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)."

Direct Link to Win32 version

[Leknor]

For such a geek heavy site as /. you'd think a download link would be to a platform select page and not the windows installer.

Here is a better download link: http://www.opera.com/download/ [opera.com] Unfortunately not all platforms have an Opera 8 download yet.

Re:600.000 times

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

In parts of Europe, numbers are delimited with a period "." rather than a comma ",".

Therefore, 600.000 is 600,000.

Why, exactly...

[Eivind]

Can anyone tell me why, exactly, the "direct link" to download Opera from Slashdot points to the Windows version ?

One would assume, if noone else, atleast Slashdot is aware that there *are* other OSes out here. (and Opera supports quite a few of them)

One word:

[p3d0]

Wetsuit.

Yeah, but which norway

[rde]

Being the suspicious slashdotter that I am, I suspected that a) there was a town in Norway called USA (unlikely), or b) there was a town in America called Norway (almost certain).

Sure enough, there's Norway, Maine [norwaymaine.com].

Shouldn't take him that long.

Re:600.000 times

[Anonymous Coward]

In Canada, we use the ONLY GOOD way: a space for delimiter and period for decimals.

And that's the ONLY way you can write big (>1000) floating-point (decimals) coordinates and still have everyone figure it out without explanations.

Exemple:
546 239.472, 654 371.653

Unless you don't use a delimiter, of course. But then your numbers are fsuking hard to read.

like the old Burma-shave promotion

[Anonymous Coward]

He'll choose a 'Norway' other than the country if they hit the download mark.

Burma-shave had a contest in 1955 to send someone to Mars (whoever was first to send in 900 empty jars of Burma-shave). An enterprising grocery store owner in Wisconsin took up the challenge and called the company's bluff.

Burma-shave ended up sending him to Moers, Germany for a nice vacation.

http://www.snopes.com/business/market/mars.asp has a writeup, for anyone feeling nostalgic.

Re:Cold

[werfele]

Tetzchner would not be the first. Benoit Lecomte [didyouknow.cd] swam the Atlantic in 1998.

Read the press release

[Tom]

You should really read the press release [opera.com] that is on their main site.

It's so much tongue-in-cheek that it stops just short of saying outright "yes, it's a joke".

Then again, it's very refreshing to see that a corporate PR department can still get away with cheap shots at the CEO. Choice quote: "However, having seen Jon in his red beach attire before, I am not sure if swimming to the USA is scarier than exposing people to this sight."

Re:Downloaded....

[Rits]

A few minutes browsing yields this:

http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/compare/
http://www.opera.com/features/

You might not need a feature-rich browser, but it is obvious that firefox does not 'do it all' for free.

Re:Read the press release

[Klivian]

>have a nice attitude, they don't take themselves too seriously.
Corporate culture in Norway are very different from what people are used to from Amercan companies.

Re:Jon will swim (European humour is sick)

[Rits]

Download.com didn't start counting this last Tuesday... The screenshot they have is from 7.5x.

Re:Who cares?

[fidelius]

Opera's generally faster than Firefox, and handles tabbed windows in a much more intelligent way. Though you can get most of the same functionality from FF with plugins Opera works properly from the get go.

If you use POP mail the M2 mail client is also great, though it takes some getting used to. Works on filters rather than folders, much like Gmail.

The Opera/FF war is always flamebait, so I won't say Opera's best for everyone, but if you haven't looked at it already it's worth trying.

Re:Where is the outrage?

[hkmwbz]

"So, by downloading and using Opera you're supporting adware."

Nothing wrong with that. Adware != spyware.

"Imagine the outrage that would occur if Internet Explorer included ads built into the browser and Microsoft offered to remove them if you paid for it. I do believe there would be lawsuits galore. I searched through the comments to this post, and I saw nothing mentioning these forced ads."

Forced ads? Lawsuits? First of all, you already pay for IE. It's part of the Windows OS, which is not free. Secondly, Opera is the only independent browser vendor (IE = Microsoft, Mozilla = IBM, Nokia, Sun, etc.), and no one is forcing you to use Opera. However, you can use it for free in ad sponsored mode, or you can buy it to get rid of the ads.

Opera has to fund development somehow, and basically your comment is nothing but FUD.