A year later CodeWeavers urges free CrossOver users to pay up

Once upon a time, about a year ago, a company called CodeWeavers ran a promotion allowing customers to download and install their software fore free. CodeWeavers suite of Crossover apps basically lets users run a number of Windows games and utilities including PhotoShop, Office, and World of Warcraft on Mac or Linux machines. The programs usually run about $40 to $70, but thanks to a heck of a lot of publicity, CodeWeavers wound up giving away an estimated $45 million dollars worth of software in one day.

On the one hand, the promotion wound up boosting CodeWeaver's customer base by 400% (although I'm certain some people downloaded the application without ever getting around to installing it). On the other hand, a huge number of people who might otherwise have paid for the software over the last 10 months might have decided there wasn't much reason to do so.

Now that the 1 year anniversary of the big promotion is coming up, CodeWeavers is sending out emails to the roughly 650,000 people who downloaded the free software asking them to consider paying for ongoing support. The company is also planning on releasing a new version of the software in December, meaning anyone who pays for support will get the update, while those who let their 1 year subscription expire will have to pay full price for the new version.

Do you need support in order to keep using the software. No. But even if you don't need the updates or customer support, you might want to think about taking pity on a company that wound up giving away a ridiculous amount of software in one day last year at the risk of dramatically decreasing revenue for the next year. Last December, the company explained that sales were down 25% since the October 2008 promotion, but I'm not sure what the impact has been since then.

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Windows 8 to be 128 bit operating system

Microsoft is planning to make Windows 8 an 128-bit operating system, according to details leaked from the software giant's Research department. The discovery came to light after Microsoft Research employee, Robert Morgan, carelessly left details of his work on the social-networking site, LinkedIn.
"Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan"

The senior researcher's profile said he was: "Working in high security department for research and development involving strategic planning for medium and longterm projects. Research & Development projects including 128-bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan. Forming relationships with major partners: Intel, AMD, HP and IBM."
Morgan's LinkedIn profile has now been pulled down, but a version remains in the Google search cache.

A move to 128-bit support would be a bold move for Microsoft. Many outsiders were urging Microsoft to make Windows 7 64-bit only, but the company continues to offer a 32-bit version of the forthcoming OS.

Microsoft has said very little publicly about Windows 8, although on a visit to the UK earlier this week, CEO Steve Ballmer denied rumours that Windows 7 would be the last major client OS the company produced. Ballmer admitted that planning was underway on Windows 8, although it's highly unlikely that the OS will arrive until 2012 at the earliest.
Morgan's talk of planning for Windows 9 supports Ballmer's claim that the company thinks there is plenty of life left in Windows yet.

This Slashdot comment raises some interesting points:
"Most 64-bit processors provide 40 or 48 bits of address space; they ignore the other two or three bytes of the address (often they support a larger virtual address space than physical, but even then it's usually less than 64-bit). I've yet to see a consumer-grade machine with more RAM than PAE (36-bit addressing) could address. That said, memory is not the only place where the number of bits is important. Hard drives are typically addressed by 512-byte blocks, so 32 bits gives you 2TB, which is a single disk these days. 64 bits gives you 8ZB, which is quite a lot, but it's not a completely unreasonable amount; some people , are going to find that constraining in the next few years, which is why ZFS uses 128 bits. It's not that 128 bits are necessary, so much that 65 bits are and 128 is the most computationally-convenient size after 128. Making sure everything in the kernel supports 128-bit filesystem offsets is an important for long-term project."

Seems to me the future of Wine is going to also have be 128 bit to remain relevant and run the future 128 bit Games and Office tools that are geared for the future Windows OS. Possibly by the time of Windows 8 this will be when they finally kill off 32 bit support and release 64 bit and 128 bit versions of Windows. Looks as if the ground work for 128 bit computing is being set now and therefor a future 128 bit release of our favorite Windows re implementation Wine.

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q4wine 0.113 has been released

Finally, after many months of development, testing and bugfixing a new version of q4wine has been released. q4wine is a wine configuration and management utility written in QT.
General features are:

• Can export QT color theme into wine colors settings.
• Can easy work with different wine versions at same time;
• Easy creating, deleting and managing prefixes (WINEPREFIX);
• Easy controlling for wine process;
• Easy installer wizard for wine applications; (Not yet. Wait for v. 0.120)
• Autostart icons support;
• Easy cd-image use;
• You can extract icons from PE files (.exe .dll);
• Easy backup and restore for managed prefixes.
• Winetricks support.
• And more..

New features avalible in the 0.113 release are:
Added:

• Added q4wine-cli console utility for wine applications and prefixes management.
• Added libq4wine implementation;
• Added embeded q4wine-mount (This is a copy of fuseiso + RH path);
  Note: use this if you too lazy to compile fuseiso from SF and apply pathes;
• q4wine now remembers 8 recent mounted images;
• q4wine now remembers 8 recent runned binaryes via Run dialog;
• QtSingleApp integration. Now you can run only one instance of q4wine-gui;
• Online documentation;
• Now q4wine save last user selected prefix and dir;
• Added "open directory" menu items via xdg-utils;
• Added "open directory" menu items via winefile;
• Added xdg-utils support (note: now it is in the depends list)
• Added translation file for Portuguese (Brazil) by Marcio Moraes;
• Added *.xpm filter to icon import patten;
• Added http proxy support for winetricks;
• Improved icon display widget;
• Added Drag & Drop support;
• Added Drag support q4wine icons export;
• Added Drop support for wine .exe and .com files;
• Added Drop support for wine .bat files (Now autoadd wineconsole binary args);
• Added splitter for programs and icons lists;
• Added command line option for q4wine (See q4wine --help for details);

Fixed:

• Linux: Improved wine process list build (thanks to Sergey Kishchenko (tilarids));
• Cleanup q4wine tmp directory on exit;
• Some fixes for q4wine.desktop (thanks to Eugene Pivnev);
• Fixed GUI bug: Text fields size, on some desktop configurations, are too small to edit;
• Fixed a lot of English spelling errors (thanks to Sergey Kishchenko (tilarids));
• First steps for source code documentation via Doxygen....;
• Total code reorganize;
• Database engine rewrite;
• Many fixes for q4wine.desktop file (thanks to Kyrill Detinov);
• Fixed compilation with Qt-4.4.X (thanks to Kyrill Detinov);