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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.
Well, crossover lets you run a non free runtime ontop of your free os and use it to run windows programs (free or otherwise)...
The alternative, is using a non free os and a non free runtime, so it's a small step forwards if nothing else.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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/
"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.
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?
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.
That's the magic of P2P - no need for massive bandwidth on the part of the original source.
"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...
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.
I am having a problem believing that a Slashdot user ,with a UID of 893, does not know what Codeweaver is.
Thank you Codeweavers. You deserve a huge round of applause.
*** Don't be dull.***
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.
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.