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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."
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.
They also employ the WINE maintainer and ensure that their code is implemented up the tree.
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...
> 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
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.