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Opera CEO Prepares to Swim across the Atlantic
rRogta writes "Previously reported on slashdot here, Opera CEO boldly promises to swim across the Atlantic should the new Opera browser be downloaded a million times in the first four days after it's release. Well, they reached their goal and in this press release it says he's now preparing for the long swim."
I'm not sure it is possible to pull this off. Isn't the north Atlantic cold at this time of year?
Given Opera's business model, shouldn't he have tied this stunt to sales rather than downloads?
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
this is one of the big problems with 'good' software. we always try to promise about 500000% more then we can deliver.
Life Jacket
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
This seems incredibly fishy, as if it were a marketing ploy. At any rate, von Tetzchner will be smelling fishy very, very soon!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Well...despite of being closed software, I must admited Opera knows how to support linux - if you go to their download page they have packages for the main distros, ej: they've separated packages for debain woody, sarge and sid, different versions of fedora, etc...in fact I'm a a debian user (in case you haven't noticed) and I've the following line in my sources.list:
deb http://deb.opera.com/opera/ stable non-free
Wow, you got to admire that man. I suppose he's not going to do it in one run, the journey seems quite long. Very nice map, though. :)
:)
I guess he could also get a Krusty burger at one of those abandoned shore oil platforms
Swimmers with lots of experience have trouble crossing the relatively narrow English Channel. Attempting to swim from Europe to North America is out of the question, for the most part.
Without even considering the difficulties posed by currents like the Gulf Stream, the water exposure will dehydrate him severely and the constant cold temperatures will push him to hypothermia.
I wouldn't want to be him. At least unless I was swimming in a pool aboard a luxury liner.
charter an aircraft big enough to put a large water tank inside, and swim in the tank while the aircraft is flying to Iceland and thence to North America.
nice PR stunt!
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer both agreed to cross the United States territory up to Washington D.C. by crawling like two salamanders should the number of bugs in the soon-to-be released version 7 of the (in)famous Internet Explorer reaches 2000 in the first 2 hours of its release.
From TFA:
The author busted his cheek with his tongue, I think.
cp /dev/zero ~/signature.txt
I figure he's going to swim from the Norwegian Embassy in Iceland, go to his mum's house, then swim to the US Embassy. Like this: http://people.opera.com/nicolasm/opera_ch05.svgz
Well, now that this mission has been accomplished... *Switches back to Firefox when no one is looking*
Somehow I don't think he will be able to complete it:
g .h tm
http://www.didyouknow.cd/aroundtheworld/swimmin
Possibly the greatest triumph of endurance is Benoit Lecomte swimming across the Atlantic ocean.
Lecomte, born 1967, immigrated from France to Austin, Texas, at age 23. When his father died of colon cancer in 1992, it spurred him to do something extraordinary to raise awareness of and money for cancer research. With the help of Edward Coyle, director of UT Austin's Human Performance Lab, and dieticians, Lecomte trained to build his endurance, swimming and cycling 3 to 5 hours a day, six days a week for two years. On 16 July 1998 he set out from Cape Cod with 8 wet suits, a snorkel and some flippers into turning weather.
Navigated through the 40th and 50th latitude by two French sailors on a 12m (40 foot) sailboat and protected by an electronic force field, Lecomte swam 6 to 8 hours a day at two-hour intervals. He mainly used the crawl stroke, switching occasionally to a mono fin and using an undulating dolphin kick to carry him over the 5 600km (3 736 nautical miles) of relentless waves. 72 days later, on 28 September, he swam ashore exhausted but heroic at Quiberon, France.
Can you say publicity stunt? /. will give them before calling it quits.
I wonder how many more downloads
Now, if MS would do the same, at least we could hope for sharks...
Bill Gates and Steve Balmer promised to swim across their bath tubs, should 1 million bugs be found in IE7 within 4 days after release.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
You cold hearted bastards have just sent this man to his death.. hope your happy.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
When will these people realize that you can only make these kinds of statements once. If you cannot follow through, the next time you make a statement like this, no one will care.
if the ISS lands on him as he swims, I will give you all a Taco Bell taco.
Read the press release!
Jeez. It's a joke.
He's not really going to do it; he's figuring out a way to honorably get out of it.
Wait till I get going!
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Hella lotta reading, but essentially it does exist.
http://www.nbb.cornell.edu/neurobio/Sisneros/Sisn
Whenever Mrs. Fitch breaks wind, we beat the dog.
"Browser company seeks new CEO"
My other sig is extremely clever...
( or maybe "dont doit" for those nerds who will attempt to point out that don't is not a single word... )
That he should wait until spring..Ya'no, because that whole North sea leg (not to mention the stretch in the north Atlantic) would be somewhat chilly..to say the least.
Actually, it's doubtful he could continue doing laps all the way unless he was really dedicated and trained hard for several months. I suspect he will float in a chair the whole way while some bikini-clad waitress brings him bottles of beer and lathers sun screen on his body.
At least that's how I would do it.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
The Princess Bride quotes with a Monty Python sig. That's the kind of humor that I needed on a dreary, Monday morning. :)
But you would have known that I would have responded to your post, so I clearly cannot mod the comment in front of me.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
In the case of "Opera Downloaders being charged for the murder of Opera's CEO" I would just like to state on record that I did not download Opera.
Not at all.
Those stories about explorers dying while crossing the Atlantic are all ploys to keep real-estate values high in Conneticut. If people found out that they could commute to Manhattan faster from France than from New Jersey, the friends of countless politicians would lose their shirts in the market collapse.
Steven Newman's site theworldwalker.com. He is listed as the first man to WALK around the world. It took him 4 years and his book "Worldwalk" is a GREAT read (Order it and he'll autograph it and send it back to you).
He wrote a series of letters that were sent back and published in newspapers and all of them are being republished in their entirety on his web site right now.
Ironically he also ended up having a Japanese businessman to name a whole line of sporting goods after him.
http://opera.com/swim/ - Pictures have been posted. Next update at at 10:00 am CET (4AM EDT)
The next update on the remarkable and heroic journey will be available here on Tuesday, April 25, at 10:00 am CET (04:00 am EST).
Tuesday April 25 is a year from today!
While testing the Opera browser he was searching google for the term "swimming across atlantic ocean" and hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
There'll be a boat next to him. Around the 5th km, he'll give up, and say: "Well, at least I tried". Then he'll become an Icon of "you never know until you try", and a whole marketing campaign will rise from this.
Maybe he will try to swim across Pennesseewassee Lake in Norway, Maine to keep his promise of swimming from Norway to the US.
While undoubtably a publicity stunt, it's nice to hear that Opera 8 had 1,000,000 downloads. I have been a fan of it for years and use it as my primary browser. Although it is not Open Source they support more Operating Systems than any other browser - I even remember running a BeOS version years ago.
Opera is looking to hire a new Chief Executive Officer as they seem to suspect being without one soon.
so many ways to respond, a myriad of responses!
Continue the ad hominem attacks?
Educate you that its an homage to "Monty Python's Flying Circus"?
Make a velied reference to Monty Python's Flying Circus?
Make an allusion to another fav british show "Red Dwarf" by telling you to Smeg off?
Or some dissmissive missive that indicates you should simply give up because your ad hominem attack belies your own ignorance; a faux pas that diminishes your own standing in The Group by casting aspersions regarding the size of your manhood?
This is too much for a Monday morning; my head asplode!*
*-Ah, the old classic; escape via Homestarrunner reference!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
This isn't a dupe . The first article was about swimming across, this article is about swimming back.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
I don't understand this post. A "doit" is a small Dutch coin (about a half farthing).
Is this a reference to trying to make money off the publicity?
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
...everyone should upload the browser back to the web site.
A little known fact is that his bitter ex-wife was personally responsible for downloading over 300,000 copies of the program, stating " I hope he frezzes his nubbins off!"
..........FULL STOP.
I'd rather see the Director for IE development swim to the bottom of the atlantic.
After viewing the pictures on your website, I would like to apply for the newly opened positions of CEO and PR Manager at your company. I feel I have the necessary qualifications, such as "not-drowned" and "not-reported-lost-in-the-northern-Atlantic".
Thank you for your time and consideration.
things to keep in mind:
- traditional wetsuits, and especially drysuits are made for diving, not swimming. they are too stiff to swim for more than a few minutes (read: extra effort going nowhere) and cause abrasions / chafing in lots of places (neck and shoulders especially). there are suits made especially for swimming (try Quintana Roo or Ironman Wetsuits), but von Tetzchner is wearing a diving suit.
- you can't stock enough supplies for two people in a rubber inflatable.
- sharks. you'd probably want to swim in a shark cage.
- currents. unless you were totally insane, you'd rather swim with the currents than against them.
by the way, here's a guy who actually did it.for some reason being in water saps the heat out of you much more quickly than air will.
t y
That's part of one of the reasons, but there are others a bit more important:
The most important reason is the huge heat capacity of water: you can shove a little bit of heat into a given mass of air, and it'll warm up a huge amount, very quickly, to the point that it's often very very near the temperature of whatever it's in contact with (and no more heat, on average, will flow into it once it's at the same temperature as the heretofore warmer thing). However, if you do the same thing with the same mass of water, the water will just keep sucking more and more heat from whatever is warmer than it, as it will take much longer to heat up (generally).
The density argument is *somewhat* applicable, because it means that a given patch of skin will be in contact with a lot more water than it will with air, and so there's better thermal conductivity away from that patch of skin. However, that's the only thing I can see which would connect density to this issue -- the specific heat capacity of gold (at 19.3 times as dense as water) is only about 3% of that of water. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capaci
I'll give you a clue - you can stick your hand into an oven at 100 degrees very safely, but you can't stick your hand into a pot of boiling water :)
given the parent of this thread, shouldn't that read:
"HOLY CARP"
May you be touched by His Noodly Appendage. RAmen.
For short time periods 60 degree water is fine, but when swimming trans-atlantic, you want something a bit warmer.
Temperature Fahrenheit | Exhaustion/Unconscious | Expected Survival
32.5 | <15 min. | 10 to 45 min.
32.5 - 40 | 15 - 30 min. | 39 to 90 min.
40 - 50 | 30 - 60 min. | 1 to 3 Hours
50 - 60 | 1 - 2 Hours | 1 to 6 Hours
60 -70 | 2 - 7 Hours | 2 to 40 Hours
70 -80 | 3 - 12 Hours | 3 to Indefinitely
Over 80 | Indefinitely | Indefinitely
From: http://www.walrus.com/~belov/hypothermia.html
most spas are 100+ degrees. i think you got mixed up between centigrade and fahrenheit... water boils at 212F/i
Even so -- I regularly stick my hand into a 450 degree oven when things need moving around in there. It ain't comfy, but I can take 20 seconds of it. I'll assume for the sake of argument that the outside air has cooled things down to a balmy 350 degrees (it hasnt, but my point will still be made)
Now stick your hand into water boiling at a "mere" 212 degrees for just 10 seconds. You've just learned a painful lesson about heat transfer.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
But he actually specified he's going to swim from Norway to America by way of Greenland. i.e. against the North Atlantic current. Since said current flows slightly faster than the fastest swimmers swim, this whole disscussion is silly, because he's not actually going to do it.
Who says he "got mixed up"? He didn't specify temperature scales, and most of the civilized world aside from us 'Merkins don't use Fahrenheit. 100 degrees Celsius is the boiling point of water.
SIERRA TANGO FOXTROT UNIFORM