SWEET JOHNNY!
Will there be fire and rockets involved?
US thesp David Arquette has had an attack of the gitwizards and will this week spend two eight-hour stints in a plastic box suspended above NYC's Madison Square Garden. Although comparisons with David Blaine's legendary twatdangle are inevitable, our use of the term to describe 37-year-old Arquette's stunt is a little unfair, …
"For every completed download of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s Browser for the Better campaign (running today through Aug. 8, 2009) will donate the financial equivalent of eight meals to Feeding America’s network of 206 local food banks, which supplies food to more than 25 million Americans each year."
Well... as long as I'm not expected to install it too, how much can it hurt?
Good stuff. Nice to see the word twatdangle bandied around again!
Really though, I don't mean to marginalise the problems of starving folks, but it seems a little odd to have an apparently high-profile charity for feeding the most obese nation on earth!
Paris because of the mention of shameless self-promotion.
Even if they count "install" as part of the download, I've got an old Windows box sitting up in the attic -- how hard could it be to write a script that downloads and installs IE, then uninstalls it and downloads a fresh copy, installs and uninstalls it...?
After all -- it's for a good cause!
Better than the last Apple humanitarian effort... oh wait, there never was one....
I for one will be downloading IE8 as many times as I can. Fat American jokes aside (and believe me, as a 175 pound NOT fat American, I see more than my fair share of fat bastards here), there are hungry kids and familys out there that will benefit from this.
Way to go Microsoft. Oh, and David Arquette? Well, OK. He is pretty funny at times.
This works nicely:
wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/C/0/CC0BD555-33DD-411E-936B-73AC6F95AE11/IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe > /dev/null
Doesn't even need Windows. Far be it from me to create a loop, such as
while true; do wget http://download.microsoft.com/download/C/C/0/CC0BD555-33DD-411E-936B-73AC6F95AE11/IE8-WindowsXP-x86-ENU.exe > /dev/null ; done
That would be wrong.
Thought the same, went to the site which suggested I download silverlight (hah!) so I clicked on the plain HTML alternative but can't do anything because you need scripting enabled, and that was that.
Anyway, this at the bottom of the page:
"Only complete downloads of Windows® Internet Explorer® 8 through browserforthebetter.com from June 8, 2009 through August 8, 2009 qualify for the charitable donation to Feeding America®. Microsoft® is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America® up to a maximum of $1,000,000. Meals are used for illustrative purposes only. Meal conversion is effective until June 30th, 2010."
I guess they'll hit 869,565 downloads in the first day or two to make the $1M and the rest is just cheap advertising.
This campaign has nothing to do with donating money, and everything to do with marketing. The people commenting above, saying that they will download IE8, are falling right into Microsoft's trap. it's a ruse for marketing and antitrust issues. By pointing to the downloads, Microsoft will be able to say:
- "Look at this, we've got 1943 billion downloads whereas Firefox only has 1 million. The market has spoken, and it has proven that Internet Explorer is the Better Browser, providing better security, better usability, and better reliability than the alternatives."
- "See, the people want our browser. Just look at how popular it is, how many people are downloading it. This clearly shows that people want Internet Explorer. By shipping IE with Windows, we're just giving the people what they want."
- "The fact that people are downloading Internet Explorer 8 shows that people have the knowledge and capability to download their preferred browser."
Also, the commenters above should have read the press release itself. It's quite enlightening. Microsoft is putting forth an illusion of altruism while being EXTREMELY disingenuous about how much they're donating (in my opinion, this should have been highlighted in the Reg article).
Read the text of the press release: "For every completed download of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s Browser for the Better campaign (running today through Aug. 8, 2009*) will donate the financial equivalent of eight meals".
Now read the the footnote marked by the asterisk: "Microsoft is donating $1.15 per download to Feeding America, up to a maximum of $1,000,000."
Where in any First World country can you get eight meals for $1.15? That's 14.375 cents per meal. That's the cost of a single slice of bread (seriously). Last I knew, one slice of bread and no drink was not considered a "meal" in any First World country. As for the maximum donation of one million dollars, I think it's safe to assume that they spent more than that on marketing for this campaign.
"Really though, I don't mean to marginalise the problems of starving folks, but it seems a little odd to have an apparently high-profile charity for feeding the most obese nation on earth!"
America being "the most obese nation on Earth" (with the UK catching up fast) doesn't mean there aren't meny people there living off food hand-outs.