Free for All | Page 5

plot, including all the twists, on the back of a
matchbox. That made it feel a bit ponderous so it only got a 6 out of 10 even though I'm
feeling extremely smug because I spotted one of the errors in the film while watching it
not by consulting imdb later.
By the imdb, he meant the Internet Movie Database, which is one of the most complete
listings of film credits, summaries, and glitches available on the Net. Users on the
Internet write in with their own reviews and plot synopses, which the database dutifully
catalogs and makes available to everyone. It's a reference book with thousands of authors.
In this case, the big glitch in the film is the fact that one of the train gauges uses the
metric system. Mexico converted to this system in 1860, but the film is set in 1841.
Whoops. Busted.
Telsa wrote in her diary, which she also posts to the Net under the title "The More
Accurate Diary. Really."
Dragged him to cinema to see Zorro. I should have remembered he'd done some fencing
and found something different. He also claimed he'd spotted a really obscure error. I
checked afterward on IMDB, and was amazed. How did he see this?
Cox is a big bear of a man who wears a long, brown wizard's beard. He has an agile,
analytic mind that constantly picks apart a system and probes it for weaknesses. If he's

playing a game, he plays until he finds a trick or a loophole that will give him the
winning edge. If he's working around the house, he often ends up meddling with things
until he fixes and improves them. Of course, he also often breaks them. His wife loves to
complain about the bangs and crashes that come from his home office, where he often
works until 6:30 in the morning.
To his wife, this crashing, banging, and late-night hacking is the source of the halfhearted
grousing inherent in every marriage. She obviously loves both his idiosyncrasies and the
opportunity to discuss just how strange they can be. In January, Telsa was trying to find a
way to automate her coffeepot by hooking it up to her computer.
She wrote in her diary,
Alan is reluctant to get involved with any attempt to make a coffee-maker switch on via
the computer now because he seems to think I will eventually switch it on with no water
in and start a fire. I'm not the one who welded tinned spaghetti to the non-stick saucepan.
Or set the wok on fire. More than once. Once with fifteen guests in the house. But there
we are.
To the rest of the world, this urge to putter and fiddle with machines is more than a
source of marital comedy. Cox is one of the great threats to the continued dominance of
Microsoft, despite the fact that he found a way to weld spaghetti to a nonstick pan. He is
one of the core developers who help maintain the Linux kernel. In other words, he's one
of the group of programmers who helps guide the development of the Linux operating
system, the one Richard Schmalensee feels is such a threat to Microsoft. Cox is one of the
few people whom Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, trusts to make important
decisions about future directions. Cox is an expert on the networking guts of the system
and is responsible for making sure that most of the new ideas that people suggest for
Linux are considered carefully and integrated correctly. Torvalds defers to Cox on many
matters about how Linux-based computers talk with other computers over a network. Cox
works long and hard to find efficient ways for Linux to juggle multiple connections
without slowing down or deadlocking.
The group that works with Cox and Torvalds operates with no official structure. Millions
of people use Linux to keep their computers running, and all of them have copies of the
source code. In the 1980s, most companies began keeping the source code to their
software as private as possible because they worried that a competitor might come along
and steal the ideas the source spelled out. The source code, which is written in languages
like C, Java, FORTRAN, BASIC, or Pascal, is meant to be read by programmers. Most
companies didn't want other programmers understanding too much about the guts of their
software. Information is power, and the companies instinctively played their cards close
to their chests.
When Linus Torvalds first started writing Linux in 1991, however, he decided to give
away the operating system for free. He included all the source code because he wanted
others to read it, comment upon it, and perhaps improve it. His decision was as much a
radical break from standard