So yesterday was finally the day where the full page spread made it into the largest newspaper in the World, The New York Times. Only, it wasn’t a full page spread, it was two! You can head on over and get the PDF yourself. But be warned, when I tried opening it on my Powerbook, I had to reset the machines after 10 minutes of it looking at me like it had swallowed something pointy… Oh yeah, and our company printers are still trying to spit it out, so far no luck ;)
“The Mozilla Foundation paid the reduced non-profit advocacy rate for the ad (reliable sources inform us that an advert like the Firefox one would cost under $100,000) and all the costs of the campaign were easily met by the $250,000 of contributions.” #
So where’s my name you wonder?
So that’s cool; being part of open source history and all. Money well spent I think, and what a brilliant idea in the first place?! And just to add a human touch to it all, despite it having been made quite clear that all names would be verified, at least one keen Dane made it past their defences:
It reads: ‘Nicolaj Elsker Helle’, which means ‘Nicolaj Loves Helle’. How romantic is that? I wish I’d come up with that. I wonder what else is hidden on there?
PS: Now that we’re at it, check out Jon Hick’s look at the new and old Firefox logo.
Kick ass feeling, I trust. I personally paid, got the “you’ve helped change the world” email, but didn’t find my name in there. I’m sure they are swarmed by complaints at the mo, and I certainly have no intention of bringing my gripe forward – the cause was Firefox, not my name in NY Times after all – but I do feel a little disappointed.
It’s a shame that it could not coincide better with the release. So much mainstream media wrote about Firefox in early November, but GoogleNews it now and you’ll find little info on this thing outside the slashdot clique. Certainly this will help bring Firefox into the limelight, but it doesn’t feel like the tidal wave I had hoped for (release, lots of blog-reports, lots of regular media reports, NY Times add etc.).
It’s more like: “ .… “, “YAY Release”, “ .… “, “Uh, NY Times add, cool”. Personally I was hoping for a big resounding media splash!
I must have been spending way too much time on the internet. I first read that second name as a rather peculiar name instead of seeing the danish meaning.
Sucks about your name; while it’s true that it was for Mozilla, you’d want the token of your involvement…
As for the timing, I couldn’t agree more. I also thought it odd that they waited this long, but apparently they weren’t happy with the first ad layout.
I’d like to hear the Mozilla team’s thoughts on this whole thing. Like how much time actually went into doing the ad and whether there were any problems that halted the ad at any point.
I had no luck opening it using Preview on my iMac GV (1.25 GB of RAM!).
So, I tried using Adobe Acrobat Reader, and it opened in 2 seconds.
Didn’t Apple claim Preview to be the fastest PDF viewer available?
The ad itself rocks. I hope they do more of these, especially one over here in the UK – in The Metro. So many commuters would get a look at that on the Tube one morning.
Dave, that’s really odd! I wonder why that is…
That’s funny I opened it in about 2 seconds in Safari (using the pdf plugin).
Really strange.
While I came late to the Firefox ad campaign party, I still think it’s awesome that your name is up there along with the other people who so generously donated to the Mozilla foundation.
If they ever plan on doing something like this again they can count on my support. In the mean time I’ll just pluck a shirt and the CD from their store.
Oh, look look! My name is right to the left of that wonderful gesture! :o)
Hah, what a cool conincidence :D
Woah, you made it on there! That’s awesome, dude!
Bjørn, YOUR name is in the ad – the pdf anyway!
Actually it was the first name I stumbled across when I zoomed in.
Have a look!
I have to say, prior to 1.0, I wasn’t a very big fan of Firefox. I’m very into animation, and I found the flash plugin to be very slow when watching shorts (though the Flash plugin on OS X is slow to begin with).
I picked up 1.0 after the final release, though, and I have to say, I haven’t looked back at Safari since. It’s great to see such an awesome open source product getting such mainstream acclaim.
Now if OpenOffice.org could only get up to speed…
“Napoleon Dynamite” is on there….
I’m in the lightest, barely-legible gray zone =/
Also, I lied: I’m not really in the “lightest” gray section. Oh well.
Same experience as Dave Winter with Preview; I’d guess the issue is that Preview’s algorithm trades off lots of memory for speed (Wikipedia), like it just bitmaps the whole image in memory at some high resolution. My poor powerbook with only 256MB RAM was paging constantly for over 15 minutes when I tried it, so I let it run overnight, only to have it fall asleep and page everything out … so when I woke it, it started again. Went to Adobe and it worked straightaway, but yeah, printing on the university lasers hung the printer for over half-an-hour with no signs of success. I wonder what kind of gargantuan computer systems must run the typesetting systems like at the NY Times.
My name is in the ad too — not a bad deal for a student. Unforunately Firefox doesn’t AFAIK have configurable behavior for left-right mousewheel (emulated by uControl): it wants to use it to go back and forward in the history. On my Windows and Linux machines, though, it’s awesome.
Where did you find a Firefox logo at that size? I’ve been looking for one, preferrably in a vector format. Haven’t found anything at mozilla.org.
I posted the love message for Helle! I’m so happy they printed it, and she was very surprised when she saw it in the paper :-)
Johan, here is the Firefox logo
davE
Nicolaj, you get the prize of the ‘most romantic geek’ of the year :)
Whoo! First name!
Nicolaj, that’s really cool, very nice. I wish I’d come up with that, too ;)
That is really so romantic! Helle must be the happiest girl now!