you might have wondered about Bogomips....

[Donn Shumway]

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.


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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