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."
Codeweavers Crossover is great! (Score:1, Interesting)
It's further along than WINE on some things, but that's only because they integrate some code not deemed ready to land in upstream wine yet; it's done by a lot of the same people and in a friendly-derivative rather than evil-fork manner.
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.
No longer just for today (Score:1, Interesting)
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?
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.
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.
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:2, Interesting)
And people claim they the internet can "replace" broadcast television for the distribution of HD videos. Yeah. Right. ABC.com, CBS.com, or NBC.com would need 600,000 gigabit of bandwidth to serve their average 30 million viewers each night..... this codeweaver.com site can't even handle a few downloads of software.
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Interesting)
Multicast, sir. Like SureWest [surewest.com] is already doing.
Re:Huh? and Site Down... (Score:2, 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.
It's crazy but we're talking religious beliefs here, not logic. My dad is hardcore right-wing and we argued the war before it started. I told him I had a bad feeling about it, didn't feel the evidence was solid, and thought that this was a war of convenience, not necessity. I personally felt that they would find a pile of old nerve gas shells and declare WMD's were found, even though the WMD's they implied were nuclear. (Personally, I think equating chem and bio with nuclear is like saying a .38 snub-nose pistol and a battleship's main 18" guns firing 2000lb shells are the same thing. I mean yeah, technically both guns but Jesus, there's a difference!) Anyway, I told him before the war I thought it was a bad idea and the course of events would show who was right. I turned out to be right but he doesn't accept it.
He's conceded "Obongo the Magic Negro" is going to win this election and predicted all sorts of dire consequences. I smiled and said "Well, either things are going to be great, turn to shit, or just muddle along as they have been. Best case, worst case, or middle case. The course of events will show us what will happen and we'll see who's right." I think he's going to be facing unprecedented obstructionism from the right, making Clinton's years look like a cake-walk. The Republicans are going to throw every monkey-wrench they can find so that they won't just predict Obama's failure, they'll ensure it. I do think Obama is up to the challenge. But if he fucks himself and by extension us like Clinton, I'll admit it and condemn him for it. If things go swimmingly over the next four years and we have a complete turnaround, I doubt my dad will be willing to admit it. He'll be looking under every rock to find a bug and prove that everything is thus completely horrible.
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
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?
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually the new version of Azureus does live streaming bittorrent pretty well.
I think they just ensure that the first part is sent, calculate the bandwidth of the rest, start as soon as you've spooled enough to avoid interruptions.
There is no reason I can imagine that the bittorrent protocol HAS to be worse than any other one as long as the packet order is chosen correctly. You could even add a variable to the torrent to indicate when the last packet will be delivered to the cloud (so that a late-starter can more accurately calculate a start time).