The previous time the Geeks and Nerds challenged each other at dawn, it was MySQL vs. Oracle. This time at the Penguin Bowl there ensured an all-out battle of the Desktops as the sci-fi and tech questions rained in: Novell’s Open Audio team vs. the Ubuntu takedown squad.
Once again, Samba founder Jeremy Allison was the multi-skilled host and appeared by storming onto the stage wearing a full Astronaut suit surrounded by the opening music from 2001: A Space Odyssey as the competitors assembled facing each other. Behind the bench for the Nerds were Ubuntu’s Jorge Castro, Corey Burger and Canonical’s Malcolm Yates (aka “mdy”).
It turns out that Malcolm is just the type of guy you want for a quiz. When the next question is “What does SuSE stand for?”, it’s useful to have formerly worked for the company in question! Malc even knew the obscure Bill Gates’ OS/2 quote “this is the most significant OS in our time”, again, that’s what you get for being a product manager back at IBM in the past.
Apparently there were no Steve Ballmer questions (of Microsoft fame) and no chair throwing, but at the end, the contestants got handed black turtle-neck sweat shirts and were invited to “dance the iPod dance” in the chosen style of Steve Jobs. Perhaps the best bit was when the Suse team were “shocked” to find that their victors, Corey and Jorge are both volunteers and not paid (Ubuntu is just that good that we like working for free!) The low bit could be said to when Corey forgot the name of the ship from Firefly in front of the huge audience. [Ed: I didn’t know either…]
After Ubuntu cruised to victory nearly 5,000 points ahead, the final score closed at 25,750 points vs. 21,000 for Suse’s Geeks. Ted Hedger of Novell admitted afterwards on his podcast, that “we got our butts kicked”, the Geeks one redeeming feature came when then won the Lego bridge building round by making a longer arch out of the small colourful plastic bricks.
You can find a short review over at download squad, get those photos uploaded to flickr!