software.
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Re:Before I hit their site (Score:4, Informative)
Like said by previous posts, CodeWeavers is basically a company focused on Wine development. As far as I know, they frequently send their patches to the Wine project to the point of being considered major contributors.
If I remember correctly, those are the guys Google payed to improve Wine support for Photoshop CS2 and who also released the first Wine-compatible version of Google Chrome.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't want to give them ad revenue if they're just lamely pulling off a marketing ploy, with Slashdot acting as a typically willing partner in the charade ...
Well apparently its a pretty effective "lame ploy" being you seem to want to click on the link despite your deeply held principled objects.
Re:Before I hit their site (Score:5, Insightful)
I am having a problem believing that a Slashdot user ,with a UID of 893, does not know what Codeweaver is.
Parent
Re:It's freeware, not real free software (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, crossover lets you run a non free runtime ontop of your free os and use it to run windows programs (free or otherwise)...
The alternative, is using a non free os and a non free runtime, so it's a small step forwards if nothing else.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
P.S.: We knew that. Nobody's gonna append (Free as in beer) or (Free as in freedom) whenever they talk about something being free.
Irony deficiency (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
No, real geeks brag about watching failed pilots, just to make sure there's no chance of the show ever going mainstream
Obviously missed the point... (Score:5, Interesting)
On one hand, it blames the unreasonably high fuel prices on the administrations leadership. On the other hand, it also gets to bring up the recent market collapse, which the writer also likely attributes in part to the administration's leadership. It's not intended to say his job is to manipulate prices, it's intended to highlight the bad circumstances leading for a need for prices to come down, and the very negative context for it actually coming down.
Of course, it does seem interestingly strange that the gas prices have dropped so rapidly so close to election, moreso than other expenses. I know the market collapse was the last thing the currently in office politicians want, but one wonders if the market had held out, would we have, for some other 'inexplicable' reason, seen gas prices drop before election day?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In case you were wondering, the US is a capitalistic economy, which means the market dictates prices, not a communism (at least not yet) where the government controls the economy.
In case you were wondering, communism is the system in which the economy is in the hands of the general public, Marxism is the system in which the 'workers' control the economy, socialism is the general term for any system in which an even distribution of wealth is attempted (half credit if you had used this one), and, this is what I think you meant when you said "communism" earlier, state capitalism is the system in which the government controls the market.
Macroeconomics 101...you fail it.
Re:Retards (Score:5, Insightful)
"What kind of retard thinks that one of the responsibilities of the president of the United States is to control the price of gasoline?"
The kind that is smarter than you?
The President of the US is supposed to make policy that positively impacts the economy, who doesn't have the dollar drop lower and lower every stupid mistake he makes and doesn't squander a sound financial market with instability by overextending our reach into areas of the world that have no effect on us. Doing almost exactly the opposite of what this idiot has done would have strengthened the dollar...gas prices might actually have gone up, but a strong dollar would have meant that we are paying less for what the rest of the world is paying more.
A good president is a figurehead...not a wannabe dictator. One that inspires markets and not one that destabilizes them. A good president doesn't need to actively do anything to the markets...he leads with sound policy and the markets react accordingly.
Personally, high gas prices affected me a little, but as you said, you make choices in what is important. Cable TV was less important than being able to travel (and in this time, I discovered Hulu which I formerly thought sucked...much cheaper than cable!) So many ways to live differently in this economy...but it still means we have to make choices we didn't a few years ago.
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Re:Retards (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Retards (Score:5, Insightful)
What kind of retard thinks that one of the responsibilities of the president of the United States is to control the price of gasoline?
What kind of retard cannot recognise a joke?
Parent
Market Forces (Score:5, Funny)
And, what kind of retard actually believes that it's a good thing for the government to try to artificially alter the price of a commodity like gasoline, probably the commodity with the most negative impact on the environment and the world in general, rather than letting market forces dictate the price?
Market Forces? That's a euphemism for the troops in Iraq, right?
Parent
Re:Retards (Score:5, Insightful)
"How does a President take the blame for all of the bad things ... but can't take credit for any of the good things"
Just a wild-ass guess here, but I'd say it's because most people are idiots.
Parent
Re:News for nerds? Stuff that matters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares why you're getting free Crossover, you're getting free Crossover! I can't wait to get my free Crossover!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Um...free software...who cares why? It could be to celebrate terrorism for all I care. Probably be a less effective marketing ploy though.
*trips over own legs rushing to surrender liberties at mention of the T word*