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Inside the OpenSolaris Source Code
An anonymous reader writes "Ten million lines of code and not a single profanity? Is that really possible? Apparently, yes, says OpenSolaris community manager Jim Grisanzio. He said even before Sun filtered the code, it was relatively free of profanity. 'They went through the code for a great many things,' he said, 'and I'm sure they cleaned a word or two. Or three.' But a careful look through the code will reveal some programmers' frustration." From the article: "The most embarassing comment came from a developer of the GRUB project who went only by the name of 'Gord'. 'This function is truly horrid,' he wrote. 'We try opening the device, then severely abuse the GEOMETRY->flags field to pass a file descriptor to biosdisk. Thank God nobody's looking at this comment, or my reputation would be ruined.'"
yep, no profanity at all
Grub is an official GNU project and thus, GPL. Gords comment was intended to be humourous. I'm not surprised the ZDNet hack missed it though. After all, understanding what GRUB is might require that they're are familiar with their subject, and that's just too much to ask these days..
Most likely this refers to the system tick. On linux this was 100Hz for most architectures in 2.4, although with 2.6 most architectures have moved to 1KHz.