Blake alerted me that tonight's Jeopardy (the TV game show) had a question that mentioned Firefox so I TiVo'd it (actually, my wife did) and thought I'd share it with you all.
The "answer" (for those of you who don't know, on this game show, the host gives the answers and the contestants have to give the question) was "I'm now using the Firefox web browser that got its start from this Time Warner company's Netscape division." None of the contestants had the question. The correct response would have been "What is AOL?"
Yes, it's trivia. But, it's mainstream trivia, and Jeopardy probably has quite a large audience of somewhat smarter than average viewers so it's good publicity and shows that we're definitely entering the mainstream.
Posted by asa at May 18, 2005 07:14 PMAnyone got the video clip?
Posted by: Robert Accettura on May 18, 2005 07:42 PMNice! Believe it or not, the answer and question are correct.
Firefox first started as Phoenix 0.1 on September 23, 2002 by Mozilla developers who was working for AOL's Netscape division at that time. AOL shut down the division on July 15, 2003 which led to the Mozilla Foundation today. The name Firefox wasn't used until 0.8 version, but basically Firefox is the same Phoenix browser but better.
Posted by: GamingFox on May 18, 2005 07:55 PMGamingFox, not quite correct there.
We were calling it "m/b" well before we started using "Phoenix" as the name. The name m/b was short for mozilla/browser, the CVS directory where it began.
- A
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on May 18, 2005 08:30 PMWhat was the name of the category?
Posted by: David Naylor on May 18, 2005 11:27 PMApparently the category was "My PC Life".
What's a PC? For that matter, what's a Life? ;-)
Umm, that would definitely not be my answer to the question "What is AOL?"
Heh.
Posted by: Simon on May 19, 2005 12:56 AMIs American English really so different that "What is AOL?" can be answered by "I'm now using the Firefox web browser that got its start from this Time Warner company's Netscape division"?
Posted by: Andrew Smith on May 19, 2005 02:01 AM"Is American English really so different..."
Jeopardy questions/answers have increasingly required divergent thinking as of late. The quiz writers are clearly geeks, so it's no surprise that they'd drop the F-bomb by now. In contrast, the chances of the name passing the lips of Pat Sajak are infinitesimal, forever.
Posted by: Axord on May 19, 2005 03:41 AMTo the confused non-US readers: The whole answer/question format of Jeopardy is just the game show's quirky format. Instead of a regular question/answer quiz, the question is presented as a statement (i.e. an "answer") and the answer must be stated as a question. In other words, the contestant must simply remember to preface every answer with "What is...," "Who is...," etc. It seems stupid, but the show has been on television here for decades.
Posted by: Greg on May 19, 2005 11:40 AM"It seems stupid, but the show has been on television here for decades."
Well that just goes to prove that Americans are perennially gullible!
Why don't you have nice BBC shows like A Question of Sport?
It will eventually show up here. In the mean time, look what I found. :-D
Posted by: Rick on May 19, 2005 01:45 PMThe full archive of that show can be found here: http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=322
Posted by: Gordon P. Hemsley on May 22, 2005 11:34 AMI think the fact that Firefox is worthy of a Jeopardy trivia question is less significant than the fact that none of the contestants could answer the question!
I like Firefox too -- I never use any other browser if I can avoid it. But we've got to stop jumping on every little factoid and statistic as evidence that we're "gaining ground". When we do that we actually make Firefox less credible.
Posted by: Isaac Rabinovitch on May 22, 2005 04:50 PMHere's a screenshot:
Firefox Clue on Jeopardy