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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."
They have to pay $130,000 if the ad is "too commercial"? How is that determined? And isn't a non-profit a non-profit, no matter what kind of ads they run?
You won't hate yourself in the morning if you don't get up before noon.
If they mention using Firefox then it's going to be commercial. Although the author of the ad says they have a special guarantee about the pricing, so New York Time's standard pricing may not matter.
Just because they're a non-profit doesn't make them a good cause. If they advocate using more standard compliant browsers rather than just Firefox or Mozilla browers they're more likely to qualify as an advocacy group rather than commercial entity. But based on the promotional drive I don't see how they can not mention Firefox directly.
Joseph Elwell.
Now I can understand the delay.
After all, would we really like to see Osama bin Laden support Firefox in the New York Times?
Hmm, so the ad runs at 11 users per second.
Solution obvious! We either overclock the New York Times, or we lobby the printer industry to break the Adobe monopoly by supporting Firescript (originally called Postzilla, and occasionally still referred to as Lexscape by some marketroids at A Certain Very Big And Very Evil Corporation), the new page description language interpreter that provides for enhanced security, usability, and performance on phototypesetting equipment of all types!
Rendering the Firefox New York Times ad.
Lots of people can't move from windows because the sites they need to look at only work in the Windows version of IE. If the marketshare for IE goes down because of FireFox, sites will follow by making their pages work on it. At the same time, people will have a familiar application they can use when switching, so I would guess that this may help other platforms.
on that day by atleast a few thousand. Yet another instance of open source promoting business.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
...Will this do any good? Seriously, will some AOL user be sitting, reading the times, see the ad and go "An ad for 'FireFox'? 'Better Browser'? I better switch!" Probably not. After all, AOL already gives them a "better internet." Damned AOL ads.
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.
Eventually they will see the golden island... but for now they can stay on the sinking ship if they want to. I think most of the community is hoping that this will show the majority of people that open source is the better alternative. I haven't recieved one piece of adware since I switched to Firebird (and later to Firefox)
Two points, both of which will no doubt get me flamed to hell and back:
1. If 10,000 flies can't be wrong, what does that say about the millions that buy Microsoft products? From the viewpoint of the majority of the readers here, aren't those Microsoft customers wrong? Quantity never implies quality, my friend.
2. It might not be open source, but Opera perhaps meets your description of "the most reasonably standards compliant, light weight, cross platform web browser ever made" more than Firefox does. Opera is available for more platforms, is smaller in size (even with a greater feature set that includes an email client, etc), better integrated and more polished.
Yes, there are some very, very minor incompatibility issues but the Opera development team has always done a good job of ironing out any wrinkles that do appear. And, as you've alluded to yourself, there's no such thing as problem-free browsing (at least on any non-Microsoft browser) nowadays.
Other than that, well done to everyone who's contributed to the development of Firefox, no matter how great or small their contribution.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I'm curious about the timing of the ad. The last two weeks of the year are when most corporate executives take vacations ... meaning they may not keep up with news in the Times ... meaning if the goal is to convince these guys to use Firefox in their corporations, they may miss the target market entirely. I suppose you could make the case that these same guys now have more time to sit on a beach and read the Times, but has any thought been put into the timing of this thing?
I wonder if the amount of press coverage they've had about the ad will give them more exposure than the ad itself.
10,000 names on a page are so many that practically none of them will be readable and it will create confusion by people reading the add wondering why there is soo much background in a full page add.
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...
I don't understand why Firefox is blowing 50K to put an ad in the NYT. A single ad is not going to cause anyone to adopt the browser - it is well known that ads take a lot of impressions to get someone to get action on it.
As a "thank you" to the community it is pretty weak as well. It thanks only the NYT bottom line.
A well-hyped $50K 1.0 launch party would be a better way to generate press and motivate people to switch to the browser. It would get far wider coverage than a single page in one edition of the NYT.
What "names" are they talking about? And a 15 minute ad?! Are they fucking insane?
The Magic Clue-Ball(tm) tells me the New York Times is a newspaper, not a TV station. That means no moving video. Some things should be spelled out. Others belong to that category I like to call "general knowledge everyone but you seems to know".
It's precisely the attitude of Linux elitist uber-geeks like you, that is keeping the chasm between Linux and Windows, uncrossable.
The REAL reason for people to have less reasons to move off Windows is because they DON'T find their favorite Windows software on Linux.
So, people need to adopt Firefox as part of their "favorite Windows software", and guess what, it's ALREADY on Linux!
What Linux REALLY needs to overthrow Windows, is a multiplatform RAD environment for C++ (and maybe *cough* Visual Basic *cough* equivalent), so Windows users will start developing multi-platform apps without having to code everything by hand.
Paraphrasing Archimedes: "Give me a cross-platform RAD, and I shall move the world".
So far, Firefox doesn't only give us a great cross-platform browser, but also XUL. And that does much more to help people build bridges between Linux and Windows, than your "screw windows users" attitude.
Gecko.
*ducks and runs*
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
This isn't a branch of government. We're talking about the New York Times. Surely they can decide whether to charge Firefox the correct rate based on the message.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
Could someone who has donated change their name to Bill Gates please? Thanks!
I like muppets.
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.
In related news, this poster is appearing all over Oslo, Norway. Spotting it the other day was one of those unwordly moments where you're seeing a little-known niche thing becoming mainstream. Then yesterday I had a meeting with the IT manager at a government agency; those guys have always been Internet Explorer users, and now Firefox was running on the guy's desktop. The fact that Firefox is actively competing with IE now is going to be good for the Internet.
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.)
Sssssssssssh! I'm giving everyone I know FireFox for Christmas! Don't let them know it's free! They'll all think I'm a cheap ass!
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Now, quite a lot of people tried to post this on Slashdot, but for some reason, these stories seem to have been rejected wholesale. I fail to see the reasoning behind this: Being U.S. centered is one thing, trying to supress the first example of an ad that the world has been holding its breath for quite another. It would be nice if the editors forced themselves to give a reason when they rejected postings or at least created a section where people can look at them.
The ad is 13" x 21". The font I'm using is Univers 67 Bold Condensed for the names. They're set at 4.5pt/4.6pt, tracking set to -25. I have enough room for 1.75" of white space on the page.
Since I'm designing it, I didn't do exactly what you would do, but you've got the right idea.
Chris