On Sat, 02 Apr 2005 18:19, Nick Rout wrote: > Is only a week away at Robert's, but there has been some interesting > developments. > > If anyone wants to run some free/open software on their windows box, > they might want to bring their windows boxes for conversion to geNToo. > > http://gentooexperimental.org/nt/
UM ... From the Gentoo Weekly News. Of the several pranks played at Gentoo this year, the GeNToo plot was the most elaborate, and actually dating back to a group of three developers splitting away from the rest of the lot at FOSDEM in February for a spontaneous hacking and belgian fries session: Karl Trygve Kalleberg[2], Patrick Lauer[3] and Marius Mauch[4]. Under the influence of too many Belgian fries, karltk was the first to point out the epiphany hidden in the name of the project: "You see, when you write 'Gentoo', it has NT in the middle," said the Norwegian developer. And thinking aloud: "Now if one took the NT kernel ... there is a POSIX layer for it ... put Portage on it ..." As he drew the surreal picture in increasingly shrill colors, the three devs quickly realized that the only possible release date for this particularly fine piece of vaporware would have to be the first of April. 2. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 4. [EMAIL PROTECTED] So, with the idea floating since February, there was time to back the story up with ample documentation and even screenshots (which were taken from VMware during a regular boot of Windows 2000 in "Safe Mode"), with a coating of a handmade bootlog text that was a rather good approximation of how emerge info might actually look on such a system. When the announcement was posted to the website and the topics of two IRC channels almost simultaneously around noon UTC, the traffic statistics on the website where the project description was hosted went simply through the ceiling. An amazingly constant stream of traffic, weighing in at around one hit per second or 100MB per hour, was sustained over almost the entire day -- considering that the whole website is only 165KB, estimations are that the GeNToo hoax got around 600 visitors per hour. Figure 1.1: Traffic load on the fake GeNToo project pages: Right after the announcement http://www.gentoo.org/images/gwn/20050404_bonsai.png Figure 1.2: Traffic load on the fake GeNToo project pages: Slashdot effect after 22:00 http://www.gentoo.org/images/gwn/20050404_slashdot.png To make the illusion even more believable, a channel on Freenode was created, too: #gentoo-nt, the perfect place to discuss something that didn't even exist. An interesting twist came about when some of the first to be fooled later turned into devoted GeNToo evangelists, perpetuating the myth in the IRC channel and taking the charade even further: One produced "a patched NT kernel" and offered it online at his own website. When looked at closely, it bore a striking familiarity with a 2.6.11 Linux kernel, but nevertheless -- declared as a "GeNToo binary" -- found many curious downloaders. While the #gentoo-nt channel on Freenode was still continuing its makebelief stance well past the dateline into Saturday 2 April, nobody was sad when the atrocities behind the other prominent Gentoo April fool's joke were taken down again. People who had followed the announcement[5] in the Gentoo forums that the redesign had now been finished and could be applied by simply switching the user profile, quickly complained about headache, sudden bursts of claustro- and other phobia. Small wonder, looking at the effect the "redesign" had on posts: 5. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-317053.html Figure 1.3: Kallamej's announcement, rendered in the freshly redesigned Forum layout http://www.gentoo.org/images/gwn/20050404_forum.png Reactions were mixed, while some people figured out the joke pretty fast, others complained about eyestrain. While moderators were watching and merging duplicated spawn to the central thread[6], they decided to create even more confusion by renaming moderators to "Ninjas" and administrators to "Ninja Masters". Bodhisatvas (the rank for ex-mods and -admins) decided not to follow this trend -- and were renamed to HAL 9000. How subtle moderator interference at the forums really is was best displayed by the fact that it took almost all day before people started noticing[7] the change! 6. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-317056.html 7. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-317461.html -- C. S.
