“It began with an email invitation to play in the Celebrity
Challenge with an open source community leader and AMD and Sun
Microsystems executives on Tuesday morning at the LinuxWorld
Convention and Exposition in Boston. The game was not unfamiliar to
me: Unreal Tournament 2004, which was released last spring and
works wonderfully on GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Although I
missed my home setup–the 64-bit edition of UT2004 running over
64-bit Gentoo on my Athlon 64 system–all the players were on a
level playing field, as we were all equally disadvantaged. But the
stakes were high and dozens of people were watching us prove that
GNU/Linux is not just for servers and workstations.“The other Celebrity Challenge guests were John Weathersby of
the Open Source Software Institute; Graham Lovell, senior director
of x64 servers in the network systems group at Sun; Ben Williams,
vice president of commercial server and workstation business at
AMD; and Margaret Lewis, enterprise software strategist at AMD. We
played a couple of practice rounds, then played for real…”
[Editor’s Note: I was fortunate enough to bear witness to
Jem’s final round play, cheering him on for the Fourth Estate.
Blood, gore, and leaping about… enough to make a Klingon tingle
with joy. Our congratulations to him for excellent gameplay.
-BKP]