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NEW YORK -- What is a teergrube? How about a sig virus? What does RTFB mean? What does bash stand for? Who created MS-DOS? What operating system ran the 3DO?

If you know the answers to those obscure queries, you're a prime candidate for competing in the Golden Penguin Bowl. The team quiz-bowl event is a highlight of LinuxWorld Expo here, the annual gathering of geeks and nerds of the Linux community.

Hosted by Nicholas Petreley, Linux evangelist for Caldera Systems, the event is a chance for the big players of the community to strut their stuff and, in this case, prove who knows the most obscure trivia.

Two teams--the Geeks and the Nerds--clash in a battle of wits. Members of this year's Nerds team included Rick Moen of LinuxWorld and Chris DiBona of VA Linux Systems. The Geeks included Jeremy Allison of Samba, Sunil Saxena of Intel, and Tim Wright of IBM.

The two teams were expanded on the spot, with two members of the audience selected to join on stage. One choice was an obvious setup: Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, joined the Nerds team.

Geeks vs. Nerds, Round One

Question topics included physics, "Bash Microsoft," science fiction, movie trivia, operating systems, mail clients, acronyms, video games, and of course Linux.

The first question flustered the Geeks, but they caught on quickly. Petreley asked them to select the image that Windows 2000 more closely resembles: a pile of excrement or Shinola. Taken aback at first, the Geeks swiftly answered when the buzzer sounded, and they earned points for saying that Windows 2000 is closer to the former.

While the Geeks got off to a good start, they lagged behind the Nerds after the first ten or so questions: The Nerds led with 1000 points to the Geeks' 200. It started looking bleak when the Geeks were -500 to the Nerds' 1600.

Things started heating up in round two. The Nerds were asked, "What are BogoMips?" Torvalds, who first coined the term, answered, saying that BogoMips are the simplest meter of performance that has no meaning. But the judges didn't like his answer, and ruled it incorrect. The judges told a shocked Torvalds that BogoMips are, in fact, the millions of times a second a computer can do nothing. In turn, the Geeks, the judges, the audience, and even the other Nerds joined in on berating Torvalds for his incorrect answer.

Negative Tallies Dominate

The game got even more tense when the Geeks' score dropped to -850 after the team incorrectly answered the question "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie pop?"

The final question, worth 10,000 points, gave contestants 60 seconds to scribble their answers onto a poster board. The final score: -12250 for the Geeks and -5350 for the Nerds.

After the event, Torvalds talked about his performance.

"I knew at least three or four questions," he mused while clutching his large Golden Penguin trophy. But he still felt the sting from the questions he didn't answer, saying, "I should've gotten that question," and "I should've watched bad science movies." He blames his lack of bad-movie trivia knowledge on all the work he put into the recent 2.4 kernel release.

At the end of it all, neither the winners nor the losers were happy with the outcome. "We were annihilated," Allison said.

Note: Answers to the Penguin Bowl questions are:

• A teergrube is a trap set for spammers that stalls their mailing agents.
  
  
• A sig virus is a joke virus that invites people to copy it and put it in their signature files.
  
  
• RTFB means (roughly) "Read The Flippin' Binary."
  
  
• BASH stands for Bourne-Again SHell.
  
  
• MS-DOS was created by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer (and sold to Microsoft).
  
  
• The 3DO ran Opera.
  
  

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