GeekScribes

New ISP in Mauritius soon?

InF — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:54:40 +0000

The offer seems interesting. They, yes “they” since the article doesn’t mention what ISP it will be, but I suspect it will be Outremer Telecom, since it’s already in Mauritius. There is no confirmation yet, so it’s just my supposition.

The project is going to be a Multiplay offer: Internet, TV and Phone in one single package - Something that is very popular abroad, specially in France. The price is what is most interesting: Rs. 1000 for the package. Rs. 1000 or lower, if I understand the article correctly. The TV offer seems interesting too, as this mysterious ISP intends to offer over 160 channels, something which has never been seen in Mauritius before.

This lone ISP alone, can single-handedly take over the market of VoIP (I guess that’s what the telephony is about), the satellite TV’s market and squat in Orange’s well-secured Internet market. It’s a direct rival of the very popular MyT offers of Orange/Mauritius Telecom.

Still quoting the article, “‘Nous allons arroser tout le pays d’un seul coup’, promet ce dernier.” To be able to get to the whole island at once, I believe they will have to use some form of Wireless technology, maybe WiMax? If they do this, it’ll most certainly not please Emtel and Nomad, specially the latter that has seen its customers migrating to Orange after the speed boost. I doubt they will spend a lot trying to put cables everywhere.

Keeping the best part for last: ” L’Internet à trés haut débit (on parle ici en termes de mégaoctets) et la téléphonie seront offerts de maniére illimité.” Did I just read, “uncapped, high-speed megabit broadband”? Seriously?? If this is true, you are so going down, Orange! I like your 2x speed boost without charging us customers more, but if ever I’m getting 10Mbps at Rs. 1000, I’m not going to be a faithful customer anymore!

So what does the coming of this new operator mean for Mauritius? Simply, that existing operators will be having a tough time if all that was mentioned in the article finally reveals to be true and gets implemented. Orange will lose Internet customers. Nomad and Emtel will surely suffer it’s a wireless, on-the-go offer. MyT will have a direct competitor. Well, overall, it’ll be a big wave on our quiet island.

Will it come to realization? Will everything be implemented? “Unlimited megabit broadband” by the end of the year? 160 TV channels? For now, I don’t know. It seems a bit short. There is less than 6 months before the end of the year now. Implementing a whole new system in like, 5 months? Isn’t it too short?

I’m not trying to be negative here, but if it does happen, it’d be one heck of a New Year’s present!

There is, however, some problems on the road to this “unlimited” offer:

“Au niveau du ministére, l’on se dit ‘impressionné’ par le projet, mais plusieurs questions se posent. Une fois le dossier déposé, les choses devraient être plus claires.

A l’ICTA, l’on se demande ainsi combien de fréquences seront nécessaires pour le projet.

Maurice ayant un nombre limité de fréquences à sa disposition, un projet qui en exige beaucoup sera difficilement réalisable. Au niveau technologique, il faudra également voir si ce projet est compatible avec les autres déjà existants et qu’il ne créera pas d’interférences.

‘Il faudra voir ce que pensent nos ingénieurs et techniciens. Les opinions des autres opérateurs seront également sollicitées, comme c’est le cas pour tout projet’ , dit- on à l’ICTA.”

Frequencies huh? What kind of frequencies? Wireless?

Let’s hope that ICTA and “The Ministry” decide to get things rolling soon. Either that, or they stop calling Mauritius a “Cyber Island” once and for all. There is a one-time chance to rapidly boost our I.T. sector, and they freeze the project?

For now, let’s this sentence guide your dreams and hope: “Mais, il semblerait que dans tous les cas de figure, l’usager aura droit à de l’illimité.”

Any comments?

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New ISP in Mauritius soon?

5 possible and cheap improvements at UoM

InF — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:33:21 +0000

Undeniably, there are lots of things that UoM needs to do to improve, and it’s almost impossible to list them all. Students often ask for unreasonable things which will cost a lot of money to implement, like “buy new computers for the labs”, or “get LCD screens” or even “a faster Internet connection”. The problem in all of these is that they require quite a lot of money to implement, and money is something that UoM is always in short supply of.

Therefore, this list of 5 improvements I’ve compiled here have one thing in common: they do not cost a lot to implement, or they do cost, but are one-time investments. Some may even be implemented at almost no cost. Of course, if you got suggestions or disagreements, you know where the flame comment box is located: below!

Here goes:

#5: A campus forum

With the increase in the number of students at UoM, communication difficulty between students and lecturers is proportional to the number of students in the class. It’s understandable - if 50 students asked a single question each, and each took 2 minutes to answer, we get 100 mins of question time over 120 mins of lecture. Not really feasible. What can be done?

Implement a campus forum or a bulletin board, if you wish. Most other Universities (excluding Mauritius) have some sort of communication system, be it a forum, or their very own kind of system. The Student’s Union had the idea in their election manifesto, but I think it vanished afterwards, for an unknown reason.

There is no excuse. Forum scripts are freely available online. They are very easy to implement. UoM already has servers to host its websites. So where’s the problem? Download the thing, implement it and get some help to secure the script a bit.

It would be of great help to students. If students don’t understand how to use a forum, it’s easy to teach them how to do it. I believe there is already a database system for students at UoM (the one for university emails. Remember, you got an email when you joined). That same database could be used to auto-register all students.

I doubt it can get any easier than that. Now, if only people decided to get it implemented, instead of the idea just being a line in a pamphlet…

#4: A decent cafeteria

People already at UoM, have you noticed that the main cafeteria has been closed for the larger part of the academic year that just went by? I used to say that, as a veg, there was almost nothing for me to eat at the cafet. Well, now there’s absolutely nothing. I do know that there is a mini-cafet at Old Common now, but it’s not the same as the old one. At least it was bigger there.

Addressing complaints about the cafeteria is one thing the administration did right, but they should have considered looking for substitutes before kicking the actual caterer out!

For now, MIE and Mini-cafet will do the job. For how long? Don’t know. Let’s hope not for a second academic year. I wonder how tough it can be to put a notice in the newspapers for the interested folks that wish to take over cafet. According to the latest sayings, it seems that the MIE caterer has taken over the actual UoM cafeteria, which would be a good thing. Anybody can confirm that?

#3: Change that homepage!

I doubt I need to say more. The title should be quite explicit. But for others, I’ll give a brief rundown of why the UoM homepage needs changing. Consider it a list within a list. Firstly, for some reason, typing “uom.ac.mu” directly in Firefox yields a “Firefox can’t find the server at uom.ac.mu.” Go figure. You need to type the “www’ in front: “www.uom.ac.mu”. Wonder how many of you still type whole addresses.

Well, if you don’t want to read those 5 points, basically they are talking about grouping stuff.

Isn’t that menu incredibly long and unhelpful? Most of the links are not fit to be given space on the main page. The most interesting ones are Bulletin Board, that leads me to a 404 error. Module Directory, Regulations and maybe, Students Email. All of which could have been grouped under a “Students’ Resources” dropdown menu. The rest could have been stuffed in other dropdowns too. Mission and Vision? Come’on! Put that in “University” menu. Same goes for 3D tours, Benefactors, Campus Facilities, Photo Gallery, Newsletter, Vacancies!
Who, in his sane mind, would put a Calendar of Activities as a link! As if that was not all, who would put it in the footer? The final straw, the font is so tiny! Every other font on the site is tiny! It’s the Internet folks! People who use it usually have bad eyesight! Why not put it as an actual calendar? With dates. Like Wordpress’ calendar! That would have been much more useful. Something that bolds the dates with events on them and give you an in-place popup when you hover on that date! Aren’t we in Web 2.0 yet?
If you open this dropdown, you get all of what you want. It’s actually one of the most useful things on this website! Do check it out. Don’t be scared by how long and crammed it is though.
Why is everything so crammed! Ahhhhrgh! Information overload! Why aren’t those grouped too? And LLC? MCE? You want people to guess what those mean? And I thought that “no acronyms in menus” was a given. Even with the cramming, there’s so much whitespace. The layout is a fluid one, so check out how it appears on my screen. Lots of whitespace is never a good thing. It indicates wrong usage of screen estate.
Remember 2? Now we got a Search link? Why not simply put the search box directly there, on the top right side where people expect it?

#2: Coffee is a must

Do I even need to mention that coffee and university students go in pairs? In short, we need coffee machines, distributors or whatever. We need coffee. A hot cup of coffee or chocolate would keep the majority of students awake during lectures. We’d also appreciate if we can get soft-drink distributors: you know, the machines where you stuff in coins, kick them a few times and they give you what you want? We need those. We are tired of crossing the whole campus from Engineering tower just to get something to drink.

Ask the major distributors in Mauritius if they aren’t interested in putting their machines there. I bet they will be. 3000+ possible customers is not negligible. Specially the small minority that’s addicted to coffee and cola. Hopefully, one or two per faculty isn’t too much. Vandalism? Place them in some corridor, or in front of some lab where lots of people go by. It should be enough security.

In the mean time, we still got coffee from the cafeteria. Problem is, the coffee is not portable! Portable coffee! However, the mess that plastic cups are going to cause is of concern. Got to find a viable solution for that. Garbage bins are not in short supply though, so it may not be a real problem after all. Paper cups are bio-degradable as far as I know.

#1: Realistic timetables please

I had to mention this one. Last academic year, my lectures started at 8h30 a.m. Leaving aside the fact that most of the time, nights are spent doing labsheets and assignments instead of sleeping and that it’s a real pain to get up at 5 a.m afterwards, getting to UoM at 8h30 is almost impossible considering the traffic jam. I leave home at 7 a.m and hopefully I’ll be at UoM by 8h30. I don’t live that far from campus. Now when I think of other people staying really far away, with two or more hours of travel just to get there (excluding return journey duration), I can only sigh.

What difference would it make to start courses at 9h? I guess not much, since when I was in Year 1, courses started at 9h. And it was all for the better. Last year, we had Summer Time on, and courses starting at 8h30. It was almost impossible to get there before courses started. Most of the time, people came around 9. It’s easier for us all. And 30 mins of added sleep… who can refuse that??

#0: Wikipedia knows no UoM

Zero? Yep, this one is a bonus for you. Go to Wikipedia and search for “University of Technology, Mauritius”. See the results. Next, type “University of Mauritius”. You see what I mean?

UTM got its Wikipedia entry, and UoM does not. No fair! And I thought UoM was supposed to be the main tertiary institution in Mauritius.

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5 possible and cheap improvements at UoM

ThePirateBay for Sale: The death of a symbol?

InF — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:10:27 +0000

If you are not aware of it yet, it seems that The Pirate Bay (TPB) is up for sale, and as already acquired a potential buyer in the name of the Global Gaming Factory X AB (GGF). The price tag was set up at $7.7 million. What now follows is my personal opinion on the matter.

I think that, if TPB is indeed sold, it’ll mark the death of a symbol in the fight against major labels, Hollywood and whoever wants to make the most money out of customers as it is possible. TPB was a major fighter, often disgracing the people who intended to bring it down. By TPB, I mean the collective running the site, including Peter Sunde. On its website, it often mocked their legal threats and did not take any actions to comply in any way whatsoever. People saw in TPB, a revolution, a rebellion. They took TPB’s side, and identified themselves with the tracker. They wanted content cheap or free, and TPB could provide it. TPB getting sold means that these folks lose their avatar.

However, TPB going down does not mark the end of piracy on the Internet. Torrents are small files, and as TorrentFreak says, one can simply move all the torrents to another tracker, and a clone of TPB would have been born. Technically yes, another TPB would have risen. However, the black-sails-pirate-ship symbol that many associate with piracy nowadays will be gone. I bet that the labels are already rejoicing and are eager to do business with GGF! Wherever there’s money to be made, you will find labels and the usual guys.

GGF wants to make TPB into a legal venture, which instantly defeats the philosophy of the site, that is promoting illegal file-sharing; an image that it has painstakingly preserved over the years. The ship was battered, but never sunk even in a deluge of legal threats. No label, no Hollywood firm could claim the head of the tracker. Seems GFF will be able to, soon.

As if this was not enough, GGF has even more plans for TPB. It plans on taking over the 20 million plus users of the tracker. How? By monetizing the uploads and downloads. Sounds familiar? This is exactly what “legal napster” tried to do, and if you don’t know how it ended, better check it out. In a few short words:no MP3s, DRM.

What will happen to TPB? I don’t know. It depends on how things turn out. There are a number of possible outcomes, the most prominent ones being that the site becomes even more popular with users. Seeders get paid to upload the content they just downloaded (the content they PAID to download). Artists and others get paid to put their content on the tracker. And the site makes money via advertising. Basically, it’s all about money. Think iTunes, but using Bittorrent technology. I guess that is what GFF wants to make TPB into.

The other, darker alternative is that the bulk of the faithful users of the sites move on to other trackers, or another tracker rises to claim the rank of TPB as No.1 notorious tracker, and acquires the users of TPB. This one seems most plausible to me. I don’t think that people who were used to get stuff for free at TPB will now want to pay to get it. They’d just prefer to move on to some other tracker. Not that there’s a scarcity of those anyway.

Also, this sale does not concern the by-products that TPB spawned, most notably, that Youtube alternative that TPB staff were talking about launching recently.

Now, the first part may have sounded a bit dark, but alternatively, there may be an upside to this story. It may be that the Industry has finally seen the light and have acknowledged the Bittorrent technology as the future of media distribution, and will adapt to it, instead of trying to fight it. This too, is a possible outcome of the sale. The problem in this is whether people will stick it it. But I guess that if the price is right, the service will manage to find customers.

Moreover, ISPs will probably want a role in this scheme too. Which ISP wouldn’t like to see Bittorrent traffic reduced on its network. If the content is legal, they may introduce local caching for the most accessed files, which in turn reduces international traffic and boosts speed for users.

I don’t want to sound negative, but I believe that the “darker” outcome is the one most probable. Already, a number of users are demanding that their accounts be closed at TPB, if the sale concludes. This shows that TPB users don’t actually want to buy content. They want it for free: they want it the way TPB has always provided it. And free cannot be beaten by any offer whatsoever.

For now, let’s just stand by and watch what happens. If TPB goes, it’s a symbol destroyed. It’s as if a general is killed in battle, but is in no way the end of the war. Others will replace it, just as Oink was replaced. Just like Kazaa was replaced by Torrents. If the sales is indeed concluded, the TPB war would have ended, but the people behind it would be $7.7 million richer to fight their legal battle, and possibly buy Sealand? Or some other small island and build their own pirate colony? Who knows where this matter is going.

Have your say! The comment box is below.

Sources: TorrentFreak, TorrentFreak, Wired

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ThePirateBay for Sale: The death of a symbol?

Firefox 3.5 officially released: Reviewed!

InF — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:04:30 +0000

Firefox 3.5 was officially released today, Tuesday 30th. The released candidate (RC) was available for a while back, but the version we are talking here is what I call the Final version, that is officially released.

If you haven’t done so already, go to Mozilla and download your copy. If you are lazy, you can try Help - Check for Updates directly in your Firefox 3. If you are already in RC, get the final! Got to show Internet Explorer 8 who’s the boss around here (and to stop MS from bragging any further)! Note that some of your addons will not work, such as Tabmix Plus, one of my favorites. Their forum have an updated beta copy, but for now, I downloaded alternatives (TabKit) to compensate. Do a backup of your stuff, if ever you want to restore.

Now is not too many upgrades to comment on, so I’ll just go on and review those I’ve seen worthwhile of mention. And some that operate in the background and that you will not see.

I have to start somewhere, right? So let’s see what changed in the immediate interface. You will see that Mozilla (now referred as ‘they’) have modified the tab bar to make it more like Chrome’s. Note that small + button near the tab? That’s your new tab button. It follows you now. Apart from that, not much to see in the main window. Looks mostly the same as Firefox 3.

Now the menus. All the menus are similar, save for the History and Tools menu. In History, you now have the option to undo closed tabs, but now, also closed windows. That’s pretty cool for people who use multiple windows. As for me, I prefer a ton of tabs rather than more than 2 windows at once.

In Tools, you will find the Private Browsing mode, or what we common folks call the “porn mode” - this is what it’ll be mainly used for. Legitimate use: accessing your bank account. Or so the “innocent” claim they use it for!

Some other interesting features you might find interesting are:

Ripping out tabs: Drag a tab away from the tab bar and release. Voila, you now have a window, with that tab inside. Pretty cool way for creating new windows, rather than using File - New Window, copy-pasting the address and whatever. You can also drag out tabs, and put them in other existing windows. Well, you can do a lot of cool things with dragging tabs now. If you don’t want to drag, right-click and choose Open in a New Window for the same effect.

Firefox 3.5 is promoting porn mode or what? In the History sidebar, and some other places History-related, there is an option to “Forget about this site”. I’ll leave this one to your creative uses.

Tracemonkey was included. That means faster Javascript. Well, a lot of stuff Javascript-related faster. If you want the gory innards, check out Mozilla’s Tracemonkey Wiki.

Video and Audio HTML5 tags are now supported in-built. This will probably mean that sometime in the future, you’ll not need to install Adobe Flash or whatever other plugins to view video and have audio on websites. I can’t begin to imagine what crazy ideas developers will come up with to over-exploit those! Just wait and see.

AwesomeBar filters: You know what AwesomeBar is right? It’s the address bar, for those of you who don’t. Well, now when typing in it, you can filter what results it returns. It’s easy enough to use the filters. As for remembering the symbols, I can’t say the same. Who came up with those? I also gave you a way to remember those. My own personal method. E.g. Try “Geekscribes *” in the address bar without quotes.
- History only = ^ (Up symbol, like, from where you came previously. Assume you are navigating down something)
- Bookmarks only = * (The * symbol is on the 8 key, that looks like a B symbol. B for Bookmarks)
- Tagged Pages = + (+ for pages that I like)
- URLs only = @ (The @ symbol is used in email addresses. URLs are called addresses)
- Title/Tags only = # (That one I don’t know how to remember!)

You can restrict the search to your history by typing ^, or bookmarks with *, or tagged pages with +. To make what you’ve typed match only in the URL type @, and for title/tags only use #.

Geo-location. Basically, now your browser knows where in the world you are. So when you are looking for pizzas in Google Maps, it’ll show you what’s closest to you. Haven’t tried that personally. I’m just scared of the implications. My browser knows from where I’m browsing porn! That’s so scary. It may even lead me to some unwanted locations (in the real world) to find what I’m looking for. I hope I’m joking, because seeing Google pointing me to the nearest porn would be awkward!

Session restore improved. If ever your browser crashes, on the next restart of the browser, you are prompted to restore the previous session, complete with ticks to choose what tabs and windows to restore. That’s very nice of Mozilla. It’s directly there in the browser window, like one of those Pages not Found messages. You get the idea. Fortunately, I was able to recreate it by End Task’ing Firefox via Taskmanager.

Did I mention that Firefox 3.5 is fast? It’s amazingly responsive, and hardly lags. Memory usage is still quite too. 127MB for 5 tabs and around 20 addons installed. It also loads fast. Less than 2 seconds it seems.

Not much to say apart from that. I’ll leave the rest of the goodies for you to discover. After you go, come back here and give us some comments and opinions about Firefox 3.5!

(Some info taken from Lifehacker)

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Firefox 3.5 officially released: Reviewed!

Internet Explorer 8 Lolz: Act 2

InF — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:41:00 +0000

EDIT: (starts here)

More lies and debunking them! You really have to see those two links.

Among the most interesting ones:

“Internet Explorer 8 has much more functionality than other browsers, and its functionality is there from the moment you open the browser. Internet Explorer 8 offers almost all of the features the most popular add-ons in Firefox have, and you’re able to personalize your browser in a way that saves you time and research.”

Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium’s test cases than any other browser.

Can’t Microsoft be prosecuted for spreading lies like that? It’s almost offensive to web-developers!
(ends here)

I recently mentioned that Internet Explorer and Microsoft were afraid of other browsers. Remember that 10k competition thing?

Well, Microsoft has done it yet again! Only this time, it’s a lot more funny and weird. And the amount of lolz just got way higher! See for yourself! And the Digg source.

Line by line comments follow after the shot:

Now the comments:

Yeah right. IE is more secured than both Chrome and Firefox. I wonder where all those vulnerabilities come from. All those ActiveX nasty stuff. Yeah. IE is indeed secured.
In-Private browsing? Ever heard of Chrome’s Incognito mode? Firefox’s new Privacy mode? Or what we call “the porn mode”? Another set of ticks missing here!
IE is easy to use? Since when? Accelerators? Try SmarterFox. Chrome is fast enough as is!
At least they got some humility to say that Firefox 3 is better. But still, I doubt IE8 is better at standards. Remember that ACID3 test?
Developer Tools? I dunno. Can’t comment. But I know nothing beats Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar combined!
Reliability. Firefox will soon have tab/process management, don’t worry IE. Chrome already has it.
Customizability: Many of the things I want? Right out of the box? Gimme the features of a fully-featured RSS reader directly in IE (Brief?). Or coloured tabs (Colourful Tabs). Or a powerful download manager (DownThemAll). I can even write my own, or customize existing ones! Stop hating Firefox, MS! Give some love to the Fox!
Compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser? For real? And that ACID3 test again? And the non-respect of standards?? Don’t make me laugh! Opera is the best in compatibility imho!
Manageability: What do they mean here? I can’t understand.
Performance: Why isn’t Safari here? I heard it’s the fastest of them all.

Overall, IE is bluffing. But hey, more lolz for us! Who are we to complain? I’d so like to see Firefox 3.5 soon. Hey, why not Firefox 4? Let’s see IE fight that!

Seems TechCrunch is poking some fun at IE8 too!

So long!

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Internet Explorer 8 Lolz: Act 2

Firefox displays weird characters as headings (solution)

InF — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:44:52 +0000

I am currently using Firefox, latest version that is 3.0.11 at the time of writing, and I encountered a strange problem on some sites, one of which is the famous Smashing Magazine. The headings were displayed using weird characters, or what it would seem, special characters. You can see a screenshot below.

At first, I thought it was a problem with character encoding. Changing to UTF-8 did not solve the problem, nor did switching off Auto-Detect from View menu - Character Encoding solve anything. Well, basically, after a lot of trying out solutions, it was not a problem with charset or encoding.

I tried other solutions but none seemed to work. One of them gave me a clue as to what the problem is. It was going to Tools - Options - Content - (Fonts & Colors) Advanced - (uncheck) “Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of my selections above”. This rendered all pages without custom fonts, except my default of Times New Roman. The problem was solved.

The workaround indicated that the problem resided with my fonts. I thus went and checked out the website source and the stylesheet and found out that Smashing Magazine uses Helvetica font as primary font for h2 tags. This line was found in the source and stylesheet respectively (I shortened the code with …’s):

<ul class="topic-list">
<li>
<h2><a...> ... a>h2>

ul.topic-list h2{font:44px Helvetica,Arial, ...}

If you don’t know, Helvetica is a proprietary font and doesn’t come with installs of Windows by default. It didn’t come with mine, on both my XP and Vista installs, so I’m assuming it doesn’t come by default.

The Solution:

So what can you do? Apparently, nothing. You cannot acquire the Helvetica font for free and install it. Unless you are willing to pay for it, you are stuck.

Now, if you are crafty enough, you can use some Google powers and try to find the font by… let’s just say, alternative means. I am not posting links here, because I do not encourage piracy. I managed to find a copy of Helvetica somewhere, installed it and problem was solved. You can see the results below.

If you do want to do what I did, you just need to find a copy of Helvetica from somewhere, install it, restart Firefox and the problem should be solved.

Another plausible solution would be for sites with such problems to substitute their fonts for those people do have on their machines. But we cannot require this from site designers. Another way would be to be able to find an addon or similar for Firefox that would allow for font substitution. If you know of such a solution, you are free to share it with us.

A bit of strangeness here is that, since Firefox did not find Helvetica on my machine, it should have used Arial. I cannot understand why it did not.

If you do install the Helvetica font and still get the problem, maybe it’s another font being used and that you don’t have.In this case: check the website source, find which element it is, search the stylesheet for that element, find which font it is and install the font. Restart Firefox, and the problem should be solved.

Hope my solution helps. That’s it! Kinda easy, wasn’t it?

Note: I uninstalled Helvetica after I tested the solution, for those of you who were interested!

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Firefox displays weird characters as headings (solution)

Is Microsoft THAT afraid of Firefox?

InF — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:33:16 +0000

EDIT: They changed it! Ahhh they finally found some reason! Note the different tone of language. Note the less number of points! Good good!

Hey readers, check out what I found in my feeds today! It’s a competition hosted by Microsoft! 10K prize money offered. The catch? You need to have Internet Explorer 8. The ad in itself is really funny, almost laughable. It seems Microsoft is really scared about losing market share to Firefox especially, and other browsers considering the tone of the ad. I’ve included a copy below, and for your viewing pleasure, here’s the original link.

A small comment: Since the page can only be opened in IE8 which got a lousy score in ACID3 test, it the page where the money is hidden must be so quirky that Firefox refuses to even find it! Also, note point #2! “Microsoft’s best ever browser” but not simply “best ever browser”. Does Microsoft itself know that its browser is not the best out there?

Enjoy your lulz, and comment! Seriously, I lol’d hard! Couldn’t resist blogging this as soon as I saw it!

Click the image for the larger version

Original Source

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Is Microsoft THAT afraid of Firefox?