boxturtleme asks: "There have been several posts recently about how movies have gotten computers, hackers, and other geeky stuff entirely wrong. A while back there was an article on Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies and another on Usability [of a GUI] in the Movies. Now we all know that most movies out there that have anything to do with technology get some part of it wildly inaccurate, though it often makes for a fun movie. This brings me to my question: What movies got technology right? This could range from movies about the past that represent it correctly to modern day movies or movies about the future that slashdot readers think present something within the realm of possibility. With all the complaining about bad movies, what movies do Slashdot readers think of as the good ones?"
I did like the printer, but they had a Mac using DOS paths and drive letters-- though that's a relatively forgiveable offence, since a Mac will be easier to follow on-screen.
Firewall did a pretty good job of getting almost exactly computers right. When a hacker is trying consecutive ports they add a rule to the fire wall. They actually invoke the right program from the command line. No uber hacker manages to hack in. And the way they secure the data center is to remove all the terminals and USB ports rather that some miracle sentry machine. The data center is just a pile of Dells in racks, no wierd high tech crap. the bad guys have to get physically inside the data center, trick someone at a remote data center to scroll the file on screen and then copy off what is on the computer screens using a jury rigged camera. Then they laboriously have to use OCR to actually read the cam-scans. It's a little hokey that they could so quickly get some software that would translate the serailezed output of a fax-scanner bar to a scan image, but not too hard to believe it possible--after all faxes do just that plus OCR to boot.
Going beyond computers, My favorite movie for getting the science right is Primer. They really capture how scientist talk about ideas as they develop them. Their initial theories are close but wrong. they use old but servicable test equipment. The time travel actually works too. Really! it's the only movie in which the Time travel does not defy the known laws of physics--they just exgaerate it a bit bit.. (in a nutshell, they borrow the only known method of time travel (which is electron positron pairs splitting from a photon then recombining--a positron can be modeled as an electron going backwards in time) and then suppose that one could do the same with macroscopic thing like a human. Thus to travel backward in time, the subject also has to travel forward in time from the past so that the two timelines can merge.)
If you are talking science in the movies (instead of just computers), "Sneakers" has a very plausible mechanism for a 'universal' decrypter: a mathmatician discovers a way to factor large numbers quickly.
You can't go back in time and kill your father. One of the really delightful things about the electro-positron anihilation form of time travel is that if you assume you could really build a time machine that could do it it get's rid of the paradox that defeats all other time-travel concepts.
namely, in this form of time travel you cannot trvale back to a point in time before the machine and the traveler first existed.
The way it works is this for a positron is this. A photon splits into an electron positron pai
Primer is the hardest movie to figure out I've ever watched. I had to watch it a couple times. The narrator in not a reliable person so that misleads you. And there's tonnes of innocuous looking details and weird stuff that happens that seem to make no sense. But actually all make perfect sense.
What sucked me in, perhaps not you, and got me to watch was the start where they show some physicist trying to do garage science and capturing the feel of it so perfectly. Then the slow puzzle of figuring out what the hack the anti-gravity machine is doing. By then you start noticing how the story has little glitches in it that turn out to be important. If you don't watch it two or three times it's impossible (really) to figure out what actually just happened. Why for example was someone lurking in a car outside their house. Ever figure that one out?
There's that obligatory exploit Trinity uses in Matrix... but I think like any movie, for every thing they get right there's a bunch of things they get wrong.
Peronally, I like Wargames.
And as much as everything else was completely wrong, I liked Wyatt's PC in Weird Science because it was black and looked powerful and had a modem. And they Enter key had two red LEDs. That was my dream computer as a kid, actually.
I suppose all the best movies I like didn't get technology right... like Short Circuit... but at least Tron had some basic information about what a "bit" was and some concept of users and sort of represented actual computer technology although in a very abstract and fantasy sort of way.
Also... *AT THE TIME*... a lot of the stuff in The Net seemed plausible to me except for the way the virus is visually shown to be eating away at the system magically at the end.
Then again at the time, Number 5 really could have been alive.
You are such an asshole. I was going to mention Wargames, too! You bastard!
Sure, some stuff was inaccurate, but it was much more in the spirit of how technology was used at the time than most of the movies we get these days. Even the speech interface was entirely plausible at the time. A computer simulating wargames was plausible. It was technically possible for the computer to launch warheads, but in reality, probably would not have been allowed. But even that base was covered, by the plausible scenario se
Trinity uses a genuine hack to get into the Matrix. She uses Nmap version 2.54BETA25 (an actual port scanning tool) to find a vulnerable SSH server, and then proceeds to exploit it using the SSH1 CRC32 exploit from 2001.
None. There's never been a fictional movie that features computers as a central theme thats got it right. Coz computers are very dull to watch. As interesting as I find writing code, I really wouldn't want to pay $10 for a ticket to see someone doing it on the silver screen.
Plus, as annecdotal evidence in favour of Hollywood's glossy shine, I was very nearly chucked out of univeristy for 'hacking' an email server, and I'm sure it gave several women the idea I was more interesting since they'd seen Hackers and associated hacking with Johnny Lee Miller. Thank heavens the director of the film used a daft 3D swooshy interface instead of vi I say.
Actually, there's one fictional movie that seemed fairly accurate. I think it was called "Windows XP." It was pretty scary though. None of the icons looked realistic, either. And they had this application suite called "Office." Nobody would use that in real life. The TV series The Office seemed more realistic than this mythical "Microsoft Office."
I don't thing there is one single movie (not documentary, of course) that gots the computers 100%. That would be the most boring movie EVER and an inmediate disaster in the box office. I mean, to handle a computer is not "fun". 90% of the time you are just sitting there reading tiny screen information and entering boring input(if you are not playing, of course).
A movie is just a movie and you most compromise and use computers to "help" the handling of the film. Computer folks are always bitching about how computers are shown in movies, but you need to realize that films simplify not only computer but medical services (my wife being a doctor is always horrified of how movies use X-Ray and Scanning techniques), mechanics (how cars can defy gravity and be fixed with simple tricks). A chemical professor would just ROTFL seeing how the prepared a formula for the invisible man, mixing the water BEFORE the acid sunbstance (a big NO-NO in real life) and so on...
Is this a joke ? AntiTrust is not realistic at all ! Is someone looking at some random C code for 2 seconds and saying "this code is perfect !" realistic ? Is stealing code using videos cameras hidden in the developers houses realistic ? Especially when this code is open source and available on the internet. That's 2 unrealistic things I can remember, but there are many more in this crappy movie.
Is someone looking at some random C code for 2 seconds and saying "this code is perfect !" realistic ?
Absolutely. Must be from management.
Is stealing code using videos cameras hidden in the developers houses realistic ? Especially when this code is open source and available on the internet.
Yeah, "Here's your code. I downloaded it from the legal, open FTP site. Now pay me $50000." vs "I hacked into their security system and used their cameras, like this, to grab the screen contents from developers' screens.
Those are plot elements, not depictions of computers. The most unrealistic depiction of computers in that movie was the way they were writing a cross-platform application that would run on everything from desktops to cellphones. It was able to be pushed to all the devices. Other than that, the depiction of the computers was pretty spot on.
The most unrealistic depiction of computers in that movie was the way they were writing a cross-platform application that would run on everything from desktops to cellphones.
The C code shown in the movie was code from the GNOME project as well, afaik. That movie also featured cameos by Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems, as did Miguel de Icaza (who designed a lot of the screenshots used in the movie).
Ironically enough, one thing the movie does get wrong is pumping gas - by law you can't pump your own gas in Oregon, which the main characters do. I guess you can't hit all the bullseyes.;)
the only movie i can think of where computers played an important role that got them really close to right is you've got mail.
maybe it's not a "computer movie," per se, but computers were an important plot element, and the use that was made of them was very close to real life.
also, i second someone's earlier mention of office space.
Densha Otoko [d-addicts.com] was a miniseries that ran in 2005 on Fuji TV in Japan, and chronicled one man's attempts to woo the woman of his dreams with the help of an internet message board. The really remarkable thing about the series (apart from being based on a true story) is that every computer-related thing in it is 100% accurate. While the series has quite a few unrealistic and silly elements, I was impressed by the technical accuracy... right down to using the real BBS that the actual "Densha Otoko" thread occurred on.
As already commented [slashdot.org] "Forbidden planet", 1956, was very accurate in rendering the behaviour of a robot. Obedient, firm in denying access until overridden. Better not talk about SciFi and computers until you have seen this movie:)
I can't believe nobody's mentioned "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (1999) yet... it's most certainly about computers/computing, and most certainly portrays them accurately. It's not (all) fiction, but then again the original Q doesn't state it has to be.
That movie, along with the folklore.org site, gives the younger audience as much of a history lesson as can probably be conveyed, about the early history of the current mainstream OSes.
I got the british tv-series the IT crowd [wikipedia.org] season 1 DVD for christmas. While the series sadly diverge away from technical jokes pretty fast, the first two episodes are comedy gold for anyone who works/has worked in a support/IT-setting, and surprisingly accurate on technical details. Furthermore, the DVD has retro-looking menues and '1337 subtitles' with lots of nerd humor. This is the first time *ever* I feel DVD menus has enhanced a DVD (you have to see it to understand...) I warmly recommend this series.
You've got mail got computers quite right. They used normal everyday computers, they used the Internet and they used e-mail as they were back then. I actually liked the film lot because it had a very positive theme and it showed two people fall in love who would maybe never in daily life done the same - which was kind a good message for me, because back then I was nerd, still am but at least now I get ladies;)
is when "It's not working" and they start hammering on the keyboard in intense attempt to do something. What are you doing, writing a new exploit from scratch? Or tripwire systems which seem to set off timers so we can have an intense computer vs. hacker rush. I'm sorry, but a computer can kick you out on the street so fast you don't even know what hit you.
Accuracy and watchability are almost mutually exclusive, believe me. I have doctor friends who watch House, M.D. [imdb.com] and Grey's Anatomy [imdb.com], knowing full well House would have lost his medical license about five minutes into every episode, and that Grey's Anatomy has no medical credibility at all. Why do they watch these shows? For the drama. For the characters. Sure, they end up yelling at the television every time someone says "Order up a CPR scan and check his glycemic index" or something, to their eyes, equally ludicrous.
Ask a lawyer what they think of Boston Legal [imdb.com] or some time. They don't watch it to improve their courtroom skills.
And any computer geek will tell you that the most exciting thing you can see when you've taken over a computer is not ten seconds of swirling colors with "Access Granted" throbbing in the middle while 80s synth-pop plays in the background. No, it's a single hash mark, like this:
# _
Where's the drama in that? You and I know, but we have special expertise, and that puts us the minority.
Medicine is most two minutes of questions, two minutes of poking, a minute to write the prescription, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Police work is mostly pulling over bad drivers, arresting the drunk ones, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Lawyering is a lifetime of paperwork.
Flying, even military flying, is mostly just sitting there, staring at the horizon, then checking the instruments occasionally.
Computering is mostly sitting there, staring and the screen, then typing occasionally.
None of this is worth watching. The real world is mundane. It takes a long time to happen. The most drama any of use are likely to see in IT is hoping and praying that the backup tapes are up to okay.
The makers of "Real Genius" has some good technical consultants. The equipment used was accurate for the era and setting. The lab computers were from HP and were showing numeric data and HPGL graphs. The crazy hacker in the sub-basement was using Symbolics equipment and some homemade stuff.
Our heroes actually had to penetrate physical security and reprogram an EPROM on the system they were trying to compromise.
Any Slashdot readers who haven't seen this movie are missing an important piece of geek culture.
That's right, Dragnet. Not the movie, the original TV show in the '50s. They had an episode once where they had to check through a company's personell records and the company used a computer to do it. There were tapes rolling, blinky-lights flashing and the result came out as a small deck of punched cards. From what I gather, they'd gone to some company that was computerized and borrowed their equipment to make sure everything was right.
(USS Enterprise D is on a mission to survey a newly formed
star cluster somewhere in the Alpha quadrant; they had several computer problems
before reaching their destination).
Picard: stand by for deploying probe class 9.
Data: Yes sir.
(Data presses some buttons. The replicators all over the
ship produce giant amounts of vanilla ice cream).
Picard: Status report number 1. Why is not that probe
launched?
Riker: We had a computer malfunction again sir. The driver
for opening the launch doors was beta and has crushed again. The antivirus
program thought it was a virus and halted execution of all non-essential
services, stopping the replicators matter regulator drivers as well.
Picard: Engineering, how long to fix the problem?
La Forge: Sir, we need to restart all services. It will take about 1 hour,
because the servers will need to be restarted.
Picard: Oh, not again! I thought computers would not have to be restarted in
this day and age. Proceed...
(Everything goes out for 3 minutes, including lights, life support and gravity.
Then slowly everything comes back).
Troi: I sense great joy onboard Captain:
Picard: (hmmm with all that ice cream...) Can we launch the probe now mr Data?
Data: I am trying sir, but a popup window with an Orion Slave Girl has come up.
Picard: what do you mean mr Data?
Crusher: wow Captain the same thing has happened in my console as well!
Data: Well, I tried to launch the probe but the trackball had a problem and I
selected 'automatic updates' Sir...it seems that the 'automatic updates'
subspace link has been hacked and it is downloading porn images from another
station.
Picard: Lieutenant commander Data, what does that have to
do with launching the probe? even if the console's screen was filled with other
programs, all you have to do is select 'probes' from the relevant menu from the
command control application.
Data. Sir, the window with the Orion Slave Girl is
multiplying every time I click a button, and does not let me control the
program.
Picard: Never mind, transfer control to that console over
there.
Data. Yes sir.
(...after 20 minutes...)
Picard: mr Data, why is it taking so long?
Data: Sir, the previous shutdown caused the BIOS of the
console to restore itself to default settings and therefore the operating system
is reloading and reconfiguring itself. By the way, does anyone have a disk
labelled 'common controls 8.0'? the console will not boot without that disk.
Crusher: Data, you are lucky today. It just happens I have
the disk with me.
(Crusher opens his bag and hands out the disk to Data).
Data: Thank you Wesley. Unfortunately this console does not
have a disk drive, so I need an external one to hook it in the ports at the back
of the console.
Crusher: You are lucky again! I just happen to have a disk
drive with me. Here.
Data: Thank you Wesley.
(Data inserts the disk in what it seems to be a port at the
back of the console. Nothing happens).
Picard: mr Data! I gave an order an hour ago! what is the
problem?
Data: Sir, the console does not recognize the drive.
La Forge: Data, you need to restart the console so as that
the new drive is enabled from the BIOS and then recognized.
Data: thank you...I am doing just that.
(after 10 minutes, the console boots; the drive is
recognized. Data inserts the disk and...voila! the console finally works!).
Data: mr Riker, I have a question...could you come over
here?
Riker: what is it, Data?
Data: if you come over here sir...
(Riker stands up and goes on the Data's console)
Riker: what is the problem?
Data: sir, the default configuration of the user interface
is totally alien to me. On the bottom of the screen there is a button labeled
'start'...but the console is already started.
Riker: mr Data, you have to move the mouse pointer over it
and pr
The movie was called Takedown, it was called "Hackers 2: Takedown" in the US but I just don't see the connection so I'm assuming someone wanted to make it clear to the masses that this was a movie about "Computars" and "teh intarweb"...
"Hackers 2" is the bootleg title of that movie since it leaked onto the fileshares way back when. I blame the same idiot who renames every song parody mp3 to "Weird Al" regardless of how much it obviously isn't Weird Al. However, the movie was never actually "Hackers 2" and has nothing to do with the original "Hackers" movie at all. None of the same people or companies were even involved at all in the two films' production, so they couldn't have called it "Hackers 2" even if they wanted to.
by Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday December 26 2006, @06:31AM (#17365392)
Uh...don't you mean "*Which* movies got computers right?" ?
Strangely enough, this single post proves why there's never going to be a movie that gets computers right, and that's because there's always going to be someone somewhere (although most likely here on Slashdot) anal enough to find ONE SINGLE problem no matter how INSIGNIFICANT or IRRELEVENT it is, and show it as proof of an error.
[hacker typing away onscreen]
"Dude, did you see that?"
"See what? That script looks ok to me."
"Nah, not that. He TOTALLY just hit Ctrl-S."
"And...?"
"Check the window caption. That version of leetedit is 0.6.4."
"Oh snap! And everybody knows shortcut key capabilities weren't built into leetedit until 0.6.8! I can't believe it! That glaring flaw ruins this ENTIRE MOVIE!"
"Dude, I am so pissed. I left my mom's basement for this?"
The fact that all 3 movies seriously overestimated the rate of progress in technology can be excused by the fact that no one could have anticipated Microsoft slapping a parking brake on the industry for the past ~30 years.
I'd blame MS for many things, but not _that_. The fact is, noone really knows how to make a computer think, and that's that.
And you don't need MS's blessing to research that. Exactly why can't you write your super-AI on Linux or Aix or Solaris anyway? It doesn't even have to be an Intel or AMD CPU. There have been clusters made of everything including PS2 consoles, custom designed FPGA chips, transputers, super-computers with thousands of CPUs, or experimental architectures involving 3D or 4D interconnect topologies.
The fact that all 3 movies seriously over-estimated it, has nothing to do with MS, and more with the fact that they wanted to play on the ignorant public's enthusiasm and millenialism. Something that happens in the year 3025 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 3000 or 40,000, because people have this fascination with 1000 year intervals. Something _has_ to happen there, good or bad. And if it's the 60's or 70's or even 80's, something that will happen in the year 3000 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 2000, because the latter is close enough to worry about.
It's, if you will, the same thing that made the Y2K scare and scam possible. While there was a real potential problem there too, the blowing out of proportion and selling so much pure snake oil (I've seen network cables, speakers, etc, sold as "Y2K compliant", ffs) was also facilitated by millenialism. It's the year 2000, something bad _has_ to happen. And this time the scamsters also had the technology explanation that went right over Joe Average's head, but was sounding just believable enough to play on that millenialism.
The signs, e.g., Moore's Law, were there all the time that nope, technology can't advance fast enough to have enough transistors to compete with a brain by 2000 or 2001. It has nothing to do with MS. Technology hasn't really evolved faster before MS's monopoly either. (Not to mention how the heck _would_ MS slap a brake on the industry 30 years ago, when the PC is only 25 years old, and Wintel becoming _the_ standard came _much_ later.)
What maybe wasn't there as a warning sign was the fact that AI research would be even slower. And that it would be so disjointed as to have half the CS guys in ivory towers busy postulating all sorts of maths theorems as fundamental conditions for an AI, while completely ignoring the neurologists, anthropologists, and even stage magicians piling up evidence that the brains just don't work that way. While the latter gang was piling up evidence that, for example, the brain completely edits out the non-interesting parts of a picture, even if it's as ludicrious as a pink gorilla doing cartwheels in the background, half the CS gang was busy postulating such BS as that just squeezing the whole picture as a stream of bits through an arithmetic compression would be necessary for AI. And generally all sorts of "look what maths I can do on a stream of bits" stuff that misses the whole point of actually extracting, indexing and processing the _meaning_ in it.
What also wasn't maybe obvious in all that enthusiasm, was that _all_ corporations (not just MS) showed a total lack of interest in funding AI research. Corporations live and die by quarterly reports, and an AI that takes 20 years to learn, and maybe then you discover that it learned wrong or you coded it wrong altogether, would be completely uninteresting in that context. And before we blame it all on greedy corporations, again, the CS gang in ivory towers was too busy with abstract unmarkettable research that just didn't appeal to potential sponsors.
What also wasn't maybe obvious was that Moore's Law wouldn't actually be translated into code actually running exponentially faster each year. Humans
First, research is rarely done by those that are scrapping by. It is always by those that believe that they are in a good economic position (wether they are or are not, is irrelevant). In fact, it is one of the reasons why USA has for 50 years been so innovative (combined with superior 2'ndary schooling). MS, like IBM before them did, has removed a large chunk of economic money from the CS field. They are becoming a monster fish in a shrinking pool. It will take a small nobody who quietly works closely (how
What maybe wasn't there as a warning sign was the fact that AI research would be even slower. And that it would be so disjointed as to have half the CS guys in ivory towers busy postulating all sorts of maths theorems as fundamental conditions for an AI, while completely ignoring the neurologists, anthropologists, and even stage magicians piling up evidence that the brains just don't work that way.
This is something Microsoft got right. Bill Gates was unimpressed with traditional AI, and kept Microsoft
In addition to the war dialer, all the little hacks he pulled were actually based on real vulnerabilities. Unscrewing the handset and shorting it to ground really would give you a dialtone on some pay phones in that time period.
Office Space (Score:5, Insightful)
2001 : A Space Odyssey (Score:5, Funny)
Looks a bit like Vista 8p
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Firewall is nearly prefect (Score:4, Interesting)
Going beyond computers, My favorite movie for getting the science right is Primer. They really capture how scientist talk about ideas as they develop them. Their initial theories are close but wrong. they use old but servicable test equipment. The time travel actually works too. Really! it's the only movie in which the Time travel does not defy the known laws of physics--they just exgaerate it a bit bit.. (in a nutshell, they borrow the only known method of time travel (which is electron positron pairs splitting from a photon then recombining--a positron can be modeled as an electron going backwards in time) and then suppose that one could do the same with macroscopic thing like a human. Thus to travel backward in time, the subject also has to travel forward in time from the past so that the two timelines can merge.)
Finally, I really like the 13th floor.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
If you are talking science in the movies (instead of just computers), "Sneakers" has a very plausible mechanism for a 'universal' decrypter: a mathmatician discovers a way to factor large numbers quickly.
Positron time travel (Score:3, Informative)
One of the really delightful things about the electro-positron anihilation form of time travel is that if you assume you could really build a time machine that could do it it get's rid of the paradox that defeats all other time-travel concepts.
namely, in this form of time travel you cannot trvale back to a point in time before the machine and the traveler first existed.
The way it works is this for a positron is this.
A photon splits into an electron positron pai
Re:Firewall is nearly prefect (Score:4, Insightful)
What sucked me in, perhaps not you, and got me to watch was the start where they show some physicist trying to do garage science and capturing the feel of it so perfectly. Then the slow puzzle of figuring out what the hack the anti-gravity machine is doing. By then you start noticing how the story has little glitches in it that turn out to be important.
If you don't watch it two or three times it's impossible (really) to figure out what actually just happened. Why for example was someone lurking in a car outside their house. Ever figure that one out?
Parent
Matrix had one thing right... (Score:5, Insightful)
Peronally, I like Wargames.
And as much as everything else was completely wrong, I liked Wyatt's PC in Weird Science because it was black and looked powerful and had a modem. And they Enter key had two red LEDs. That was my dream computer as a kid, actually.
I suppose all the best movies I like didn't get technology right... like Short Circuit... but at least Tron had some basic information about what a "bit" was and some concept of users and sort of represented actual computer technology although in a very abstract and fantasy sort of way.
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Then again at the time, Number 5 really could have been alive.
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Was sort of a rambling thought I know.
But yeah... I was a little kid when Short Circuit came out and I was an AOL user when The Net came out.
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Sure, some stuff was inaccurate, but it was much more in the spirit of how technology was used at the time than most of the movies we get these days. Even the speech interface was entirely plausible at the time. A computer simulating wargames was plausible. It was technically possible for the computer to launch warheads, but in reality, probably would not have been allowed. But even that base was covered, by the plausible scenario se
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0234215/trivia [imdb.com]
This one (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Fictional stuff? (Score:5, Insightful)
Plus, as annecdotal evidence in favour of Hollywood's glossy shine, I was very nearly chucked out of univeristy for 'hacking' an email server, and I'm sure it gave several women the idea I was more interesting since they'd seen Hackers and associated hacking with Johnny Lee Miller. Thank heavens the director of the film used a daft 3D swooshy interface instead of vi I say.
Re:Fictional stuff? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
A movie is just a movie and you most compromise and use computers to "help" the handling of the film. Computer folks are always bitching about how computers are shown in movies, but you need to realize that films simplify not only computer but medical services (my wife being a doctor is always horrified of how movies use X-Ray and Scanning techniques), mechanics (how cars can defy gravity and be fixed with simple tricks). A chemical professor would just ROTFL seeing how the prepared a formula for the invisible man, mixing the water BEFORE the acid sunbstance (a big NO-NO in real life) and so on...
Antitrust (Score:5, Interesting)
If I remember correctly, it had real gnome desktops, actual C and HTML code and showed *nix command line operation that made sense.
Re: (Score:2)
AntiTrust is not realistic at all !
Is someone looking at some random C code for 2 seconds and saying "this code is perfect !" realistic ?
Is stealing code using videos cameras hidden in the developers houses realistic ? Especially when this code is open source and available on the internet.
That's 2 unrealistic things I can remember, but there are many more in this crappy movie.
Re: (Score:2)
Absolutely. Must be from management.
Is stealing code using videos cameras hidden in the developers houses realistic ? Especially when this code is open source and available on the internet.
Yeah, "Here's your code. I downloaded it from the legal, open FTP site. Now pay me $50000." vs "I hacked into their security system and used their cameras, like this, to grab the screen contents from developers' screens.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Ironically enough, one thing the movie does get wrong is pumping gas - by law you can't pump your own gas in Oregon, which the main characters do. I guess you can't hit all the bullseyes.
the only one i can think of that i've seen (Score:5, Interesting)
maybe it's not a "computer movie," per se, but computers were an important plot element, and the use that was made of them was very close to real life.
also, i second someone's earlier mention of office space.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:the only one i can think of that i've seen (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Densha Otoko? (Score:4, Informative)
Nmap (Score:2)
Terminator (Score:5, Funny)
Dexter (Score:5, Funny)
Forbidden planet (Score:2)
Sneakers (Score:5, Insightful)
Ed Almos
Re: (Score:2)
Pirates of Silicon Valley (Score:5, Interesting)
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/ [imdb.com]
That movie, along with the folklore.org site, gives the younger audience as much of a history lesson as can probably be conveyed, about the early history of the current mainstream OSes.
The IT crowd (Score:3, Informative)
You've Got Mail (Score:3, Insightful)
The most funny stuff I see (Score:2)
Accurate != watchable (Score:5, Insightful)
Ask a lawyer what they think of Boston Legal [imdb.com] or some time. They don't watch it to improve their courtroom skills.
And any computer geek will tell you that the most exciting thing you can see when you've taken over a computer is not ten seconds of swirling colors with "Access Granted" throbbing in the middle while 80s synth-pop plays in the background. No, it's a single hash mark, like this:
Medicine is most two minutes of questions, two minutes of poking, a minute to write the prescription, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Police work is mostly pulling over bad drivers, arresting the drunk ones, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Lawyering is a lifetime of paperwork.
Flying, even military flying, is mostly just sitting there, staring at the horizon, then checking the instruments occasionally.
Computering is mostly sitting there, staring and the screen, then typing occasionally.
None of this is worth watching. The real world is mundane. It takes a long time to happen. The most drama any of use are likely to see in IT is hoping and praying that the backup tapes are up to okay.
Real Genius (Score:4, Insightful)
Our heroes actually had to penetrate physical security and reprogram an EPROM on the system they were trying to compromise.
Any Slashdot readers who haven't seen this movie are missing an important piece of geek culture.
Dragnet (Score:3, Informative)
Real computers on the USS Enterprise. (Score:4, Funny)
(USS Enterprise D is on a mission to survey a newly formed star cluster somewhere in the Alpha quadrant; they had several computer problems before reaching their destination).
Picard: stand by for deploying probe class 9.
Data: Yes sir.
(Data presses some buttons. The replicators all over the ship produce giant amounts of vanilla ice cream).
Picard: Status report number 1. Why is not that probe launched?
Riker: We had a computer malfunction again sir. The driver for opening the launch doors was beta and has crushed again. The antivirus program thought it was a virus and halted execution of all non-essential services, stopping the replicators matter regulator drivers as well.
Picard: Engineering, how long to fix the problem?
La Forge: Sir, we need to restart all services. It will take about 1 hour, because the servers will need to be restarted.
Picard: Oh, not again! I thought computers would not have to be restarted in this day and age. Proceed...
(Everything goes out for 3 minutes, including lights, life support and gravity. Then slowly everything comes back).
Troi: I sense great joy onboard Captain:
Picard: (hmmm with all that ice cream...) Can we launch the probe now mr Data?
Data: I am trying sir, but a popup window with an Orion Slave Girl has come up.
Picard: what do you mean mr Data?
Crusher: wow Captain the same thing has happened in my console as well!
Data: Well, I tried to launch the probe but the trackball had a problem and I selected 'automatic updates' Sir...it seems that the 'automatic updates' subspace link has been hacked and it is downloading porn images from another station.
Picard: Lieutenant commander Data, what does that have to do with launching the probe? even if the console's screen was filled with other programs, all you have to do is select 'probes' from the relevant menu from the command control application.
Data. Sir, the window with the Orion Slave Girl is multiplying every time I click a button, and does not let me control the program.
Picard: Never mind, transfer control to that console over there.
Data. Yes sir.
(...after 20 minutes...)
Picard: mr Data, why is it taking so long?
Data: Sir, the previous shutdown caused the BIOS of the console to restore itself to default settings and therefore the operating system is reloading and reconfiguring itself. By the way, does anyone have a disk labelled 'common controls 8.0'? the console will not boot without that disk.
Crusher: Data, you are lucky today. It just happens I have the disk with me.
(Crusher opens his bag and hands out the disk to Data).
Data: Thank you Wesley. Unfortunately this console does not have a disk drive, so I need an external one to hook it in the ports at the back of the console.
Crusher: You are lucky again! I just happen to have a disk drive with me. Here.
Data: Thank you Wesley.
(Data inserts the disk in what it seems to be a port at the back of the console. Nothing happens).
Picard: mr Data! I gave an order an hour ago! what is the problem?
Data: Sir, the console does not recognize the drive.
La Forge: Data, you need to restart the console so as that the new drive is enabled from the BIOS and then recognized.
Data: thank you...I am doing just that.
(after 10 minutes, the console boots; the drive is recognized. Data inserts the disk and ...voila! the console finally works!).
Data: mr Riker, I have a question...could you come over here?
Riker: what is it, Data?
Data: if you come over here sir...
(Riker stands up and goes on the Data's console)
Riker: what is the problem?
Data: sir, the default configuration of the user interface is totally alien to me. On the bottom of the screen there is a button labeled 'start'...but the console is already started.
Riker: mr Data, you have to move the mouse pointer over it and pr
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/Mikael
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This ironically proves the problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Strangely enough, this single post proves why there's never going to be a movie that gets computers right, and that's because there's always going to be someone somewhere (although most likely here on Slashdot) anal enough to find ONE SINGLE problem no matter how INSIGNIFICANT or IRRELEVENT it is, and show it as proof of an error.
[hacker typing away onscreen]
"Dude, did you see that?"
"See what? That script looks ok to me."
"Nah, not that. He TOTALLY just hit Ctrl-S."
"And...?"
"Check the window caption. That version of leetedit is 0.6.4."
"Oh snap! And everybody knows shortcut key capabilities weren't built into leetedit until 0.6.8! I can't believe it! That glaring flaw ruins this ENTIRE MOVIE!"
"Dude, I am so pissed. I left my mom's basement for this?"
Parent
I'd blame MS for many things, but not THAT (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd blame MS for many things, but not _that_. The fact is, noone really knows how to make a computer think, and that's that.
And you don't need MS's blessing to research that. Exactly why can't you write your super-AI on Linux or Aix or Solaris anyway? It doesn't even have to be an Intel or AMD CPU. There have been clusters made of everything including PS2 consoles, custom designed FPGA chips, transputers, super-computers with thousands of CPUs, or experimental architectures involving 3D or 4D interconnect topologies.
The fact that all 3 movies seriously over-estimated it, has nothing to do with MS, and more with the fact that they wanted to play on the ignorant public's enthusiasm and millenialism. Something that happens in the year 3025 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 3000 or 40,000, because people have this fascination with 1000 year intervals. Something _has_ to happen there, good or bad. And if it's the 60's or 70's or even 80's, something that will happen in the year 3000 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 2000, because the latter is close enough to worry about.
It's, if you will, the same thing that made the Y2K scare and scam possible. While there was a real potential problem there too, the blowing out of proportion and selling so much pure snake oil (I've seen network cables, speakers, etc, sold as "Y2K compliant", ffs) was also facilitated by millenialism. It's the year 2000, something bad _has_ to happen. And this time the scamsters also had the technology explanation that went right over Joe Average's head, but was sounding just believable enough to play on that millenialism.
The signs, e.g., Moore's Law, were there all the time that nope, technology can't advance fast enough to have enough transistors to compete with a brain by 2000 or 2001. It has nothing to do with MS. Technology hasn't really evolved faster before MS's monopoly either. (Not to mention how the heck _would_ MS slap a brake on the industry 30 years ago, when the PC is only 25 years old, and Wintel becoming _the_ standard came _much_ later.)
What maybe wasn't there as a warning sign was the fact that AI research would be even slower. And that it would be so disjointed as to have half the CS guys in ivory towers busy postulating all sorts of maths theorems as fundamental conditions for an AI, while completely ignoring the neurologists, anthropologists, and even stage magicians piling up evidence that the brains just don't work that way. While the latter gang was piling up evidence that, for example, the brain completely edits out the non-interesting parts of a picture, even if it's as ludicrious as a pink gorilla doing cartwheels in the background, half the CS gang was busy postulating such BS as that just squeezing the whole picture as a stream of bits through an arithmetic compression would be necessary for AI. And generally all sorts of "look what maths I can do on a stream of bits" stuff that misses the whole point of actually extracting, indexing and processing the _meaning_ in it.
What also wasn't maybe obvious in all that enthusiasm, was that _all_ corporations (not just MS) showed a total lack of interest in funding AI research. Corporations live and die by quarterly reports, and an AI that takes 20 years to learn, and maybe then you discover that it learned wrong or you coded it wrong altogether, would be completely uninteresting in that context. And before we blame it all on greedy corporations, again, the CS gang in ivory towers was too busy with abstract unmarkettable research that just didn't appeal to potential sponsors.
What also wasn't maybe obvious was that Moore's Law wouldn't actually be translated into code actually running exponentially faster each year. Humans
Parent
Actually, I do blame MS (Score:2)
Re:I'd blame MS for many things, but not THAT (Score:5, Funny)
The fact is, noone really knows how to make a computer think, and that's that.
That's what the botnets want you to think...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What maybe wasn't there as a warning sign was the fact that AI research would be even slower. And that it would be so disjointed as to have half the CS guys in ivory towers busy postulating all sorts of maths theorems as fundamental conditions for an AI, while completely ignoring the neurologists, anthropologists, and even stage magicians piling up evidence that the brains just don't work that way.
This is something Microsoft got right. Bill Gates was unimpressed with traditional AI, and kept Microsoft
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Yep, they sure got that right.
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