Slashdot Mirror
Lame Duck Challenge Ends With Free Codeweavers Software For All
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."
I think that this was a good marketing ploy. I hope their servers can stand the strain.
I think that this was a good marketing ploy. I hope their servers can stand the strain.
They went to a low-bandwidth version to alleviate some of it.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Slow??!? It's dead Jim.
I hope their servers can stand the strain.
They obviously can't.
Site's down for me currently, any info on this low-bandwidth page?
It's not slashdotted; they just turned the servers off until tomorrow.
Coincidentally, I got up early today, at 4:30AM Pacific time. Still too late.
It was down.codeweavers.com.
And of course, it's down.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Codeweavers is a respectable business. They sell a customized version of Wine which is tuned to run popular proprietary software (MS Office, Adobe stuff, etc...).
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.
"Before I hit the codeweavers web site, and possibly generate some undeserved ad revenue for them, can someone explain to me what codeweavers is and what software they make/sell?"
Basically it is a commercial version of Wine. Wine tries to implement the Windows API on linux in case you didn't know. I personally never felt the need to buy or obtain Codeweavers since Wine currently does what it needs to do for me and in order for me to totally switch to linux I need more than both Codeweavers and Wine can offer.
If you have a linux box I'd say gice it a chance. I mean, what could possible go wrong(don't think about this)?
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Codeweavers is a respectable business. They sell a customized version of Wine which is tuned to run popular proprietary software (MS Office, Adobe stuff, etc...).
Furthermore, see: wikipedia.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Basically it's "wine with support" and remember Wine is not an Emulator.
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.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
I have had my eyes on codeweavers for a long time but never gotten to it to try it out. I suspect many others will try it for the first time.
If it works well for the tire kickers who are thinking about jumping off the Windows wagon this stunt can lead to many new accounts.
Number 5 will never be met since Bin Laden is nothing more than a ghost thats needed for the US to be able to have constant wartime legal status. A better goal would be to find out why every muslim hate the US. Hint, Israel, foreign politics, selling chemical weapons to dictators, toppling democratic leaders and killing innocent people tend to get people on the receiving end mad.
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...
You can download this proprietary software at no cost, but it's not free software (free as in freedom).
No one can see what it's doing, and no one can make changes, and no one can publish modified versions if there's any problem that users would like to see changed.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
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.
For gaming, particularly, many things runs a lot more glitch-free under Crossover Games than wine. You don't need to do all the small tweaks usually required to get World of Warcraft running, for example -- it just runs out of the box.
And buying a license is a useful way to contribute to wine development.
And not unlike their servers, some one stick a fork in that thing, I think its done. I have been wanting to tryout their service for some time. I have used wine in the past for a fair amount of success. If this works out as much as I hope I may have to pay for a subscription when this free one ends. Which may be the purpose of whole free offering in the first place. But, what the hell, even if there is a hook on the line it will be nice to support the ability to play Micro $aft games on my linux box.
If you look, you'll notice the liberal use of tags used throughout their web page.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
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?
I believe.
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.
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.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
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.
I am afraid you have failed the humorous irony detection test. As you leave Slashdot by the back entrance, please hand in your geek cred card and your Futurama and Simpsons DVDs.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What kind of retard doesn't know that the economic policies of the ruling administration have an effect on the economic health of the country?
No one was asking for Bush to do any price controlling. They were asking for a better run country in which all of our economic indicators weren't going to shit, thus resulting in constantly rising prices for things like gas.
Retard.
No kidding!
Hey, maybe we could ask the Messiah, Lord Barry the Merciful, to resurrect the Codeweaver servers.
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.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Who cares why you're getting free Crossover, you're getting free Crossover! I can't wait to get my free Crossover!
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I clearly misunderestimated the man.
Just in case someone (like me) got interested in upgrading its PPC-iBook into an oldschool gaming machine. Won't work :-(
They are giving away Crossover Pro for OSX or Linux.
It is. They have also massively simplified their site temporarily to withstand the Slashdot and Digg assault. It's more responsive than their normal site at the moment :P
They also employ the WINE maintainer and ensure that their code is implemented up the tree.
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.
"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.
And that tactic seems to be serving them well. I was able to visit their site and finish a download.
How is it you are replying to this post? I guess you are running a computer with a modem connection (cable modem perhaps?), instead of reading a book. And seriously, gas is the most negative thing on earth? Stop hugging trees and come back to the real world.
-- It doesn't matter what temperature the room is. It's always room-temperature.
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."
It's obvious these guys trolled the tech growd, including the slashdot editors hard with this bit. Instead of just offering their product, they dressed it up with a "challenge" so it would get more press.
They used a lame and cheap anti-Bush ploy to push their software, and the editors fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
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*
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Naah, in Soviet America Iowa has price control over corn. China's market is freer than ours these days, and they /claim/ to be socialist.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
This guy gives President Bush way too much credit. The global calamity is the product of the combined stupidity of millions of people, not just that of President Bush.
Sorry, FREE WINE beats free beer.
Gotta love slash. Whn you're not busy talking about how totally awesome open source is, you're creaming your pants over non-FREE variants of it (OS X, Codeweavers).
Who would have thought? "Free Software" in a Slashdot title, and all of a sudden codeweavers isn't responding.
The only way to tell the difference between a hamster and a gerbil is that the hamster has more white meat.
I live in the Twin Cities and saw gas for $2.15 this morning! It hasn't been $2.79 in over a month, well, granted I live in the south metro area so maybe it is taking a little longer to propagate down up there.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
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.
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 [...] 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.
Well, by that standard, President Bush is a freaking genius. Where I am (Sweden), the dollar has gotten over 30% stronger versus the local currency since the beginning of August (6.00 SEK/USD to 7.95 SEK/USD).
Of course, that may well be due to other, more complicated reasons, some of which involve US policy and some of which do not, but hey -- why let facts get in the way when you want to bash the President?
I got mine at 600+Kb/s each too.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
slashdotted...
Not only that, but crossover is the easiest way to get wine on a mac.
...and we Slashdot users have obligingly given them a DDOS...
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?
Well... they were.
680 sq ft? What?
Seriously...that's fine. If you live alone OR it's just you and the SO. And maybe one kid. But if you are looking at a larger family (er, let's try 4 kids), then that kind of space just isn't going to cut it in terms of psychological health. Then there's the family I know with 7 (8?) kids (I've lost track). You seriously want them to move into a smaller house? Not a chance. They need that kind of space. And acreage. It's actually greener/more sustainable for that size of a family to have acreage and work some land (as in GROW some freaking vegetables and have some chickens/cows/goats) than to live in a freaking apartment in the middle of an urban concrete mass.
You can argue that a lifestyle choice about not having a larger family is more sustainable, but I don't know that it's ethical to make that call for another person. I've talked to some people from China recently about their feelings regarding the one-child policy, and they felt that it was detrimental to the country in some ways (and certainly to the children involved). That said, they also felt that it may have still been the right decision for the country as a whole in terms of reducing poverty overall and modernizing the country. Does that make it ethical? I'm not sure it does.
It certainly doesn't give soemone in this country the right to say 'you are an idiot for having a large family and living in an appropriately sized home for that family'.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I have a friend who's always bitching about President Bush. "Bush did this...Bush did that...etc" two weeks ago when gas dropped nearly $.50 in the course of a weekend, I interrupted my friend's bitching to ask "Does Bush get the credit for dropping gas prices?"
Of course, he did not.
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)?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It is. They have also massively simplified their site temporarily to withstand the Slashdot and Digg assault. It's more responsive than their normal site at the moment :P
And...
It's down again.
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.
So you don't think the few hundred people running congress into the ground have anything to with our current situation? The actions of the president did not destabilize the markets. The actions of people - regular citizens, loan officers, accountants, etc. - are responsible to a far greater degree.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
I could get a free serial number , but cant download ...
Wanna trade? ;)
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.
You don't remember correctly. It was Disney who helped defray some of the costs for Photoshop support. And Codeweavers did sort out a few versions of Google Chrome, but it was with no help from Google (aside from them making the source available).
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.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
According to the e-mail I just got:
*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.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Are you suggesting that politics doesn't matter to nerds? It... kinda does. Even for the ones not in the US, what with the US president having some manner of influencing foreign policy. Oh, and then there's the whole "releasing some nice software for free" part, which naturally matters a bit to nerds.
So there you have it. Politics matter. This story involves some "news" that is specifically applicable to "nerds". I also hear that if you make an account you can even influence which pages you see when you visit the main page, by some sort of "category" system. You should consider looking into that if you for some reason disagree that politics matter.
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.
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:
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Cost of bailout: Up to $700B
Cost of Bush's War: At least $600B
Hmmm...
I guess it's time to update the saying. "A hundred billion here, a hundred billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money..."
That's the magic of P2P - no need for massive bandwidth on the part of the original source.
Since so many people are having trouble accessing the front page of their site, here is where to download the fully unlocked builds
http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/lameduck/crossover-pro-7.1.0.dmg
http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/lameduck/crossover-games-7.1.1.dmg
http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/lameduck/install-crossover-pro-7.1.0.sh
http://media.codeweavers.com/pub/crossover/lameduck/install-crossover-games-7.1.2.sh
You can get a serial number from the one below, but good luck getting it to work!
http://lameduck.codeweavers.com/free/
Multicast, sir. Like SureWest is already doing.
I clearly misunderestimated the man
Fixed.
You just got troll'd!
Well in theory during the implementation of ipv6, multicast, which makes the same things as TV possible, would be implemented.
There's just this slight, tiny issue : it's mathematically infeasible (can't possibly be implemented on current hardware) to do it for a large network.
But given today's political system (like noone asking, say Obama, what exactly were you saying about Rezko a year ago ?) I'm sure we can all just "keep believing". I'm sure that will change the mathematics of the problem, right ? (all Obamatons rise and cheer !)
Trolling slashdot has long been an amusing, if somewhat frowned-upon passtime here, but this summary (sorry, can't RTFA even if I wanted to) raises the humble "troll" from amusement to art form by combining a) a FOSS-friendly entity, b) a free software giveaway, and c) gratuitously sarcastic, if somewhat tired, political rhetoric. The result is an article that is causing people from both the left and right to froth at the mouth in an almost Pavlovian fashion. However, by placing the troll in the article itself rather than in a response, they have essentially created an uber-troll.
My hat is off to you. I shall raise a toast to you as soon as I start drinking today.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Got a URL? The registration page doesn't have a link at the moment.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
"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.
sig has been sent away for a few small repairs...
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?
Actually, the download is the demo version, which is unlocked by the serial number you get. So if you can't get through to that server today, you're outta luck.
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
American Spectator
Mackinac Center
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.
Okay, that would probably work. +1 to you. However: How many American have the necessary 15 megabit/s connection to watch Heroes, CSI, or Lost live from NBC, CBS, or ABC?
Um, er, trick question. Technically they ALL have 15 Mbit/s connections..... but only via broadcast reception, not internet. Very few americans have 15 Mbit/s or better internet services.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can't wait to get my free Crossover!
You don't have any choice, unless you know a secret back door into the site!
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
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.
I agree, now, the question is, how do you think the markets are responding with the prospect of a left wing dictatorship of at least 2 years in the offing? Kinda hard to put your faith in the markets when the braintrust of the political party about to come into power does nothing but condemn them.
This is my sig.
The main site has been replaced with: http://down.codeweavers.com/ It loads quickly but the link to get your serial number still fails.
Armaments, 2-9-21 And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, 'O Lord, bless this Thy hand grenade' N
So, um, look it up. You know, google it, or maybe wikipedia?
But let's be honest, you just wanted to chime in about "undeserved ad revenue" didn't you?
"The government grants you rights, not the other way around."-- beav007. Yes, these people really exist...
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.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
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)?
Speaking of which, you should ask your friend whether Obama will be responsible for the massive test that's supposedly headed our way if we elect such an unproven, inexperienced person as our president. I mean, Joe Biden has only guaranteed that it's coming... so, will that be the President's fault too? I mean, we need to achieve some kind of consistency in these sort of things... it looks bad when we don't know who to blame!
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
What kind of retard thinks we have a "ruling administration"?
There's a fuckload more to economics than whoever is sitting in the oval office, retard.
I am having a problem believing that a Slashdot user ,with a UID of 893, does not know what Codeweaver is.
YES!!!
Parent post could never be upmodded enough.
> 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
That wasn't a joke.
Download CrossOver Mac Pro
Download CrossOver Games Mac
Download CrossOver Linux Pro
Download CrossOver Games Linux
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
I wonder, do servers whimper?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
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.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
who has no use for the program but downloaded it anyway because it was free? /me gets his coat
Most people have no idea what they are doing, and are silently panicking on the inside.
Broadcasts, or even filesharing networks are a totally different kettle of fish to a set of files that you're only wanting to be available for 24 hours (though of course now they will be all over the P2P networks anyway).
The site is back up now by the way, and I got a nice copy of Crossover Games for Mac (installed Wine at the weekend but it didn't like the games I tried to install). I should get the Linux version too just in case I like Ubuntu 8.10 enough to ditch OS X..
which is totally what she said
TANGENT! Stop blaming Bush for everything. All he did was not fix it. Mostly because he's a tool, but more mostly because the silly corrupt conservative democrat run legislature wouldn't have let him anyway. ... and people think democrats are gonna fix things by sprinting toward European socialism ... oy.
Not that the neocon republicans are any better ...
Vote out your incumbents! Its our constitutional right to fuck our own country, its also our constitutional right to un-fuck it.
You should also include an SEC rule change that allowed Lehman and the rest of the gang to overleverage themselves. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/business/03sec.html.
And somehow you managed to miss the creative ways that subprime mortgages were turned into high-quality investments. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27Credit-t.html.
Amazingly, both of those happened on Bush's watch. No wonder you missed them.
Thank you Codeweavers. You deserve a huge round of applause.
*** Don't be dull.***
Why is all news bad news? Oil prices go up, the stock market goes down. Oil prices go down, the stock market goes down. Which is it people? Is any change at all bad?
The prices were to high, he had a market correction. Now the price is lower. That's what is supposed to happen. The housing market has done the same thing. It will happen to the next bubble too.
I was thinking - cool! Free stuff. But as I thought about it some more, I thought ... hmm, what the heck am I going to use it for? My Windows computer hasn't even been hooked up for 8 months, it's sitting collecting dust. For the 5 years before that, I only used it to play a game on occasion. But now I play HL (original) mods via WINE every so often, but that's about it.
I went ahead and downloaded Pro and Games, just in case I need them for something or just to check it out. But it will probably just collect e-dust on my drive. I do appreciate the gesture though, and I am sure others will get some good use out of this.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Speaking of Adobe, anyone know how Freehand MX runs in Crossover?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Actually, the download is the demo version
I think they've changed the site. Earlier they only had the demo versions, now the site says:
"For today only, we are putting up fully unlocked builds."
I've downloaded it, but haven't tried to install yet. I was able to get a serial early this morning, though.
the no
According to The Big Picture, who is a well-respected and gathers data from multiple sites, the CRA was certainly not a principal factor:
Today, we get free Codeweavers software AND a free taco as well (if you are near a Taco Bell). You reading this, cmdrtaco? Enjoy!
Bummer, those two Mac versions only work on Intel Macs (not PowerPC G5 like mine).
Can someone tell me the difference between "Linux Pro" and "Games Linux"?
Bush had 8 years to prevent this mess if he wanted to do it. He even had Republican Congress and Senate most of the time!
So he shares the blame.
stfu windoze b01
Could be an ebay buyer?
It's up now. I just dowloaded all four packages (my current Mac is PPC, though, so I probably won't be able to run Crossover Mac), but getting Crossover for my Linux box is worth my while. And I put in for the registration code.
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
Right, look... Blaming Bush for this mess is like blaming the monkey passenger if the rocket it's on crashes.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
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.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
The serial will work till the end of the month but if you want to get a serial you'll still need to go sign up for one today.
[...] undeserved ad revenue for them [...] I don't want to give them ad revenue if they're just lamely pulling off a marketing ploy [...]
At the moment their site isn't up to serving ads. I don't know if it normally has any ads on.
Their site is currently one page, with the only image being their logo. There are links to the different downloads, and a form submitting to a simple cgi to request a serial number (with a warning that it could take a few days for the email containing it to be sent). The previous version made you go to a second page to get to the serial request form, which had two email boxes on, now it's just the one box and it's on the main page.
They've really done a good job of optimizing it so that it still works under this kind of crazy pressure. They're actually surviving a slashdotting!
Can monkey passenger fix rocket? Probably no.
Could Bush fix these problems? Yes he could.
Ergo, your analogy is flawed. And it's not about cars, so it's doubly flawed.
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?
Aren't you the idiot who claimed the Apple store didn't fully refund opened software, and when proven wrong about that, then claimed they didn't sell games, and when proven wrong about THAT, started whiining to the mods that the proof of you being wrong was "off topic".
And the whole time you were quoting from the very document that proved you were full of shit but you were too stupid to scroll down to see it?
You really are pathetic, and you calling someone else a dick after that?
God damn you're not trolling, you really are that stupid.
Except all the WINE code written by Codeweavers is given to the WINE project, the only proprietary part is their front-end.
Also you're talking about different groups of people, "slashdot" is not just one person or one group of people. Some people don't mind proprietary software when it's working properly, some do. Some people think GPL is too restrictive and LGPL is just perfect, and some people think any license but BSD is too restrictive. Different strokes for different folks.
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!
>>>A normal TV channel uses 6 MHz of bandwidth, in that same space DOCSIS 2 can send 38 Mbps down
So? What? You discontinue broadcast DTV with a DOCSIS radio setup that only serves 50 homes (channels 2 to 51)??? Perhaps one hundred if you divide each channel into 19 Mbps each, which is the width of current HDTV. That does Not seem like a good solution.
Broadcast digital television serves *half-a-million* homes per market. And with multiple channels (14 average). 500,000 homes accessing 14 channels, for a total 266 Megabit/s downlink, is a lot better than 100 homes limited to just 19 Mbps.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
Damn, that was a brutal takedown.. Glad to see there are still some sane and informed people still left in here.
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.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
That's like saying highway overpasses are impossible because you drove a Mac truck over the bridge over your backyard creek and it didn't hold. The CodeWeaver site wasn't designed for that sort of traffic.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
>>>[Limelight is]
That's the problem right there. Limelight wasn't providing anything close to HDTV, but more like a fuzzy VHS tape. That wasn't a true test of what life would be like without broadcast television, if everybody had to rely on just internet to watch primetime news or entertainment. NBC.com was not taxing resources with its tiny ~0.5 megabit stream.
On the other hand, maybe it was a good example. Maybe the post-broadcast television will be nothing more than blurry VHS-quality images squeezed through internet lines. Not exactly a step forward IMHO.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
The name of wine stands for "Wine Is Not an Emulator", not "WINdows Emulator". See Wine Myths for more information.
P.S.
>>>A normal analog TV channel uses 6 MHz of bandwidth
So too does a normal digital TV station. Most stations subdivide the 6 megahertz into a 15 megabit/s HD stream and a 4-5 megabit/s SD stream. That's how I arrived at the typical HDTV program requiring about 15 Mbps.
Unfortunately DTV is not all it's been advertised to be. Sure the picture looks great, but my station count has dropped from 25 with analog to just 14-15 with digital, since digital is harder to receive. So I have fewer choices and less variety.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
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
No sig for the moment.
6 Mbps?? you must have comcasts bitrate starved hdtv, last I checked a real hd feed was 7-9Mbps for 720p and 16-18Mbps for 1080i.
Wouldn't it be possible to aggregate all requests that come in within a certain window into a single multi-cast stream for non-live broadcasts? Sure it's not as good as a single multicast stream, but you might be able to get by with say 60 streams total for a one hour show.
IE. you start a new stream every minute with all of the requests that have come in during the previous minute.
After 60 minutes, the stream that started first, ends. So you end up with only 60 streams rather than 30 million.
I had always heard it as:
W ine
I s
N ot an
E mulator
You are all a bunch of idots.
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.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Wait, so you're saying that Bush could understand and fix a problem that actual brilliant economists are still arguing about?
I'm fairly certain you're giving the guy way too much credit. I still kind of like the guy but even I'm not going to say he's terribly bright.
Which is why the monkey analogy works. Good point about it not being about cars though, feel free to s/rocket(.*)on/car\1in/ yourself to happiness.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
I have the opposite experience, with digital OTA being easier to receive and my channels (not including the subchannels) went from 9 to 15. So your blanket generalization fails, and in fact digital in some cases is much better and easier, and in some cases is much worse, and even in urban situations both cases appear.
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.
That was in the middle of your rant somehow blaming the SOX reforms rather than the out-of-control subprime lending. Maybe you should read your own stuff.
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 ...
I don't think Lehman would have gone under if they had stayed at 12:1 rather than 30+:1. Well, maybe they eventually would anyway, but not so spectacularly.
The president can no more control the price of gas than he can control the course of a hurricane. The price tanked because the speculators made their pile in anticipation of a new left-wing windfall profit grabbing administration. Couple that with excessive production levels and lower demand and the price comes down.
Please tell me ONE thing that Bush could have done.
Take your time.
Firing the SEC members or Fed Chair is not on the table, either - you need Senate approval for that and then you have to find replacements for them.
Well? I'm waiting... I know you've got nothing but I'll still wait for your "OMG BUSH IS SATAN" frothing-mouthed rant, because you can't accept that the President simply is NOT in charge of the economy.
I'd mod this comment up, but it's at +5 already so I can only say: thanks!
Wrong again.
Roosevelt knew almost nothing about nuclear physics, but it hadn't stopped him from initiating the Manhattan Project. Because he had good advisors who understood physics and explained to him why it was necessary.
There were plenty of warning signs back in 2003-2004 and lots of economists warned about the impending crisis. But he and Greenspan choose to ignore them.
Well, and if Bush failed to find good advisors - then he failed his job.
Epic fail.
From the Wine website: "As Wine's name says: 'Wine Is Not an Emulator'"
Maybe try learning how Wine works?
What part of that was troll? The part where I pointed out that Obama's own VP choice "guaranteed" that Obama would "have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy" (which he did say), or the part where I pointed out that since we blamed Bush for all the bad things that happened under his watch it'd be inconsistent not to also blame Obama for what happens under him (which is only fair)?
Oh wait... I forgot. The "Fairness Doctrine" really means "We only allow fair people to speak here, and 'fair' means agreeing with us since obviously we're right. Even though it'll look like we're wrong. Because we need your support, and you'll just have to stick with us when the polls go to shit. Don't be like Peter, because you know, he denied his Messiah three times. We need your support and..." Ah crap, Biden's comments are sneaking into my sarcasm again... sorry about that.
There isn't a -1 Disagree mod, and the -1 Troll mod isn't it.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
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.
Hmm... so the nearly-unanimous Senate votes approving these various people (Fed Chair, SEC members, including two under Democrat control of the Senate and two more during a "power-sharing" agreement) somehow mean nothing?
The one thing I hold Bush accountable for is asking for, and then signing, the shit-flinging piece of crap known as the "bailout." But that was a knee-jerk reaction by the Congressional Democrap/Rethuglican monkeys whose only response to any problem is to fling Federal money around as if it were poo.
If this is the case, can you please explain why the UK is also in a recession right now?
I like muppets.
The people that for 8 years let the situation come to this?
If Fannie and Freddie had no government backing, there's no way mortgage backed securities could ever have been credibly floated... so, since the Dems created and defended Fannie and Freddie, the blame is squarely on them.
With that said, republicans do not deserve to win this election.
If I was the Republican in charge, I would be out in front of this and arguing that Republicans have made it possible to make homes for lots of people, which worked, but it carried a big risk and we (Republicans), rolled the dice a bit and lost. Still, we got 5 trillion dollars of new housing stock out there and we're only on the taxpayer hook for a trillion of it, but all in all it worked. More people are in homes than ever before but now we have some work to do to keep them there.
I would have then included mortgage relief for distressed homeowners, linked with a comprehensive national infrastructure and alternative energy and drilling plan to lower the price of energy and transportation to help our country .... make it easier to make mortgage payments... would have done something to check the rate resets.
sigh...
but they didn't. Instead we got Bush preaching doom and gloom and McCain going on about firing Chris Cox and bashing Wall Street. With every crisis comes an opportunity for success and Republicans whiffed on the play. Meanwhile Democrats positioned themselves very carefully to take advantage of the political opportunities and made the most of it. Quite frankly, this inability of Republicans to manage this message and crisis is why, even though I am a Republican, feel that this crop deserves to lose.
Time and time again Bush has been presented with various crises and time and time again he has done the wrong thing. If he had been the optimistic guy with the bullhorn on the flaming WTC in New Orleans, waving that bullhorn to the crowd in the superdome saying that we are going to bring you food. If he had had that bullhorn this last few months, at wall street and main street, he'd go down as the greatest president -ever-. But he blew it... he totally blew it, and mccain blew it too.
This is my sig.
Wow, that was well informed. Is there a way to add you as a friend? I'd like to remember to read more of what you comment around here.
--Coder
Today they're running a low-bandwidth version of their webpage; it doesn't have any ads on it. And yeah, as others have already said, CodeWeavers are the good guys. They're St. Paul MN based; they actually hosted a TCLUG installfest at their office last year.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Same reason Lyndon Johnson is usually blamed for Vietnam rather than being remembered for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
this is my sig
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.
Hmm... so the nearly-unanimous Senate votes approving these various people (Fed Chair, SEC members, including two under Democrat control of the Senate and two more during a "power-sharing" agreement) somehow mean nothing?
The one thing I hold Bush accountable for is asking for, and then signing, the shit-flinging piece of crap known as the "bailout." But that was a knee-jerk reaction by the Congressional Democrap/Rethuglican monkeys whose only response to any problem is to fling Federal money around as if it were poo.
I was talking about the "bailout". It was intended to give liquidity to failing banks, to help them continue their business of taking homes from people.
Damn straight it is. If you try to urinate outdoors when it's below -15F, it can actually freeze inside your penis and really fuck you up.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
Let's start from the most recent history: ...
1) Helped Lehman Brothers to evade the bankruptcy.
2) Persuaded the Congress and Senate to pass a 'care package' earlier this year before the panic.
3) More aggressive interest rate cuts earlier last year.
4) Force more regulation in banking.
5) Fire Greenspan. After all, it worked with 8 US attorneys.
You left out that many of the laws that caused the current problems were instituted and passed by republicans since 1994. You know, the 'contract with america' or better phrased 'the contract to screw america'. The 1999 dissolution of the 1933 Glass-Steagall reforms was an earmark injected by a republican into a must pass bill at the last minute. And let's not forget that bush appointees including Greenspans successor, who are supposed to know what they are doing, were at the controls of this train for the last eight years that has now wrecked. The republican party had near overwhelming control of all three branches of government for more than six years and at least two branches were criminally negligent at the switches.
#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%.
The homeownership rate went from 64.2% in 1995 to 69.1% at the peak in 2005. That is barely an 7-8% increase, nowhere close to a 30% increase. The Community Reinvestment Act had little to do with the current mess. See BIS Working Paper #259 or this BW article. Most of the subprime lenders were not subject to the CRA and much of the foreclosure problem lies in the 'burbs where the CRA did not apply.
FreeSpeech.org
Codeweavers are a great company but they haven't done a good job of preparing for a slashdotting - after all, Slashdot survives a slashdot every day and runs considerably more complex Perl software than the original Codeweavers form, which only had to generate a license key. Perhaps the license key is based on the email address, but it would have been good to test very high volumes before actually announcing this promotion... They have done quite a good job of reacting to the slashdotting after it started.
Fine... blaming Bush for the country's economic woes is like blaming the hood ornament for your wreck.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Building WINE on the Mac is pretty easy, but with Apple's X server you don't get working 3D support (or, didn't, last time I tried it) due to bugs in their DRI implementation. Crossover bundles their own X server, which has better dock integration, with the Mac version and so you can run Windows games that need 3D support.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
See, now I'm just going to have to assume you're a militant Obamite and also have no sense of humor.
Throw a guy a perfectly good analogy comparing the President to a monkey and he feels the need to argue. Give him the benefit of the doubt, explain it to him, and even throw him a bone on the meme with an added offering of geeky sedspeak and he still can't just have a chuckle and move on. Yeesh.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
We apologize for any inconvenience. We still love Digg, even if our server disagrees. ;-)
Apparently they havnt heard of the "slashdot" affect!
I'm actually not even a US citizen :)
but Bush does not dictate the price of gas.
If the president dictate the price of gas, it would sell for a penny over costs, any changes would be political suicide.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Another bad side effect of SIVs is making it much more difficult to be lenient on mortgages. ... 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.
But this also opens a huge legal loophole that is allowing some people to keep possession of their home without making mortgage payments. See Who Owns Your Home? for a link to the Reuters story.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Something else we need to look out for is What happens when I want to watch something different on the computer in my room while the old lady watches something on the family PC in the living room and the kid decides to play a game of some sort with network play on his Xbox or something?
Currently, we can all do that with traditional broadcast TV (cable and satellite too) but in the olden days, the satellite connection was one show on every TV or the old rabbit ears. Then it went to different channels but the same satellite unless you had multiple dishes. Even with direct TV or Dish, in the beginning it was one channel on all TVs unless you pulled out the rabbit ears. For some reason, I think HD broadcasts over the interweb will be something like that. Especially seeing how running Cable Internet the additional 200 yards to my house is "financially unfeasible" according to Time Warner and i am limited to 3 meg verizon DSL.
I have seen the channels in my area consolidate onto sub channels of larger stations.
These stations are the lower quality stations and typically niche stations like religious channels and so on. But they provide some good programming, sometimes reruns of older family friendly programs and sometimes newer feature length productions and such. So while my channel count has went down, I still have about the same amount of stations with the alternative channels.
My neighbor put up a new antenna and can pick up more stations then before but I'm not sure I want to go through that hassle.
You can bookmark my "latest posts" list, that'd help you look when I post. It's at http://slashdot.org/~Moryath/ (you can do this for anyone, btw).
You'll see a few things modded "troll" from the other day... that's what I get for speaking uncomfortable truth when people were on one of their ACLU "OMG loss of freedom bush is a nazi" insanity kicks. I'm as libertarian as the next person (more actually) but I'm a sane libertarian and tend to apply a little common sense to situations. "Common sense" being a highly uncommon commodity in this day and age, you get what you get.
If everyone is good, I'll make a torrent or something...
Re:And the web site was already slow this morning. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently it could.
Hmm... so because he didn't ignore Greenspan (who had been Fed chair since 1987, through Reagan and Bush41 and Clinton), when Greenspan was the primary advisor, he is to blame for problems that started long before he was elected?
I agree - GREENSPAN screwed up. It was under Greenspan that the whole "accelerating economy" and change in how we managed economic bubbles happened. But what was Bush's alternative? He'd already been painted into a no-win situation. If he'd canned Greenspan on the say-so of the other economists' warnings, it would have been both political and economic suicide; the press would have raked him over the coals, and probably the firing of Greenspan alone would have caused one hell of a market crash.
Remember, right after 2000, how the press and financial companies and congress were openly demanding Bush retain Greenspan and a lot of the financial advisors from the Clinton regime? Well, he did. And they kept on advising the same things they'd advised under Clinton.
As for the other warning signs... are you perhaps referring to hearings like this when the financial fraud at Fannie Mae came under scrutiny, conscientious representatives from both sides of the aisle were calling for much-needed reform, and the mainline Democrat response (specifically racists like Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus) was to scream "racism"?
Well?
then if governments and parliaments have such a tiny importance let's get rid of them!
It isn't like he didn't try...
There was more problems then bush. Look ate the parts that specifically talk about Fannie and Freddie getting busted for FEC violations and paying 3.8 million in fines or the leaders of those institutions cooking the books and so on. This problem was much larger then Bush and for once, I can actually agree that government was bought and paid for. Well, enough of it was to stop reform.
BTW, don't get hung up in the site I linked to. Everything is linked back to the congressional record and other government sources and the bulk of the article is more or less a reprint of a NYT story but you can verify what it says.
That depends upon the ability to get the foreclosure proceedings dismissed. I am surprised that is, in the long term, possible. In the UK, it can be fought for a while, and the courts will pressure the lender to do a deal, but foreclosure cannot be dismissed.
Even so, this does not affect my point either way. If what you describe is possible, it is possible whether the mortgage is held by the original lender of has been sold on. But selling on reduces the options for a negotiated climb down.
The "Jingle Mail" option only works in the US, which has "limited recourse". In the UK, the borrower is personally liable for any difference between the loan and what the lender gets from selling the foreclosed property. Which can be very painful, but removes the temptation to trash on exit.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
#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%.
I just don't buy this as causation. I know the deregulation crowd has a raging boner for this as a cause, since it implicates regulation as cause, and implies deregulation is the answer. But it doesn't really add up; the creation of new finance vehicles, acceptance of 100% financing, highly leveraged investors fleeing the dot com bubble for the "sure thing" of real estate, and the detachment of risk from those originating the loans from those actually holding the loan, etc. seem far more likely causes than regulation forbidding red-lining that applies to only local banks
I agree with you blaming Bush for this mess is ill-advised, though the Republican focus on Deregulation led to Sarbanes-Oxley by allowing the Enron collapse to happen. But trying to pin this collapse on on guy, or even a small group of guys, is a mistake in that you let thousands of other contributors off easy. Like blaming global warming on cows, or pollution on cars. Reform is tough.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
I think the biggest problem is that Bush did actually try to do something about this back in 2003 with proposing tighter regulation over the GSE's that had been cooking the books and buying members of congress.
I think the link you provided is from a hearing over that very action Bush attempted to take. McCain also attempted to do something in 2005 and admittedly, they were more focused on the GSEs but they were the primary enablers/exaggerator of the problems we see now. I think if Bush's or McCain's legislation would have been implemented, it probably wouldn't have stopped all the problems but it would be a lot like building a damn that can hold back the water to limit the amount of flooding down stream. The mess wouldn't have been near as bad as it is or that people are making it out to be.
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).
Indeed it happened on President Bush's watch. But cherry picking the data doesn't bolster the case that the current financial madness is solely his fault.
I don't have a car to put gas in, and my bank just got bought by another bank, but man am I happy to be running IE6 on my Mac.
Now I can finally make all my websites work with that pos browser! Thanks, Codeweavers!
Could someone who has actually used CrossOver please comment on the performace of Windows applications running in a Linux OS? Supposedly they run at native speed (since Wine is not an emulator and all that), but somehow I find it hard to believe... I am particularly curious about the playback of PowerPoint presentations that include movies and fancy slide transitions. To me this is the only area where OpenOffice is still way behind.
Are you incredibly ill-informed, or just insane?
Let's start from the most recent history:
1) Helped Lehman Brothers to evade the bankruptcy.
How do you think he would have done that? Remember, the President has no control over the Fed and SEC beyond appointing their members. He can't even fire them without Senate approval and that takes months. Lehman Brothers had gotten itself into a horrible situation and probably rightly deserved to fail. I have a problem with the bailout, because it let a whole hose of companies that obviously were too far gone and too corrupt survive anyways.
2) Persuaded the Congress and Senate to pass a 'care package' earlier this year before the panic.
A "care package" of what nature? One that repealed the ass-backwards "bankruptcy reforms" carried out during Clinton's remaining days and Bush's early term? One that would have implemented reforms to prevent the backing of securities with other securities? Ooh, I know... how about one that issued some way for people to renegotiate their loan amounts due to the fraudulently inflated home prices most of the market had been paying due to having to compete for homes on the market with people who were getting loans they should never have been issued?
Please. I'd love to hear your thoughts. What form of a "care package" do you mean? Or do you mean yet another Rethuglican/Democrap package where they just fling your tax revenue around like poo and expect it to make things better?
3) More aggressive interest rate cuts earlier last year.
That is the LAST possible thing that should be done. Interest rates are far lower than they ought to be, because of economically bad policy that kept reacting to every "crisis" by pushing them further. If you've noticed, the Fed Funds Rate is now at 1.5% and it quite literally has almost nowhere to go. Ever seen one of those piece-of-shit cars that come across the Mexican border blowing down the highway, with a plume of smoke coming out the back and getting slower and slower every second even though the driver obviously has the gas pedal down all the way? Guess what - that gas pedal is the interest rate and it doesn't matter where it is when your engine is slowly destroying itself; in fact, keeping it that far down will hurt it more because you're literally choking the engine.
4) Force more regulation in banking.
Again, since you seem to have never had Civics 101, this is not within the power of the President. Congress can pass a bill and ask the President to sign it into law. If he's really feeling lucky, the President can send Congress a bill and ask that they consider it. That is the extent of his power.
5) Fire Greenspan. After all, it worked with 8 US attorneys. ...
As I mentioned in a previous posting, there are two problems with this:
#1 - To fire the Fed Chairman, he has to get Senate approval. The President does not have the power to unilaterally fire him.
#2 - At the time before Greenspan retired, any President or Congresscritter who voted to fire him would have been committing economic and political suicide. He was wildly popular in Wall Street, wildly popular with the major banking firms, he was being hailed in all the newsmedia as being the "Architect" of "vast economic growth" from 1993 through 2005... in short, firing him (even if you could get the Senate to go along with it) would likely have given the market one hell of a shock anyways.
Since you obviously have NO grasp of simple realities (or of what is actually within the powers of the office of President of the United States) I invite you once more to come up with an intelligent response. Do some research this time, please.
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.
15 Mbps is not too much for a 1080p H.264 feed, sure if you don't want full HDTV the bandwidth requirements go way down but it's about the same as current H.264 HDTV broadcasts which is what we are comparing to.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I was talking about the "bailout". It was intended to give liquidity to failing banks, to help them continue their business of taking homes from people.
When did I say I was for the "bailout"? I am pretty sure I said numerous times it was a bad move - in fact, I believe I have directly compared any Congressional Representative / Senator who voted for it to a stupid monkey flinging federal monies around in lieu of poo.
Fortunately for us, the FIRST time through, some congresscritters with consciences voted against it. Unfortunately for us, they were bought off in the second round.
It's real simple, kids. The derivative market needs to be taken out completely. See: http://www.infowars.com/?p=5545 and http://www.allamericangold.com/ Buy some gold while you're there--you'll be glad you did :)
I agree - GREENSPAN screwed up. It was under Greenspan that the whole "accelerating economy" and change in how we managed economic bubbles happened.
Well you may remember what happened in 1928 when the Federal Reserve did try to "pop the bubble" of the stock market. I think I'd prefer them to stick to the Taylor Rule, keep their eye on currency stability, and leave the bubble pricking to someone else (the market?)
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid your neighbors' wallets and give you their money.>
I'm a dad - should I be raiding my neighbors' wallets and giving the proceeds to my kids? (Tongue firmly planted in cheek for the humor-impaired.)
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Another factor which contributed was the Basle-1 and -2 capital adequacy requirements - particularly the latter.
I think when you loose somewhere between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in wealth in an asset bubble burst, the details probably don't matter much.
Yeah, but I think it's still less efficient than multicasting (send once, everyone receives it simultaneously) and that's why multicasting is well-suited to live streaming media.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Why don't we call it... A Comedy of Errors...
And move on with our lives. :)
Thomas A. Knight
Author of The Time Weaver
>>>15 Mbps? Holy crap. Talk about overkill.
Holy crap. Talk about clueless. A Bluray uses 50 megabit/s. An HD DVD uses 30 megabit/s.
The 15 megabit/s I quoted for NBC's high-definition broadcast of Heroes is VERY compressed, and if it became any smaller you would see mosquitos, blocking, and other annoying artifacts.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
No, they just WINE a little...
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Google Cache
The press release is not in the cache. :-(
When did I say I was for the "bailout"?
I don't recall that you ever did, or that I ever said anything to suggest you did. I was merely talking about how Bush has contributed, not to the original fiasco, but with what is yet to come.
You don't have any choice, unless you know a secret back door into the site!
In Soviet Russia, the site knows a secret back door into you!
--
------------------ My Other Sig Isn't Half This Funny ------------------
Actually tvfool.org supports the "generalization". According to their published article the difference between NTSC TV (analog) and ATSC TV (digital) means the average American drops from 15 analog to just 12 digital stations.
So "theaveng" was correct when he said his digital reception became less than his analog reception. That's pretty typical, and people who see more stations is the Exception not the norm.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Bad Assets Backing Bad Assets
Ah, you blame BABBA, but I think we're looking at a case of BABBABBA or even BABBABBABBA. I also suggest considering the role of ABBA. Damn meddlesome Swedes.
Not 6 Mbps. 6Mhz as in 6 megahertz.
That's how wide each broadcast television channel is. It supports just over 19 Mbit/s of data.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
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.
er... critical logic error in progress...
That would only be true if you were the cable companies only customer in the area.
Right now, you and everyone else all receive that analog channel. If they switched it to internet data, only one person at a time (on any given loop to to the head end) could use it. They absolutely cannot turn off a single analog channel and then offer everyone full utilisation of 38down/28up Mbps connections.
Turning off analog completely would free up multi-gbps of bandwidth, but it will still be divided up amongst everyone on the loop.
Joey
had a solid grounding in economics
Would you mind explaining some of the background knowledge for those of us who haven't had the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with economics?
I can't give you anything back, except high-probability Informative moderation :)
--Jonas K
"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.
One moment you are stating that the Pres of US is supposed to ... then in your next paragraph you state he (or she) is a figurehead. So, which is it? There's too many people to blame for the current situation.. which all stems from greed... and lack of regulation. Free market my @$$... unfortunately we are too stupid to control or manage ourselves... and even worse the people that are controlling us aren't any better than us... we're screwed either way... someone lend me their Simpsons DVD - I didn't get mine.
P2P can't handle live broadcasts.
I still kind of like the guy but even I'm not going to say he's terribly bright.
Why do you hate America?
go figure, a site called "down" is down...
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Hell, I'm just happy Slashdot managed to post this before the damn promo ended. I read about this yesterday on TUAW.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Really? The details of how it happened aren't important? Would you say the same thing if you just saw a horrific airplane crash at the airport, right before you were about to take off in the exact same airplane make, year, and operating airline? Would you still get on the plane, or would you want them to figure out what made the other one crash, first?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
It is faster than virtualization software such as vmware or virtualbox as only the app has to be loaded, not the entire OS.
Indeed, let's! That is the purpose of elections and term limits. They work for us. Let's fire them. And while we're at it, how about congressional and senatorial term limits?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
The economics people predicting this mess BEFORE it happened (not retroactively) should be the ones that should gain credibility now; however, we will continue to listen to and employ the ones who completely messed this one up because they will give us plenty of hindsight 'perspective.'
Just like Katrina, Bush's government never thought this was going to happen... despite experts and the slow moving nature of it... They did nothing at BEST; they contributed to the bad environment so when it happened we were not well prepared (like Katrina as well.) If anything, they did their part to further the problem along; their party and the new democrats all played a part.
FYI: there are BIG PROBLEMS besides just this housing crisis and those are being unnoticed in the SAME pattern as the previous disasters.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
"I clearly underestimated the man."
I think you mean misunderestimated.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
But if you are looking at a larger family (er, let's try 4 kids), then that kind of space just isn't going to cut it in terms of psychological health.
How about you don't be the type of fucking douchebag that has 4 kids? Especially don't do that and then expect everybody else to subsidize your piss poor decision making capabilities which we are forced to in a number of ways.
You can argue that a lifestyle choice about not having a larger family is more sustainable, but I don't know that it's ethical to make that call for another person.
True, but the complete lack of ethics of the type of scumbag that would have 4 fucking kids kind of removes them from ethical discussions. They've chosen to consider themselves above ethical considerations towards others so there's no real reason to pretend that ethical considerations should apply to scumbags like themselves.
That's not to say that enforcing invasive government policies is a good thing, just don't pretend that ethical discussions apply to people without ethics. That's always been a recipe for disaster as summed up in the quote, "Evil will always triumph over good because good is dumb". Dumb is thinking ethics are held by unethical amoral scum.
I've seen the parent (theaveng) bitching about whitespace devices in every thread that has something remotely related to TV for the past few days. Look at his post history, moderators, before you mod him up, it's made up almost entirely of anti-WSD FUD: Parent is most likely an industry shill, and is also probably the dupe account of another poster (can't find him or remember the name, sorry) who did the same with the EXACT SAME ARGUMENTS worded the same way.
Hi, and welcome to the Internet!
No, not an ebay buyer of my UID. Do people actually pay for low UIDs on Slashdot? The mind boggles.
I don't run Windows software on Linux - don't see the point really, since everything I want to do, Linux covers for me. So I really was unfamiliar with Codeweavers.
The difference is I don't whine about the price of gas. And yeah, I exaggerated a bit when I said that gasoline was the 'most negative thing on earth'. I do think our reliance on it has caused lots and lots of problems but ... this is Slashdot. If your post doesn't contain a large dose of hyperbole, you're not trying hard enough.
Though I do agree that P2P can't replace broadcast television especially in HD, you are missing a key point.
The thing about things like BT, is that the minimum amount of time you need to spend uploading a copy is the time it takes to upload *one* copy. Here's why.
Suppose there are 3 people (A, B, and C). A is the source of the material.
A wants to upload a movie which has 16 segments, and for clarity, A will upload serially.
A uploads portion 1 to B
A uploads portion 2 to C
etc..
A uploads portion 15 to B
A uploads portion 16 to C
B and C can get the pieces they are missing from *each other*. A need not be involved. It gets way better with more peers too. This is because protocols like BT exploit that fact that the vast majority of users can have download bandwidth significantly larger than their upload bandwidth.
Like I said, I agree that P2P can't replace broadcast, but unfortunately, your argument isn't sound.
That was in the middle of your rant somehow blaming the SOX reforms rather than the out-of-control subprime lending. Maybe you should read your own stuff.
Are we still trying to blame this on Bush? I see this:
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)
Also the original SOX argument was that SOX forced the lenders to un-hide the actual backing of securities, which then got valued at about 15 cents instead of $200 like they were trying to show under the old model. This means that the root problem was, in fact, the banks deliberately trying to hide the actual backing of securities; once called on it, they turned kind of green and started to stutter a lot.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Basic economic principles:
#1 - Fungible vs nonfungible commodities. Some commodities are priced relative to their availability on the open market, some not. For example, Oil is a fungible commodity; you can easily replace oil (and its derivatives) with those from another source. Saudi Arabia won't sell to you? Buy from Venezuela, and someone else will most likely make up the shortfall by buying from SA instead of Venezuela. You didn't buy your gasoline/diesel from a Shell station because you went to Citgo or Raceway instead? The place you did buy from will purchase that much more from the refinery (and most of the gas on the market comes from the same few refineries), so very little will change. This is why organized boycotts of a particular "chain" of gas stations don't work; their parent companies can (and do) simply sell their extra stock to one of the competitors. At best, you hurt the local station owners and that's all.
#2 - Supply/Demand. These don't mean what you think they mean, but relatively close; they don't always adjust exactly on schedule (because purchasers/suppliers may mis-read how much supply or demand there is in the market and price inappropriately). The idea is that over time, the price of a product will reach an equilibrium such that, if there are Y available units, then there will eventually be X available buyers. If there are less buyers than product, the price will decline until more buyers (enticed by the lower price) enter the system. If there are more buyers than product, either the price will (theoretically) rise, or else you will have a product shortage and someone will try to produce a competing product to fill the need until pricing equilibrium is reached. Compare, for example, the Sensio Grill to the Foreman Grill.
Now here's where we get a little more advanced:
#3 - Forms of investing. You've got direct investment in a company (Venture Capital or Stock), indirect investment (investment in a bank or lending company that in turn provides lending services to the company itself), and all manner of tertiary involvements such as membership in various investment funds where you, personally, have no control over what is done with your money.
#4 - "Stock Market" indexes. There are a ton of these out there, each of which averages the price of a predetermined set of stocks, weighted by some amount, to come up with some "average" monetary number. The most commonly referred to by the newsmedia is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which is an average (weighted to dollar price of stock) of a mere 30 stocks. There are a whole slew of other stock averages, each telling a different story on the market; the more stocks they watch, the better an indicator they can be (but a lousier news story), which is why the Dow Jones Wilshire 5000 doesn't get press while the DJIA does.
Now we get into the nitty-gritty:
#5 - There are three basic ways to make money in the stock market: you can buy stock and receive dividends when(if) the company makes a profit; you can buy stock and sell it later when it is worth more; OR you can "borrow" stock from someone, sell it, wait for the price to fall, and then buy it back at the lower price (pocketing the difference) and then return the "borrowed" (but now not as valuable) stock to the rightful owner.
The third way is called shorting. The "fourth" way is called naked shorting, and it's been one of wikipedia's biggest recent scandals. The gist of it is that with naked sho
"So thanks, Bush, for empowering the banks to further the exploitation of the American people" You are thanking the wrong person for that...thank your liberal socialist leaders(Reid, Frank..etc..) and your candidate for president, Obama. They are the ones that forced banks to give mortgages to people that could not afford it. They were warned in the past, but chose to get rich on the kickbacks. Do you really think these folks want to give up their millions? This reduction of the gas prices shows that the larger the gas supply becomes (whether through less use or the US starting to drill or at least threatining to drill) the lower the price falls. This also shows that your liberal socialist leaders are not only wrong but that they know they are wrong. They want the poor and uneducated to stay that way, so that they can continue to run campaigns of fear without substance. You can come to these conclusions one of two ways; use your brain and go over everything Obama has said or elect him and see how many of his promises come true. This country is on the verge of a crisis...and it begins with the election of Barack Obama.
Many banks were facing financial difficulty and were in danger of failing. Bush helped them out by securing them $700 billion. I was not discounting what others have done, but Bush helped make sure that banks could continue to foreclose. I was saying that's the ONE big thing that Bush DID do for this crisis. Get it?
We're not on the verge of a crisis, we're in the middle of one. And by crisis I don't mean what is apparent now, what has happened to date, but what is to come. We are already in the trap. The only question in my mind is how deep we sink, and if we (the USA) be sent back to the stone age by the "advancements" of our society, or if we will move further towards globalization (which I believe would be worse, and which is more likely).
Removal of Saddam
Did you ask the Iraqi's which situation they liked better?
gas prices
So you do hold Bush responsible for the economic collapse as well?
abortion numbers at 34 year low
Nice in the eyes of the reli nazi's. Another soul saved for the church. Ever talked to a woman who got raped and pregnant?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
sensible reasoning on Slashdot?? this is a red letter day!
http://trial.p2p-next.org/ Streaming P2P is real.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
6-8 megabits is plenty for 1080p H.264 if you're using a sane encoder. I've made demos as low as 3 megabits without serious artifacting. NBC uses MPEG-2, not H.264, which is why it sucks so much at lower bitrates.
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.
I've read a few other people claiming that the whole mark-to-model system was broken, because the models were providing completely unrealistic valuations of the assets they tracked. Your previous comment before this one seemed to suggest that mark-to-model has its place in the world of investing, and that it has been inappropriately demonized. If you have the time, can you provide your thoughts on the claims that mark-to-model valuations have a risk of being wildly inaccurate, and whether that risk is overblown.
Glass-Steagall was repealed so Citi could buy Travelers insurance to form Citigroup. How are they doing today? Still going strong.
If Glass-Steagall was still in effect, Bank of America could not have bought Merrill Lynch. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley could not have converted to bank holding companies. These transactions have had important stabilizing effects.
The repeal of Glass-Steagall is a popular talking because it is a tangible example of "deregulation." However I have not seen a single hard analysis that ties it into any of the root causes of the problem. A far more causative piece of deregulation was the repeal of the net capital rule. Leverage increased dramatically following that repeal.
The real problem was not "de"regulation, it was lack of regulation in the first place. There was (and still is) no general regulation of mortgage origination. Banks are regulated, but many of the worst subprimes were originated by brokers or other non-deposit-taking companies. Likewise, there was and is no regulation of derivatives like credit default swaps. Subprime defaults may have lit the match but derivatives are the logs that keep the fire going.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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)?
The same way God gets credit for all of the good things, but is not credited for the bad...
AC because that's what I am on this subject...
Apparently you are unfamiliar with the adblock plugin for firefox, too. With that I don't worry about giving anyone ad revenue. :)
Post-CRA-insanity (and the following nonsense when everyone started to want to get more and more loans on the market), we got treated to all the "subprime" nonsense
I just want to point out that "subprime" is a private market invention and term, that has nothing to do with the CRA. Subprime loans are made at the discretion of individual lenders since neither interest rates nor underwriting standards are federally controlled. People will point to the CRA but the CRA regulates only deposit-taking institutions. Subprime loans can be made at will (and many were) by private institutions that do not take deposits.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Mark-to-model valuations have a risk of being wildly inaccurate, this is true. Unfortunately, the chosen replacement (mark-to-market) is vulnerable to major short-term fluctuations in the "valuation" of what are essentially long-term assets.
Take, for instance, subprime loans. Not all subprime loans were unpayable and doomed to forfeiture, and even for those that were, the vast majority would see some payback before they lapsed into insolvency. The problem came when dishonest companies (many of which were just given $$$ by the "bailout") created a false "model" that said 100% of the subprime loans would be paid back in full, created various securities backed by these loans or backed by other securities that turned out to be backed by these loans, and started selling off those securities.
When mark-to-model was replaced by mark-to-market, all of a sudden these base loans hit the market... flooding the market with them and causing their immediate-sale value (what someone on the market would actually pay for them right this minute in one lump sum) to plummet far below what a realistic model would value them at.
For example, if we take a large pool of subprime loans and assume that (pulling a round number for sake of argument, not following any actual model here) X% of them were doomed to failure, then we'd get a model roughly like this:
(Model Price) = (100-X% * loanprice) + (X% * loanprice * averagepaidbeforedefault) + (X% * actualassetvalue)
Now, obviously the only way this model equals 100% is if X is zero; however, even if we assume 50% of them are doomed to failure, we still have the average recoupment (payments made before defaulting) and the asset value (probably NOT equal to loanprice and well below saleprice, but still nonzero). In other words, the value of the "pool" if we assume 50% of the loans are "doomed" should still be above 50 cents on the dollar.
Note that the price on a lot of these loans and loan-backed securities got down to pennies on the dollar now. The only way we get there with a sensible model is if we assume (a) nearly 100% of the loans will fail and (b) all of them are going to go into default relatively "immediately", e.g. in the next couple months and (c) the value of every single one of these assets is going to plummet to pennies on the dollar, as well, overnight.
See what I mean? The idea of mark-to-model, if you have sensible models and regulations checking and verifying the models the financial institutions use and forcing them to readjust the models as new financial data comes in regarding them, is not itself inherently bad. The problem is when corrupt people, with no oversight, are allowed to create fake "models" that far overvalue things and then hide their fraud behind multiply stacked "mortgage-backed securities."
Catching my own tpyo: that model should be as follows.
(Model Price) = (100-X% * loanprice) + (X% * averagepaidbeforedefault) + (X% * actualassetvalue)
Sorry if I created any confusion. CTRL-V at the wrong time.
It is the responsibility of the president to send troops to the middle-east and destabilize the situation causing the price of fuel to surge. THAT is how the president affects the price of fuel in this case.
The truth is there is no pure example of a capitalist, communist, or socialist society at large scale. In practice they are all philosophies representing extremes that reality doesn't go to.
Any attempt to implement the pure form of any of them would lead to disaster. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, and a carefully controlled mix of all adapted to the circumstances at hand would be productive...
That aside, those with ostensible influence over fuel prices have a significant interest in an administration they have good relations with. As such, a cut in fuel prices could be considered an investment in continuing that relationship. I.e. if they fear tax policies of a new candidate, they would be willing to manipulate consumer confidence to the extent they can so long as the lost revenue wouldn't exceed the lost taxes (balanced against the risk of that manipulation having zero effect). Bonus points if they think the foreign policy of one vs. another leads to a greater supply of raw materials. Not saying this is the case, but "we're capitalist" isn't a valid standalone defense against such a theory.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Just because it "serves" half a million homes per market doesn't mean that people actually watch it. I haven't looked at broadcast in years, since I've had cable. I think most people are in the same boat.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild
I used to run Cedega. I also had WINE. I found that WINE was more responsive under some particular circumstance (I think this turned out to be the GL_vertex_buffer_arb extension or whatever it is). So I've been running free WINE ever since.
I actually did manage to download the Codeweavers Linux build, and put in for a serial. In the mean time, I tried it for WoW. (What, you think there are other Windows games?) It's noticably more responsive than my native WINE build, although I couldn't say why. My WINE build tends to stutter a couple of frames every few seconds; Codeweavers was pretty smooth.
I'm gonna keep messing with it, and when they're less loaded, I'll ask if there's a command line app corresponding to "wine WoW.exe". But right now, it seems to me that this is overall a better gaming experience for me than WINE, by enough to justify cost. I think the next time I think about buying a Windows license, I'll send the money to Codeweavers instead.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
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.
No, let me put together a car analogy for you that fits more closely.
Blaming Bush for the country's economic woes is like blaming the driver for where your car ends up. Sure you can point to the engine (people) for powering that car. Sure you can blame the wheels (banks) for carrying the car there. Sure you could blame the exhaust fumes (Democrats) for causing global warming. Of course you can blame the drive train (government) for allowing it all to be connected, but in the end it was the driver that persuaded all those parts to go where you ended up.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
When people oversimplify a situation by blaming a particular individual or group for the problem, they reveal a basic lack of understanding.
Your blind quest to vilify Bush is, at best, foolish.
Bush is no more to blame for supporting the banks than Obama, or McCain, or pretty much anybody in Congress. Both parties signed off on the bank bailout.
Even if I were to assume there was a pellet of intelligence in your comment, what solution do you propose, abolish banks?
Capitalism isn't a zero sum game.
Unless you're sitting less than ten feet away from a six-foot-wide screen, you can't tell the difference between 1080p and 720p. All you're doing is wasting money and energy.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
You seem to think that my comment stands alone. It was a reply to someone who said Bush did very little.
I was simply saying that the $700 billion deal was not little and it will exacerbate the crisis. (Granted, we aren't suffering the ill effects of that decision, yet.)
Your blind quest to vilify Bush is, at best, foolish.
Funny. You seem to know all about me. I'm on a quest to vilify Bush alone, by pointing out his deeds. I'm sure he's grateful that you came to his rescue.
Bush is no more to blame for supporting the banks than Obama, or McCain, or pretty much anybody in Congress. Both parties signed off on the bank bailout.
Except that Bush led the war on the middle class, and McCain and Obama merely followed. Yes, both parties signed off on the bailout, but that was after a great deal of fearmongering by the Bush administration.
Even if I were to assume there was a pellet of intelligence in your comment, what solution do you propose, abolish banks?
I thought you'd never ask.
End income taxes. Dismantle the Federal Reserve. Raise tariffs. Eliminate the FDIC, Freddie and Fannie.
I'm sure I haven't thought about this enough, though. You're probably right. My argument has no intelligence behind it.
Capitalism isn't a zero sum game.
What makes you think that we have capitalism?
No, it doesn't.
AFAIK, HD OTA broadcasts in the US use MPEG-2. I don't think that qualifies as "VERY compressed".
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
I don't disagree with your point, but I'd like to point out that you have the numbers wrong, with one too high, the other too low. Iowa class battleships have 16" guns, not 18. The bombardment shells they use are 2,200 Lb, of which 500 is high explosive. (The rest is there to keep it together until impact.) Armor piercing shells, which we've probably not used in decades, are 2,700 lb with only 150 of it devoted to payload.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Sorry, but CRA didn't cause this:
CRA's relation to 2008 financial crisis
CRA is a helpful piece of legislation that helps reduce the incidence of lending discrimination.
Sorry, but CRA didn't cause this:
CRA's relation to 2008 financial crisis
From the article: "A 2008 study by Traiger & Hinckley LLP, a law firm that counsels financial institutions on CRA compliance, found that CRA regulated institutions were less likely to make subprime loans, and when they did the interest rates were lower. CRA banks were also half as likely to resell the loans."
Has the dollar ever been as strong as it is right now?
That analogy would be better if the President actually had the sort of control that you picture.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Gotta love an economics geek!
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?
Since eternal September, many.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
15 Mbps? Holy crap. Talk about overkill.
In my days, we counted bits per second on our fingers. In binary.
I'm not insane! My mother had me tested.
You're assuming we all have 20/20 vision, which is a poor assumption. I'm 20/10, myself.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
Ever talked to a woman who got raped and pregnant?
Yes. She gave the baby up for adoption.
This is a red herring anyway, less than 4% of abortions are the product of rape/incest.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Trusting in wikipedia is your FIRST mistake.
I was a bit hyperbolic, but I didn't really assume anything. I just chose those numbers because they're more representative of the average person. So you're 20/10 -- if you buy a 36" screen and sit 10 feet away (a perfectly reasonable size and distance for TV viewing), you can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. I'm 20/15 (when I wear my glasses), and I have a projector in my living room that displays a picture about 84" across, but I sit a good 15-20 feet away from it. You'd have a hard time noticing any difference between the two formats. I certainly don't think it's worth more than doubling the bitrate just so .1% (or whatever) of people can kinda see a difference. The vast majority of people are 20/20 or worse even with corrective lenses.
Note that NBC and some other stations broadcast in 1080i, which is an entirely different matter. 1080i and 720p use about the same bandwidth at the same bits per pixel (1080i is about 10% more).
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
Energy?
+++OK ATH
When running a piece of coax outside and sticking up an antenna on a push-up pole on the end of it is "that hassle", we really have become lazy sloths.
That used to be the only way to even get TV.
Just do it. You'll appreciate having the other channels, and it's maybe 30 minutes worth of work.
I assume you're using "rabbit ears" or similar right now.
I already had a Dish Network DVR with dual-tuners, but since it also had an ATSC input, I threw up an antenna for it. Great for when a HUGE thunderstorm blocks the dish from the satellite (happens maybe three times a year at my house), and you still want to watch some local sporting event, or whatever... and of course, the DVR can record from those channels also...
Well worth the effort to put up the OTA antenna. And I already HAD satellite. You can put yours up in just a few minutes more than it will take you to read this posting. :-)
+++OK ATH
Lol.. It is a little more involved then that. You have to anchor the pole to the building, ground it, drill a hole in the side of the house to put it through the wall (without damaging the siding), Then you have to run it through a distribution box and feed new cable to all the rooms with TVs in them. Not to mention going and getting a ladder which I don't have and connecting the rotators (running electricity to the side of the house the pole will be mounted) so the Antenna can be moved in different directions depending on the location of the station or channel you want to watch.
You make it sound like 10 minutes and your done.
Yes, I'm using amplified Rabbit ears right now. I get around a 30-50 mile range depending on the weather. I can adjust them and get a few different channels at the cost of some better ones but there is never anything good on them do I don't. With the external antenna, I would be able to get about 70 mile radius with around 120-140 directional. That comes in handy because the broadcast stations don't always show the same stuff in neighboring markets.
I cannot get regular cable but I can do the satellite dishes, I had a guy out looking to install dish network he cut the lines to the direct TV satellite that was already on the roof right in front of me. I got pissed and told him to leave. It wasn't hooked up and I was already fooling with the Dish to make a Wifi antenna out of it but I haven't had cable for over 4 years now by choice and only started looking back into it when the DTV switch started getting closer.
If I put one up, I'm doing it right and I'm not pissing around with an omnidirectional that will only get a limited amount of coverage. I'm about 20-25 miles from the nearest broadcast station and it direct their signal away from me. I need a little more the someone in a large city or the suburbs of one. There are a lot of hills around and your only allowed 20 or 30 foot above the highest mounting point of the structure which I will need to get the reception I'm looking for when I mess with it. My neighbor put his up to the maximum and has the rotators which automatically changes the Antenna's direction when he attempts to tune in the further away channels. What sucks is that he can only receive those channels on certain TVs when the one TV is set to watch them or he manually changes the position which blocks out certain channels on the main TV. The consolidated channels I was talking about, went to a lower powered broadcaster/radio which means they will be even harder to pull in when they stop the analog signal for good.
I'm pissed (no not drunk; angry). I TRIED ALL DAY to get the free serial number and the webserver refused to let me access it due to being overloaded.
Stupid bastards. I ought to sue them in court for false-advertising. If you say something is going to be free, then it should be free, and if a technical hiccup prevents you honoring your word, then you should extend the deadline until everybody has a chance to get the serial number.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Nice try, but it's a swing and a miss. We pay the same taxes that our neighbors pay for public education, and then we homeschool-so our neighbors are paying for others' kids education, and I pay for others, and for mine.
Now, when it comes to health insurance, my fellow plan members *do* subsidize me because kids need lots of care, but that's free enterprise, not government.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
P.S.
The solution of course is to download it off some pirate site. This greedy corporation advertised "free" and I'm going to get "free".
Alternatively I could buy the product, claim it was never received in the mail, and then do a credit card chargeback.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Technically it's up.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
HDTV broadcasts use MPEG 2, not H.264. That's why they have such high bandwidths.
And 15 MBps is indeed way, way overkill for H.264 compressed material. H.264 is far more efficient than that.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The 15 megabit/s I quoted for NBC's high-definition broadcast of Heroes is VERY compressed, and if it became any smaller you would see mosquitos, blocking, and other annoying artifacts.
It could easily be compressed much smaller by using better codecs, like H.264 and such. The only reason it's not is because HDTV (and Bluray) is standardized on MPEG 2, which has a overall poor compression, but is very cheap on hardware costs.
You can compress video very, very well indeed, as long as you don't rely on 18 year old methods to do it.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
In Soviet Russia, the militant monkeys meme you!
Fuck off, you insensitive prick. I know scores of decent folks who have raised families of 4, 5, even 7 or 8 kids — without relying on the government to bail them out.
Of course, from your UID, it's apparent that you're one of those old tards who sits on his front porch and screams obscenities at kids who dare to "trespass" on the city-owned sidewalk adjacent to his property.
Wouldn't your penis freeze first, and wouldn't that fuck you up significantly worse than the frozen piss?
Yes, and SPARC is a technically superior architecture to x86, FreeBSD and Solaris have superior SMP than NT and Linux, OS/2 is better than NT, NetBSD is more coherent and portable as a whole system tha anything, FireWire is better than USB for everything above cheapo flashstics and HIDs, near same for SCSI vs. SATA. Whats your point?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Yes, energy. It takes a faster processor to handle more data, and it takes more electronics to run the display (more pixels = more transistors = more heat lost due to switching). Given a 720p system and a 1080p system made with comparable technology, the 720p system will be more energy efficient (in terms of Watts per square inch).
"Pish-posh," one might say, "that's only a difference of a few Watts. No big deal!" But Americans watch an average of over 4 hours of TV per day or about 1500 hours per year. That's 450 billion TV-hours per year. Given that amount of TV usage, every extra Watt of power our televisions consume is, over the course of a year, equivalent to the amount of energy in 2.65 billion gallons of oil. If 720p displays save only 5 Watts*, that's 13 billion barrels of oil over the course of a year.
Given that our annual oil consumption is over 20 billion barrels per day, you might say that's only a drop in the barrel. But we have to start somewhere. Energy won't conserve itself!
* Watch out! That number might have dingleberries stuck to it.
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
I like that quote, but it's falsely attributed to Jefferson. The first recorded appearance of it was in a 1937 Congressional hearing.
I'm a longtime slashdot reader who's only ever posted as AC, so I know this will remain unseen and 0, but it needs to be said.
Multicast could still be used if the requested start times were quantized to let's say 1 minute intervals. This would mean that you would at most be sending N streams where N is the total number of minutes from the real-time start of an event to the last time after the event start that content could be requested. This would mean also that the most time that a consumer would have to wait before their viewing content starts would be 1 minute. It's not real-time but it is probably close enough to it that most people would not care. It would also just be used during peak load times after which smaller quantums could be used and after that, real-time demands. I believe that hotel/motel movie service used to work in the same manner except with a quantized unit of 10 or 15 minutes.
Be as you would have the world become.