Slashdot Mirror
IE Sends Cake to Firefox 2 Team
GDI Lord writes "The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent the Firefox team a cake for the release of Firefox 2!
"P.S.: No, it was not poisoned" " That they know of anyway.
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
but they didn't have time, seeing how they were too busy building a better browser! Good night, everybody!
stuff |
They can't have their cake and eat it too!
I think this is the poster child for the "itsatrap" tag.
...just got a whole lot friendlier
Reminds me of the prank they pulled on the Netscape team long time back. Not that this is another prank, but well...
Are they sure it wasn't just humble pie? :)
Nobody likes black frosting. Consider it an obscene gesture.
WHO NEEDS SHIFT WHEN YOU HAVE CAPSLOCK/ DAMN1
So the IE team prove that firefox can have their cake and eat it!
Better than the big IE logo they left back when IE4 shipped, although the cake surely didn't provide as cool of http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/mozilla-ie-car d.jpgpictures. (It is sad seeing the guy placing the marketshare number there, however.)
That was pretty classy. (Even if ultimately it was intended as a bit of good-natured competitive ribbing, which it doesn't look like.)
I have to say, often times we're prone to think that large organizations such as Microsoft are just a big, faceless entity. As a whole, this may or may not be true, but either way, they're only made up of people. The IE team only wants to ship the best software possible given their resources, as does Mozilla.
The best to both teams -- let the competition continue!
Shouldn't it be http://fredericiana.com/2006/10/24/from-redmond-wi th-love/ ?
When the cake was opened, the Firefox team found it was not quiet finished and full of bugs.
If it wasn't for the Firefox team, we'd all still be stuck with IE6 and the Internet Explorer team would have had to look for new jobs.
While the IE team touted the cake as 'new and innovative', after further investigation, the Firefox team discovered that Microsoft had used ingredients that originally appeared in Mozilla cakes several years earlier.
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
since when is Exlax considered poison...
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
Then the FF team will slowly start disappearing from mysterious causes
"Let them eat cake."
Remember, Microsoft disbanded the IE team shortly after 6 was released. The IE team sends a cake not just for a "birthday," but as thanks for giving them jobs!
The Explorer team also left a greeting card with the picture of a grumpy baby with the note: ``It's just not fair. Good people shouldn't have to feel bad. Best wishes, the IE team.'' [an error occurred while processing this directive] A helium-filled balloon taped to the logo reads, ``We love you.'' How history changes in 9 years.
Sally Struthers: No! This is my cake!
Cartman: Sally Struthers, you give me that cake!
Sally Struthers: You can't have any!
Should mozilla not exist, there would be no IE7 team. The IE7 team must be glad that mozilla keeps releasing new versions so they can keep their jobs. Without competitive pressure M$ left 5 years pass without a IE release.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
Who says Microsoft does not give back to the open source community?
I've been trying to use Firefox 2.0 for the past few days. I never got around to using any of the release candidates, but I had kept reading that there were a lot of improvements and that it was going to be a great release.
That's not what I've found. The memory consumption issues of Firefox 1.5.x have still not been dealt with. The Firefox process I'm using right now has been running since yesterday afternoon. Using the Task Manager, I can see that Firefox is taking up 593 MB of RAM. I've heard that this can be caused by bad extensions, so I didn't install any. Furthermore, I heard that Firefox's caching sometimes uses a lot of memory, so I completely disabled it.
I've also tried IE7, and I've been really pleased. They've gotten their act together and their product works very well. I've been using Firefox 1.0.x for a long time now, but I think I might just switch to IE7. I was hoping that I could take the Firefox 2.0 route, but based on my experiences so far, that won't be happening.
I hope the Firefox developers enjoy the cake the IE7 team sent them. They should eat it, and then get to work on fixing Firefox for 3.0. I'm hoping Firefox 3.0 finally gets around to lowering the memory consumption to a reasonable level.
Isn't Real Cream ;)
Looks like Micro$oft is just thanking them for the great ideas, which they will add to the next version of IE. They always were a step behind.
Developers later found that they were unable to open the box containing the cake. When attempting to do so, they kept getting a message from WGA telling them that it was attempting to verify that theirs was in fact a Genuine Windows Cake, then their connection to the server would time out.
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
reads "Thank You for tabbed browsing."
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
After they ripped off so much shit from Mozilla.
However, it did contain the pubes of every person on the IE team. The Firefox team plans on retaliating by baking a cake using the dismembered appendages of family members of the IE team. You can thank South Park for that grisly idea.
For a change, Microsoft's IE team was showing a bit of class and acknowledging that without the competition and innovation from Mozilla Firefox, there (probably) wouldn't have been an IE 7 project. It also hints that there might be some subtle changes in Microsoft's old Cult of Bill approach. At the end of the day, software developers are just people, and political football aside, there really is no reason for animosity. Kudos to Microsoft's IE 7 team for being good sports.
Maybe while us users squabble in our own browser war, the development teams actually don't care all that much. Maybe they truly are just glad of how everyone is advancing (as opposed to just trying to one-up each other). I'm not saying that everyone in both companies feel that way, but instead of reading stuff into this surprise present, maybe it was just a good gesture.
"But did they include the recipe?"
Were there any bugs in the cake?
Was the icing #FF6666, #6600FF or something else?
Was there a nice #FF0000 cherry on the top?
AT&ROFLMAO
Was it a Ferrari cake, or an Acura cake?
The Cake Is A Lie...
"It's a trap!"
P.S.: No, it was not poisoned
Montgomery C. Gates: Look at them stuffing their faces, never knowing they're getting closer to the poisoned part of the cake... There IS poison in the cake, right?
Smithers Balmer: Uh, no sir, our lawyers said that's considered murder.
Montgomery C. Gates: Damn their oily hides!
Seems Death wasn't an option
Seems even the IE team knows that IE is dead.
As for the ex-lax, bugs, pubes in the cake of course none of that is true. Those things would only be possible if someone at Microsoft actually made the cake, and that's not how MS does things. They knew they couldn't make a good cake so they just went out and bought a cake from someone who already knew how to make one and then stuck their logo on it and called it theirs.
How is this a troll? he is completely correct about the memory usage of FF, granted mine is only using 228MB with no extensions its still way too high!
""The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent the Firefox team a cake for the release of Firefox 2!"
And being the nerds they are, it was baked into the shape of Counselor Troi. The Firefox nerds, now trendy Galactica fans, merely laughed at the nerds who were so out of it as to still love "Star Trek".
Where were you when the voynix came?
The picture is hosted on flickr.
Shouldn't it have been cookies?
Ok, maybe they were afraid they don't accept cookies.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
IE developer: What? The cake wasn't poisoned? But... but... then what did we just eat?!?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I heard Microsoft was originally going to book the entire Firefox dev team on Oceanic flight 815....
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
So IE vs. Firefox is a piece of cake? For whom?
I recall stories of cheerleaders from my highschool making brownies with laxative mixed in and sending them to the cheerleaders of a rival school. Maybe this is a similar gesture? I would hope, at least, the cake was magical .
Why bother.
Damn! Those idiots at Microsoft can't get anything right!
That cake looks like it was made on a PC.
Was there a file in it?
After all, Firefox has probably caused more updates and work on IE than anything else. Those IE developers are probably quite thankful seeing as their budget increased quite a bit, partially because there is now some decent competition on the field.
Congratulations on fixing Internet Explorer 3!
*DrugCheese rants*
what it looked like... was it a "#1" - or was it the bird? Or even better, was it a picture of a fox pissing on an "e"
I wonder if it was CSS (Cake Sweetness Standard) 2.0 compliant?
Knowing Microsoft probably not...
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
They are grateful to the Firefox team for doing all their R&D for them.
In a related story, 2 days after the MSIE team sent the Firefox team "Cake 1.0", some important discoveries were made. A package was sent and the FF team was instructed to take the cake to the kitchen for more work. Turns out that the MSIE team forgot the sugar and flour.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I used to work for Major Cell Phone Company 1. Our competitor, MCPC2, was based in the same town as we were. The best lunch hours where when "my guys" and "their guys" wound up at the same place. We'd taunt each other mercilessly, but we'd also share information as well. "You guys planning any expansion south of Richview? Good, we could use the roaming when our new site goes online in June. Oops, did I say that out loud?"
Sure they were "the enemy" but because of their competition we always had job security. And the fact is that they were just people who did the same job as us. We had a lot in common, and knowing what their jobs consisted of, a LOT of mutual respect. Just don't tell any of them that I said so, I'd hate for their heads to get too big to fit into the door of that crappy old shed they call a MTSO...
Did the cake say "Congratulations" or "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche"?
We know the how the Firefox team answered that question.
When Microsoft runs out of cake, the Opera team will have to politely ask for the chicken.
... did they accept the cookie ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Just as they did with the Nintendo Wii and Xbox360, Microsoft is getting free publicity.
With Firefox just releasing their new version, it has eclipsed the launch of IE7. By sending a cake, which is sure to getting bloggers and slashdot to post, Microsoft directs the attention back on them. Also, it's good publicity. But we all know, no publicity is bad publicity.
SLASHDOTTERS YOU TOOK THE BAIT!
"Cake or death?"
"Eh, cake please."
"Very well! Give him cake!"
"Oh, thanks very much. It's very nice."
"You! Cake or death?"
"Uh, cake for me, too, please."
"Very well! Give him cake, too! We're gonna run out of cake at this rate. You! Cake or death?"
"Uh, death, please. No, cake! Cake! Cake, sorry. Sorry..."
"You said death first, uh-uh, death first!"
"Well, I meant cake!"
"Oh, all right. You're lucky I'm Church of England!" Cake or death?""
</eddie izzard>
sorry, first thing I thought of
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
... send congratulations for their first efficient internal database implementation??? Mozilla used text databases to store information which is for Firefox not a big problem, but it is for the Mozilla suite, ie. Thunderbird which uses that dumb db to store usenet article topics completely in memory!
...to bake a pretty cake.
The frosting around the edge of the cake looks like morse code - hmmm - my morse is a bit rusty. I think it says "Cancel release and we'll tell you where the antidote is".
do they get to eat it?
Sergeant:When a felon's not engaged in his employment -
Police: [His employment,]
Sergeant:Or maturing his felonious little plans -
Police: [Little plans,]
Sergeant:His capacity for innocent enjoyment -
Police:['Cent enjoyment]
Sergeant:Is just as great as any honest man's -
Police:[Honest man's.]
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I hope they didn't intend the FireFox team to use the cake to.... Oh, never mind :)
( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkA6JZqwc3w )
"Let them eat cake!"
yet insightful. If they wanted to do anyone a gift, they should have concentrated on making a browser that doesn't suck. They [willingly] hardly improved DOM/CSS support at all even though it needed it badly (that's what their browser needs the most), still no xhtml mime type support, still insecure (already 2 exploits for it), a stupid GUI (the menu bar below the address bar instead of immediately under the title bar where it belongs and tons of little things), a broken zoom feature (hyperlinks are messed), a totally brainded and retarded installer (they've disabled the switches to integrate it into an installation CD, and you MUST have WGA installed for it to install [don't want that spyware on my PCs TYVM], they've disabled unattended installation of the extracted packages too - anything that was useful was intentionally crippled! Only IEAK makes half-decent installers), they've dropped support for Win2000 (which lots of people/businesses still use), and it's slower and more of a memory hog than firefox 2. And it does break several apps (there's patches for AutoCAD products because of it namely, and I noticed my DB2 installer which worked perfectly pre-IE7 install now doesn't anymore).
Yeah, it has tabs, and it finally supports the html4 abbr tag, but that's not exactly new stuff.
IE is Microsoft's single biggest failure. Worst than Windows ME, Clippy and MS Bob together. I very much like most of thier stuff (windows, visual studio, sql server, etc), but IE is such crap, I feel sorry for people who use it. There are so many good browsers out there (not just firefox), there's just NO excuse to use that piece of junk (unless you're stuck with some ActiveX-using app, in which case I'd look into replacing that - and ActiveX can be made to work on FF AFAIK, not that I'd want to do that)
Cake in Firfox?
Can someone fax me a slice?
Have you read my journal today?
Lots of comments about how the IE team is happy to be empoyed, a friendly gesture, poking fun, etc etc. But I think this sort of thing is more common place than most of us imagine. Big companies that spend a lot of their time working on similar products follow eachother's progress very closely and are aware of the same difficulties they're both having. They may not be on the same team, but they're fighting the same battle. Even physical wartime battles have been known to halt to celebrate a common holiday, together.
I know that Terminix (a client of my company) congratulated Orkin (the evil competitor) on one of their recent anniversaries. It's a way of saying "We know what you're up against, and we know it kinda sucks. Hang in there."
My wife and I watched an episode of Dharma & Greg last night (TiVo, don't know the air date) where they're entering a dancing competition. Dharma's parents were against it claiming competition makes people mean and greedy. I see that a lot in society, and it doesn't have to be that way. Competition is to make us better individuals. Without competition we'd never progress to the next level. And because of that we should thank our competitors for putting up a good measure of excellence.
Even in sports like track and cross country where you can effectively compete against yourself, where's the push to keep getting a faster mile time, higher polevault, or longer long jump if you have nothing to compare it against? At the end of high school track meets I remember walking around and shaking the hands of everyone I competed with. If it weren't for them I wouldn't have been "in the top three" regularly. I'd have just been a dude running crappy lap times on the weekend.
Here's to competition! The evolver of our modern society. Thank your competitors, for they are what bring us a better life.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Microsoft Cake?
Finally, my Microsoft Bob has been hungry for years now, maybe i can finally raise him a level.
Have you read my journal today?
Yes, this link is http://static.flickr.com/118/278562314_14716c0232. jpg
FF: All right. Where is the poison? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both eat, and find out who is right... and who is dead.
IE7: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own cake or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own cake, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of me.
FF: You've made your decision then?
IE7: Not remotely. Because iocane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of you.
FF: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
IE7: Wait til I get going! Now, where was I?
FF: Australia.
IE7: Yes, Australia. And you must have suspected I would have known the powder's origin, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of me.
FF: You're just stalling now.
IE7: You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? You've beaten my giant, which means you're exceptionally strong, so you could've put the poison in your own cake, trusting on your strength to save you, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of you. But, you've also bested my Spaniard, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that man is mortal, so you would have put the poison as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of me.
FF: You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work.
IE7: IT HAS WORKED! YOU'VE GIVEN EVERYTHING AWAY! I KNOW WHERE THE POISON IS!
FF: Then make your choice.
IE7: I will, and I choose - What in the world can that be?
IE7: [IE7 gestures up and away from the table. FF looks. IE7 swaps the cakes]
FF: What? Where? I don't see anything.
IE7: Well, I- I could have sworn I saw something. No matter.First, let's eat. Me from my cake, and you from yours.
FF, IE7: [they eat]
FF: You guessed wrong.
IE7: You only think I guessed wrong! That's what's so funny! I switched cakes when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...
IE7: [IE7 stops suddenly, and falls dead to the right]
Opera: And to think, all that time it was your cake that was poisoned.
FF: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.
I would have sent a cake back to the IE team. Except I would have included the recipe on exactly how the cake was made along with it.
And some will say that Microsoft can't ship on time!! at least cakes they can
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
that Firefox has taken the cake for best browser!
It secretly contained chopped-up bits of the IE source code. Having ingested it, the entire Firefox team is now legally disqualified from working on open source competitors.
Or something like that. It's early still.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
After seeing Van Wilder, I wouldn't accept any baked good delivered to me.
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
Just for information. IE7 is now named "Windows Internet Explorer" instead of "Microsoft Internet Explorer"
Quick, before someone sees me! Go to my secret website and type LOGIN. Then use my login, Pharmboy. My password is "portal" (without the quotes). At the prompt, type "thecakeisalie" at the prompt without the quotes to activate the hidden camera inside Microsoft! The cake is a lie and this proves it!!!1!
;)
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Where did they sent the cake to?
Will all firefox developers be able to get a slice?
I submitted a bug report once - does that deserve a slice?
Free Food is the best.
I bet that the IE team plant small and sophisticated mechanical bugs inside the cake, which will activate themselves after the bugs are exposed to stomach acid. They will cling to intestine walls and record all conversations by the firefox team. Periodically, the bugs will transmit the data to redmond.
If any of the bug is exposed to x-ray radiation, it will self-destruct, but only after sending self-destruct code to to all other bugs.
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
At least its proof that they know who their enemy is, I wasn't sure they had figured that one out yet.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Human nature being what it is, people only tend to play the bully when they're at the top of the heap. Microsoft are not a completely undisputed monopoly any more; Apple have regrouped, Linux is continuing to make in-roads, and I've just downloaded FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE...it's great.
In other words, Microsoft are having to compete on a more level playing field. Given that, some people at least within the company have probably realised that they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from being nice. I'm sure there are some who've been around long enough to have noticed a massive change in IBM's behaviour in the last ten years, compared to when they were a monopoly...they're not king of the hill any more either.
Another thing worth remembering is that in nearly any conflict, the brass are primarily to blame. It was high ups within Microsoft who would have been responsible for killing Netscape...my guess is that the IE 7 team are more or less rank and file in Microsoft's heirarchy. Some of you probably know the story about at least one Christmas Day during the first world war...some lower level soldiers from both sides gave each other presents, sang carols together, and played soccer...which made the officers furious.
It's only officers or politicians who tend to want conflict...aside from self-defense, the little guy has nothing whatsoever to gain from it.
...because Bill Gates fears having pies around him.
...that Firefox 2.0 has zero problems running on my machine that has only 160 megs of RAM for days at a time.
I keep hearing about these memory problems from people - but *I* don't see it... and I've got at least 7 tabs open at any given time...
I doubt IE7 would perform so well on my 366MHz machine though.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
"That's no cake...."
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Looks like a extended standard cake to me.
1. Start cooperate with a competing bakery.
2. Get competitor's recepy.
3. Break of cooperation.
4. Profit!
Don't eat it!
I remember a certain scene from a movie. There is a picture of the IE team farting on the cake at the bottom.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
The cake seems ugly looking. Or am I just crazy?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It just shows a bit of symbolism that the FF team can now have their cake and eat it too...
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
The blue delivery van crashed on the way.
*ouch sorry
Even their cake isn't fully compatible with iCSSing.
"Every vision is a joke until the first man accomplishes it; once realized, it becomes commonplace." -Robert H. Goddard
FF: All right. Where is the exploit? The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both eat, and find out who is right... and who is dead. IE7: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the exploit into his own cake or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the exploit into his own cake, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of me. FF: You've made your decision then? IE7: Not remotely. Because this ActiveX exploit comes from AJAX, as everyone knows, and AJAX is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of you. FF: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect. IE7: Wait til I get going! Now, where was I? FF: AJAX. IE7: Yes, AJAX. And you must have suspected I would have known the exploit's origin, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of me. FF: You're just lagging now. IE7: Connecting... IE7: Connecting... IE7: Connecting... IE7: Waiting... IE7: You'd like to think that, wouldn't you? You've beaten my buffer overflow, which means you're exceptionally strong, so you could've put the exploit in your own cake, trusting on your security to save you, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of you. But, you've also bested my Zero-Day Exploit, which means you must have studied, and in studying you must have learned that browser is mortal, so you would have put the exploit as far from yourself as possible, so I can clearly not choose the cake in front of me. FF: You're trying to trick me into giving away something. It won't work. IE7: IT HAS WORKED! YOU'VE GIVEN EVERYTHING AWAY! I KNOW WHERE THE EXPLOIT IS! FF: Then make your choice. IE7: I will, and I choose - What in the world can that be? IE7: [IE7 gestures up and away from the table. FF looks. IE7 swaps the cakes] FF: Javascript console: Missing Parameter IE7: Well, I- I could have sworn I saw something. No matter.First, let's eat. Me from my cake, and you from yours. FF, IE7: [they eat] FF: You guessed wrong. IE7: You only think I guessed wrong! That's what's so funny! I switched cakes when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against Microsoft when profit is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha... IE7: [IE7 stops suddenly, and falls dead to the right] Opera: And to think, all that time it was your cake that was poisoned. FF: They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to ActiveX.
"The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent the Firefox team a cake"
And they let it past airport security?
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
Did you check out the balmer video on the blog ?
"Un-be-lievable! It comes with Write and Reversi and runs bla-zing-ly fast on a 286! And all that for only 99 Dollars! (Except in Nebraska)"
First, Microsoft invites the Mozilla team over so that they can help them integrate it more tightly with Vista. Now they're congratulating them with a cake.
It begs the question... Are they plotting something? Or are they buttering the Mozilla guys up for some kind of buyout? Or could the IE team really be good sports about all of it?
/* No Comment */
...when the IE people manage to handle them properly and safely :-) .
Did it say: C:\>ONGRTLNS.FF2
(Apologies to Apple)
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
How can you be so sure? Many MS bugs have taken years to surface.
(( Heard from a low level admin))
"Accounting called. They want to know the cost code for Sending Cakes to Competitors".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
This reminds me of the time when John Smedley sent 1200 Krispy Kreme donuts to Penny Arcade. Arguably he was trying to give them diabetes and put an end to their assault on SOE, but it's entirely possible that bitter hatred and its lesser cousins, disdain and irritation, are no obstacle to having a sense of humour.
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
I think it was less "Congratulations to you" and more "Let them eat cake"...
the KillerB
How very Marie Antoinette of them. "Let them eat cake," indeed.
Has anyone actually verified that the cake is in fact from Microsoft?
I can hear the phones ringing....
Mozilla secretary: Mozilla- home of Firefox and Thunderbird, how many I help you?
Microsoft secretary: This is Ursula from Microsoft's browsers division- we didn't send a cake...
*phone drops*
****DON'T EAT THE CAKE!****
Or perhaps upon closer inspection, there were flakes of white powder on the bottom of the cardboard...
I'd be wary of food items being dropped off anonymously.
Did an IE rep physically hand over the cake and show real ID?
Another example of FUD, followed by a buy-out of developers.
FF deaths are the worst.
cookies?
...but I think this... ummm... takes the cake for the most posts modded funny I have ever seen!!
Its ok, I'll go flog myself for the bad pun.
I don't have a microwave. I do, however, have a clock that occasionally cooks shit.
I think that's the obligatory joke of the day.
Did Opera send them a singing telegram?
...should read like this:
:)
All your browser market are belong to us!
-firefox team
"Now you can have your cake and eat it too".
All in good fun of course. Good show Microsofties.
i would interpret this as analogous to the horse's head placed on the bed in The Godfather.
free software, open standards, open file formats, no software patents.
It might look like a FF2 lauch cake but really they were thanking the Mozilla team for providing Microsoft with a browser feature specification list they could work from while attempting to 'improve' their product.
;-) But maybe there's another Halloween document inside...
Sending a previously heated pile of flour, water, sugar and eggs is the LEAST they could do. But then again, Microsoft has NEVER been any good at giving credit where credit is due.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Mirosoft just scored not only publicity from the release of IE7, but they suckered the Firefox gang into advertising it as well for the price of a fucking cake ?!
Brilliant !
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Did the cake read
"Congrats for releasing a product that actually made us get up off our asses and do some work around here. The IE team."
Of course that would be a lot of cake real estate that could otherwise be decorated with pretty flowers and pictures of slain foxes.
Don't you hate glorious self-promotion? Visit my Blog
Let them eat cake! The open source movement will still take the IE7 Bastille.
After being told to "Let them eat cake."
Piece of cake!
They scraped the logo off and replaced it before they ate it.
It was Laocoon, not Cassandra. In John Dryden's translation of Virgil's Aeneid:
"Laocoon, follow'd by a num'rous crowd,
Ran from the fort, and cried, from far, aloud:
'O wretched countrymen! What fury reigns?
What more than madness has possess'd your brains?
Think you the Grecians from your coasts are gone?
And are Ulysses' arts no better known?
"This hollow fabric either must inclose,
Within its blind recess, our secret foes;
Or 't is an engine rais'd above the town,
T' o'erlook the walls, and then to batter down.
Somewhat is sure design'd, by fraud or force:
Trust not their presents, nor admit the horse.'"
Nice that the 'free as in beer' mozilla folk seem to think it's ok to violate AdSense's policies. Asking visitors to click on your ads in a direct violation. The site owner should try being honest like the rest of us.
*Shot snapped and sent off to Google*
Underneath the cake is the EULA that starts with:
By consuming this cake, you agree to the following terms in the cake end user license agreement (EULA)...
Don't worry, the Microsoft employee responsible for the incent has already been fired and blackballed.
Firefox needs to send a bunch of burritos to the IE team.
Not A Troll!
Since someone already noted that cookies would have been more appropriate, I'll just offer my guess that it was a cellular peptide cake. With mint frosting. Mmmm... Troicake...
"Even pirates like chocolate chip cookies." www.youtube.com/musecast5
which ment that the Firefox team could not accept it, as it was worth more than the total value of gifts per year they can receive from their clients, err, I mean competition....
thousands of frosted miniature Microsoft employees came streaming out of the cake and took the office...
I've never had huge memory issues on my primary desktop, but on my notebook I've had Firefox 1.5 push the 1 gigabyte memory consumption mark, after several hours of normal browsing. I think I have mostly the same plugins installed on both, but I'll admit I haven't investigated rigorously.
Interestingly, I tried disabling Firefox's memory cache, and that fixed the memory problem, but then random websites started loading as blank pages...
The IE team is trying to kill off the Firefox team using carbs!
but seriously, I think the IE team just appreciates the competition. Having a browser war really does drive innovation. Now Firefox team needs to come up with a gift, that is better than a cake. although wasn't IE7 released a while ago?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Quoth Marie AntoiBallmer: "Let them eat cake."
A sheet cake!? . A budget the size of Kentucky and all they can muster up is a sheet cake!?
I think there's a subliminal message in the colour of the cake. Black and white? Stone age? Old Tv? i.e. (get it i.e.) firefox is crap?
That does not have any problems with Firefox and memory use. I have Firefox open all day long with multiple tabs, always. I use about a dozen extensions too. Even when working on ajax interfaces while using FireBug to debug I still not have memory issues. I'm running on Ubuntu dapper. Does that make the difference? Previously Suse without issues, also.
I also have my son's computer running dapper as well. They use it mostly for playing Java based games in Firefox online. No memory issues there either.
Just lucky? I don't know.
... cream pies.
Microsoft's way of saying, "Let them eat cake!"
How about this, Microsoft stole all our browser ideas and all we got was this lousy cake?
What are those Micro$oft engineers?
Sissies?
The cake was black because of the teams black hearts. "We will crush you Firefox like ants!" IE Team. P.s Send the blog poster couple bucks for surviving the /. effect.
\
This might be the classiest thing I've ever heard of MS doing. No in-joke, no sarcasm, here's your non-pretentious cake, you deserved it.
It's how the rest of the world works. Healthy businesses acknowledge competition and inspiration. Their workers even go out for drinks with rivals now and again. $giantcorporateentity != $employee and all that.
I'm not exactly heralding the coming of a kinder, gentler MS that consistently behaves like a grownup, but baby steps like this are the beginnings of a change in corporate culture and should be encouraged.
Props to the IE 7 team, you guys showed some serious class and also delivered a great upgrade (minus a few bizarre interface choices) recently.
Now who do I have to send a cake to to get my menus back in IE without hitting alt?
I kid!
(mostly)
I didn't watch enough Star Trek "The Next Generation." Did the Borg ever try to assimilate another by letting itself be assimilated into them first? I suppose this is like submitting an empty bag of "integrity" just so they could get their bag full of someone else's integrity.
Metaphorically speaking: Did Micros^Hx6 the Borg give any forks with the cake, or did they decide to walk away with the forks?
What people try to criticize Microsoft Internet Explorer as having poor HTML standard adherence, is actually not HTML but their own in-house standard independent to that of another. Don't forget that just because there is a Board of said standard to confer it upon a company, doesn't mean they can't just grow their own similarities independent and unique down to the verry grain. If intellect moved independently, then isolated forms of untracable intellectual inductance are the cause of reprove.
without prejudice
You obviously have never used Opera. I'm running 9.01 on i386 Linux right now. This current process has been running for 17 days. I know it has been that long because that's when I last booted my system, and I always open Opera immediately after logging in. I've probably opened thousands of tabs by this point. I read about 75 blogs each day, plus checking my web-based email, reading the news, reading Slashdot, and checking other sites. Even now, with 27 tabs open (I just counted them), the Opera process is only consuming 31 MB of RAM.
31 MB of RAM over 27 pages makes sense. First there's the overhead of Qt, since I'm using the statically linked build of Opera. Then there's the overhead the browser itself, including its JavaScript interpreter, email client, protocol support, HTML parsing and rendering code, and so forth. The pages each likely contain between 75 KB and 400 KB of HTML, JavaScript and images. So adding the overhead of the DOM and perhaps some cached data, 1 MB per tab seems reasonable.
Frankly, I don't see how the same justification can be applied to Firefox. 80 MB to 90 MB is just unreasonable. We're talking 3 MB per tab with 20 tabs open, and that's allowing Firefox itself an overhead of 20 MB. Opera offers what amounts to be the same features as Firefox. Yet Opera manages to keep its memory consumption within understandable and justifiable limits. Even in the best of cases, Firefox uses three or more times as much memory than Opera does, even when Opera is being pushed far harder.
...I bet there were worms in it! ;-)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Was is a Ferarri cake or just an Acura cake?
but either way, they're only made up of people.
The cake is too.
Because without firefox and its 20% market share or so, there wouldn't be a IE7 team at Microsoft. No need to.
It's not classy, it's public posturing.
That was very nice of them.
----- If communism is a system where the government owns business, what do you call a system where business owns govern
I hope they sent something in return... maybe this! ;)
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47