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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.
They went to a low-bandwidth version to alleviate some of it.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
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...).
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...
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.
So you mean it was not free software, but rather software that was free? Got it.
P.S.: We knew that. Nobody's gonna append (Free as in beer) or (Free as in freedom) whenever they talk about something being free.
Just in case someone (like me) got interested in upgrading its PPC-iBook into an oldschool gaming machine. Won't work :-(
They also employ the WINE maintainer and ensure that their code is implemented up the tree.
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."
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.
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.
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)
This challenge has been up on their page for months. They clearly had several posted goals, unlikely ones, and that if any of them were completed during Bush's term then they would give away copies of their software to celebrate.
Replace that whole mess with "We said we would do this if X happened. X happened, so here's your free copy!" and I fail to see how this is a troll or classical advertisement.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
In case you were wondering, the US is a capitalistic economy, which means the market dictates prices, not a communism (at least not yet) where the government controls the economy.
In case you were wondering, communism is the system in which the economy is in the hands of the general public, Marxism is the system in which the 'workers' control the economy, socialism is the general term for any system in which an even distribution of wealth is attempted (half credit if you had used this one), and, this is what I think you meant when you said "communism" earlier, state capitalism is the system in which the government controls the market.
Macroeconomics 101...you fail it.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
> 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
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
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.
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
You should be able to re-compile WINE on a PowerPC-based system and then have it run programs written for Windows NT 3.51 PowerPC Edition.
Since WINE Is Not an Emulator, it's an implementation of the Win32 ABI, it's probably not what you're after....
[...] 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!
from wikipedia I learned that games linux is updated quicker while linux pro focusses on stability (and therefore does not receive updates as quickly)
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!
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."