This is Scott, reporting from LinuxWorld 2006 again. Last night was the exciting annual Golden Penguin Bowl, in which two teams - typically composed of members from competing companies - divide into the Nerds and the Geeks to answer trivia, playfully mock each other, and have a good time. Hosted as per usual by Samba developer Jeremy Allison, this year's GPB found Ubuntu as the Nerds facing off against SUSE as the Geeks (past years have seen Microsoft vs. Google, and Oracle vs. MySQL, for instance). Every year Jeremy dresses with a different theme, and this time he slowly bound on to the stage to the strains of 2001: A Space Odyssey's theme Also Sprach Zarathrustra while wearing a space suit. After introducing the teams, it was off. Which team would know more trivia about Linux, technology, and science fiction?
Before I give away the final results, let me present to you some of the questions, with the answers in white (just drag your mouse over each one to see the answer). How would you do? And keep in mind, the pressure is intense, with hundreds of LinuxWorld attendees watching.
What does SUSE stand for? (Amazingly, the SUSE team got this wrong, which the Ubuntu team got it!) Answer: Software- und System-Entwicklung.
The design for which processor has been released under the GPL? Answer: Sparc.
What is Codemonkey's favorite snack? Answer: Fritos.
What is the only non-English language every used in an ad appearing in Linux Journal? Answer: German (amazingly, the SUSE team got this one wrong too, which is incredibly ironic considering that the ad was for SUSE!)
And the grand finale: each team was given a box of giant Legos and told to build the longest free-standing arch that they could, with 500 points given per square Lego unit spanned.
So who won? Basically, Ubuntu blew SUSE out of the water (also my opinion when it comes to operating systems, but hey :) ). For most of the contest, Ubuntu was faaaar ahead of SUSE, but the final competition helped the SUSE folks pull a bit closer. However, they were still short. Final scores: Geeks/SUSE with 21,000 and Nerds/Ubuntu with 25,750. Nerds win!
One of the PC games from the mid-'90s that I have the fondest memories of is You Don't Know Jack, a great raucously fun game that really set the bar for hot-seat trivia action. Today I'm thrilled to report that You Don't Know Jack rides again, in the form of the Daily DisOrDat. It's a web-based Flash game with a new trivia challenge every day. The format will be familiar to anyone who played the original series, but in case you haven't, it goes like this: You're presented with a series of items and for each one you have to press 1 or 2 depending on which category it belongs in. For example, today's challenge is to differentiate between foreign names for Santa and foreign beers. It's a fast-paced game in which you have to make seven selections in 30 seconds, which I guess doesn't make it much of a time-waster, but it's still great fun.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
