Lame Duck Challenge Ends With Free Codeweavers Software For All 433
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."
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: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.
Re:Retards (Score:2, Insightful)
What kind of retard can't see the joking humor in what the Codeweavers folks are saying?
It's obviously a marketing ploy to get a whole hell of a lot of people to try their software.
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.
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!
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:News for nerds? Stuff that matters? (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*
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?
Re:Retards (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Obviously missed the point... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Implied Conversation (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...
Re:Before I hit their site (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:Huh? and Site Down... (Score:2, Insightful)
Or maybe - just maybe! - we don't like Bush but don't give him credit for micromanaging every aspect of the economy. Remember, this was the guy portrayed for eight years as a drunk failure of an ex-frat boy, but now he's able to manipulate the price of crude oil? You can't have it both ways.
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.
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.
How ignorant of you (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you Codeweavers. You deserve a huge round of applause.
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:3, Insightful)
P2P could not be used to send a 15 Mbps Heroes (5 gigabytes total) live video to 30 million people. Almost nobody has that kind of upload connection (mine is only 0.13M), which means it could take days to send just 1 complete copy from the original seeder.
Broadcast from 200 stations to 30,000,000 people at the same time is the most-efficient method. And no waiting time required.
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.
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.
Re:How ignorant of you (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Retards (Score:1, Insightful)
How does a President take the blame for all of the bad things that happen on his watch (9-11, gas prices, subprime mortgages) but can't take credit for any of the good things (Removal of Saddam, gas prices, abortion numbers at 34 year low)?
From my point of view: Credit vs blame actually depends on whether it was due to his actions for credit, with the intention of causing those consequences (just getting lucky as a side-effect of a catastrophe does not give credit). For blame, it is the question of whether the effects are in his area of responsibility - and, in general, part of the responsibility of the president is setting up things to handle "bad luck".
Bush gets credit for removal of Saddam. He also gets blame for the present state of Iraq being worse than before the invasion, and the present state of the world (including respect for UN) being worse than it was - because these are results of his action.
He don't get credit for falling gas prices, because these are not the result of his actions in any intentional way. Crashing the economy and thereby lowering anticipated demand doesn't get him credit, because he lacked the intention of doing this and because the side effects are so enormous that we'd rather have kept the old situation.
As for abortion numbers, I have no idea of the causation behind that. Without knowing if any of his actions have intentionally caused this, there is no rationale for giving credit.
Re:A good President.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Left-wing? Ha! All US politicians are so far to the right it's truly frightening. You think Obama, who wholeheartedly supported the trillion-dollar bailout of Wall Streat, and who has been beating the war drums to attack Pakistan for *ages* is left-wing? Sure, he's left-wing compared to Bush. But we're splitting hairs here. They're both waaaaaaaaaaaaay to the right.
And as for dictatorship, I think that's what you've got right now, isn't it? You know, Commander-In-Chief, blanket-immunity-from-illegal-activities, we'll-torture-if-we-want-to Dubya?
Jesus Christ, you need some perspective.