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Firefox New York Times Ad, Soon
An anonymous reader submits "CNet has an update on the status of the New York Times Firefox ad. According to the article, the delays are largely because of the decision to go with 10,000 names rather than the original 2500. The amount of content means each change to the ad requires 15 minutes of rendering. They also must be careful in crafting the ad, so that stay on the advocacy side of things. As a non-profit, they can still qualify for the under $50,000 rate, but if the ad is too commercial, they would need to pay the $130,000+ business rate. They say they're close to finishing, and the ad should run by mid-December, or at the latest, by Christmas. Firefox is also close to 10,000,000 downloads in the first month of release."
isn't a non-profit a non-profit, no matter what kind of ads they run?
I can see it now... Wal-Mart's non-profit subsidiary, "The Friends of Sam Walton" (not a real charity) using their non-profit status to reduce Wal-Mart's advertising costs by over 50%.
I'm afraid checks and balances have to be in place, even if they occasionally slow something like Firefox down.
Smells like a troll...
Anywho, I'll take a shot at this. Firefox and other Free, multi-platform software (Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, etc.) reduce dependence on Windows, because people aren't stuck with Windows-specific programs. For me, the only thing stopping me from moving to Linux is gaming (I don't believe Cedega supports the games I play). Basically, Microsoft's got my "patronage" hanging by a thread, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
My experience with firefox has been if I tell someone to use it they do, most of the time without questioning why. Not a hint of concern about 'publicized' IE security flaws of Microsoft failings. Seems most users just want to surf the net, take care of business or whatever. I guess this can still be claimed as a victory for firefox...
My company does pre-press work for marketing campaigns. If they need 15 minutes to render a postscript file (or PDF) they need better hardware. We use off-the-shelf gear (PC and Mac, none of it SMP) and nothing we do that is full-page size takes 15 minutes, even at 300 dpi. What're they using, a PII-400???
That's a silly statement to make.
A PS or PDF file can be arbitrily complex for a given page size.
I've personally caused a single 8.5x11 page to take twenty mintues to come out of a fast laser printer.
All you need to do is send it a postscript file of something with a hundred thousand elements or so. (I'm my case, the VLSI layout for a microcontroller.)
If you're starting out with a bitmap then DPI and page size are dominating factors. When you're starting with a list of names in a scaleable font, you're talk about VECTOR graphics.
That is a "proper" way for a professional to work in this instance since they can then produce a result of arbitrary DPI or page size.
Life is too short to proofread.
Actually, I'm working at Mozilla on their shiny new Dual 1.8GHz G5 PowerMac with 1.25GB RAM.
The problem is that 10,000 names converted to outlines and intersected with a complex, gradiated shape isn't a task for mere mortals. But at the rate this thing is happening... Geez, Firefox 2.0 might be out! (j/k -- I'm almost done.)