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Opera's CEO to Swim From Norway to the USA
Viggeh! writes "An overly excited Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software, today proclaimed at an internal company meeting that if the download numbers of the new Opera 8 Web browser reach 1 million within the first four days of the launch, he will swim from Norway to the USA with only one stop-over for a cup of hot chocolate at his mother's house in his home country, Iceland.
The new browser was released Tuesday and was downloaded 600.000 times in the first 48 hours since release. The challenge will end on Saturday at 0900 a.m. CET, so if you want to try out some new software and make the CEO stick to his big words, download it at Opera's webpage(direct link)."
Sure enough, there's Norway, Maine. Shouldn't take him that long.
...except for that stopover in Iceland (described as "his home country", so no wriggling out of that one).
In case anybody is wondering - of course that cannot be done. While the atlantic ocean has been swum, it was done by swimming six hours a day in two hour intervals (and took almost 80 days). And the person who did it was a highly trained swimmer, not a corporate CEO.
Also, going via Iceland might be a bad idea - since in the north atlantic he will freeze to death without a dry suit. And try surface swimming six hours with a dry suit some time...
Does the Iceland chain of supermarkets count? :-)
Was "his home country" added by journalists or did he say those exact words?
There could be an "Iceland" store (or something) near-by...
First, the Gulf Stream doesn't extend that far north. Take a look at the wiki for it.
However, if he were swimming against it (instead of north it and perpendicular (roughly) to the current of the North Atlantic Drift), he'd be lucky to make any headway at all. The average speed of the Gulf Current is around 5 knots (or is that nauts? I've never been sure which is correct). Now, I've done a mile swim numerous times-- I was on swim/dive as a kid-- and I KNOW it takes me about 18-20 minutes to swim an imperial mile. Considering a nautical mile is even longer, I really doubt I'd make any progress swimming against that current! Take that & multiply by however many miles it is from Norway to Maine... I don't even want to imagine trying.
Allegedly real newspaper headline from 1998:
Man Struck by Lightning Faces Battery Charge
But not, apparently, those that reply to those that make fun of those who explain it.
Wonder how long this thread can go and keep getting modded up.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
About the Hotmail issue: there are limits to the webcoding stupidity that a browser can fix.
http://my.opera.com/hallvors/journal/37
If you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own. - Neal Stephenson
"He probably likes his product but does not believe its useful for everyone. This is why would he would be surprised to see a million downloads that soon."
This is obviously a load of crap. 600K downloads in 48 hours? How would he be surprised to see a million downloads soon?
Heh... one day after the story about PR firms, and we're still discussing this?
This is a friggin' press release for god's sake. The CEO is not surprised about anything. This whole outrageous statement was no doubt just a plan to stir up attention. And no guarantee that Opera didn't pay to have this story published in Slashdot anyway.
-a
I went through the site, saw the screen shots...What is the difference between this and Firefox? I'm not too familiar with this thing called Opera, I've only watched it here and there. What makes it worth the $40?
That's backwards. We don't want the least significant digit first. We already know what bloody millenium it is. However, knowing the day without knowing the month is almost always useless unless you're talking about the current month, e.g., "on the 18th", but no good if you're talking about "May 18th. So the American version is correct. The month, followed by the day as a unit; with year optionally appended.
I don't understand how "USA! USA! USA!" can possibly top "geeky correct". It's so obvious the right way is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS it hurts.
How TF can a date format that automatically sorts correctly be wrong?