I thought everyone would enjoy this. It is excerpted from: ======================================================== NICHOLAS PETRELEY: "The Open Source" InfoWorld.com ======================================================== Wednesday, February 14, 2001 LINUS TORVALDS BRINGS DOWN THE HOUSE WITH HIS OWN PERSONAL DEFINITION OF BOGOMIPS Posted at February 9, 2001 01:01 PM Pacific THIS YEAR'S LINUXWORLD Expo in New York was an absolute blast. I had the privilege of hosting the Golden Penguin Bowl. (You can view the Webcast of the show at http://www.technetcast.com/tnc_play_stream.html?stream_id=501.) We split a dozen geeks into two teams -- The Geeks and The Nerds -- to answer trivia questions that most self-respecting geeks should know. Each member of the winning team got a large, gorgeous hand-blown glass penguin. We also had two members of the Linux community judging: Don Marti of Linux Journal and Rob Malda of Slashdot. We deliberately left three empty seats on each team to fill with audience volunteers. I gathered the volunteers Monty Hall-style (for those who remember the Let's Make a Deal game show), selecting them according to what geek paraphernalia they had on hand: digital cameras, PDAs, etc. I also asked if anyone had directly contributed to the Linux kernel source code. I prearranged to have a hero of mine, Linus Torvalds, pretend to be an unsolicited volunteer for one of the teams and raise his hand for the source code question. When I chose him as a contestant, I asked the audience if anyone could vouch for him as a valid contributor to Linux, but I don't recall if any hands were raised. I also noticed former InfoWorld columnist and BSD advocate Brett Glass in the front row. Although I probably shouldn't have played favorites, I couldn't resist getting Brett on stage for the bowl, especially because another BSD fellow, Jordan Hubbard, had to cancel at the last minute. Brett is a critic of Linux and highly critical of the GNU GPL (General Public License) under which Linux is licensed, so it was very satisfying for me to see Brett Glass and Linus Torvalds sitting next to each other on the same team, fighting for the same goal and sharing the fun. Brett turned out to be a valuable asset for The Nerds, since he was the only one who knew the correct definition of a teergrube. (A teergrube is a mail server that is deliberately crippled in order to foil mail spammers.) Linus Torvalds really brought the house down when his team, The Nerds, got the question, "What are Bogomips?" This was one of two questions I had prepared that Linus was more likely to answer correctly than anyone else. The other was a picture of Linus sleeping at a school desk. The team had to identify the person in the photo. I hadn't planned it this way, but Linus' team happened to get both these questions. Obviously, Linus recognized the picture and got the answer correct. Did that give The Nerds an unfair advantage? Apparently not. Linus himself defined the term Bogomips, so he gave the answer for his team. But he spouted a different definition than what I had in my answer database, which was, "the number of million times a second a processor can do absolutely nothing." I got my answer from Eric Raymond's geek jargon dictionary, which I am told is how Linus himself used to define Bogomips among developers. The answer Linus gave as a contestant was technically correct; he said it was a meaningless benchmark measurement. I didn't quite know what to do, so I left it to our now-infamous scapegoats, that is, judges Rob and Don. The audience went wild when the judges gave the thumbs down to Linus' response. Nevertheless, Torvalds' team, The Nerds, won the coveted Golden Penguins. As I said, it was a blast, thanks to the wonderful contestants, judges, and audience. I also owe many thanks to Kathy Moran, Natalie Vercauteren, and Julia Russ of IDG World Expo for managing the event. While I'm expressing gratitude, let me toss more thanks to Troll Tech (http://www.trolltech.com) for its excellent Qt toolkit, which I used as the basis for the Golden Penguin Bowl software. I especially want to draw attention to KDevelop, the superb IDE (integrated development environment) I used to create and test the program (http://www.kdevelop.org). I'm looking forward to more Golden Penguin Bowls at future LinuxWorld Expo shows, and I hope you'll attend. In the meantime, brush up on that geek trivia. Get The Open Source free via e-mail Go to http://www.iwsubscribe.com/newsletters and click The Open Source to receive this column every Monday, free via e-mail. Nicholas Petreley is the founding editor of LinuxWorld (http://www.linuxworld.com). Reach him at nicholas@petreley.com. Regards, Donn Shumway dshumway@hypercom.com "Once the 'what' is decided, the 'how' always follows. We must not make the 'how' an excuse for not facing and accepting the 'what.'" -- Pearl S. Buck