What Movies Got Computers Right? 176
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?"
Office Space (Score:5, Insightful)
2001 : A Space Odyssey (Score:5, Funny)
Looks a bit like Vista 8p
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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.
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I rented it, and there was nothing interesting at all. Over an hour in and nothing to keep my interest.
Back to the rental store it went, amazingly I got a refund since the staff knew how bad the movie was.
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?
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>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.
As a physics grad student with a dumpster-diving habit, I've got to side with the parent poster. Sure, Primer got a lot of the details right; however, they never managed to use those details to construct anything remotely interesting.
Of all the questions one can ask about time travel, "what happens when two greedy, narrow
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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
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_LOAD_LETTER [wikipedia.org]
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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Thanks!
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http://imdb.com/title/tt0234215/trivia [imdb.com]
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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
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The major flaw in Wargames, though, was how Matthew Broderick was some kind of local hero for being good at arcade games - like some sort of sports jock being cheered on by the townspeople, and scoring a hot chick.
He had some geek-notoriety for being good at video games. I don't find that unrealistic, not for the time, kids who were good at games, were proud of it and let everyone know about, they were geeks, they're friends were geeks... Now you do understand the number one most unrealistic thing in all movies, right?
The people are all too good looking!
This one (Score:4, Funny)
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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)
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...
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Problem is that most of the time, Hollywood has no idea what the fuck a computer is - forget a firewal
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Not really. It's their movie and their goal is to get as many people as possible to come see the movie so they can make a profit. One way they do that is by simplifying all kinds of things so the story can get told in about 1.5 to 2 hours.
Hackers 2, believe it or not (Score:1)
Hackers 2 also goes by the title "Takedown"
Of course, Kevin Mitnick did social hacking more than computer hacking.
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/Mikael
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Probably not, but it's possible.
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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.
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Re:the only one i can think of that i've seen (Score:5, Funny)
Except for the timeline... (Score:1, Flamebait)
Someone in Hollywood knows they'll be the death of us all - and I, for one, welcome our new silicon overlords...
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
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...
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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
No, not really. In fact, not at all (Score:2)
Compared to some of the alternatives, the interface remained _remarkably_ stable. In fact, one of the criticized things even on /., in the name of "look how bloated it is", is the mammoth of code that's there for backwards compatibility. And, frankly, for an AI where you don't need DirectX or EAX or other fancy gamer stuff, the
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I think HAL 9000, Colossus and Skynet are all eerily accurate depictions of the future of computing, each in its own way. The fact that all 3 movies seriously overestimated the rate of progress in technology...
Hmmm, are you sure that AI progress has fallen behind what "2001" predicted with HAL? Because I've been interacting with a number of entities on the internet where it sometimes seems like they might be silicon intelligences rather than flesh and blood. In fact there are some denizens of Slashdot th
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Densha Otoko? (Score:4, Informative)
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(A very well written psycho thriller.)
Nmap (Score:2)
Terminator (Score:5, Funny)
Dexter (Score:5, Funny)
Forbidden planet (Score:2)
Sneakers (Score:5, Insightful)
Ed Almos
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Indeed. If only Redford had been a ten years young and a bit sexier, they'd have nailed it.
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.
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The IT crowd (Score:3, Informative)
You've Got Mail (Score:3, Insightful)
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It was completely unrealistic.
90% of the people I've met in real life, who I met originally online, are fat.
50% of them are downright ugly.
I don't remember that being portrayed in the movie.
The most funny stuff I see (Score:2)
War Games? (Score:1)
Sure, there was some hollywood 'magic', but he used wardialers for chripesake.
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Yep, they sure got that right.
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35 years ago (Score:1)
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.
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The comment about "# _" being the most exciting thing to see for a hacker (in Unix at least) is right--and that's not only boring, but arcane. Explaining the arcane is one of the prime purposes of sidekicks in movies. Imagine:
"Hey, check it out--I'm in!"
"What do you mean, you're in? It looks like the same crap you've been staring at for six straight hours."
"No, look--that prompt means I'm roo
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"This literary device has been completely abandoned since the '80s, I think, and nowadays the author tends to throw the reader "in media res" and add details as the story moves along."
I think you need to expand your reading sphere a bit. Many authors still use this technique, in fact most of the ones I read. Maybe avoiding it is something that's limited to post-Gibson SF authors.
Some examples of currently writing authors who use this technique: Murakami, G
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Actually, when I was taking flying lessons, I remember there was a lot of paperwork for that too (flight pl
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How about "The Forbin Project"? (Score:2)
US and Soviet super computers merge and form a super intelligent machine which then rules the world. Predates 'Terminator' and 'Skynet' by about 20 years. Less action, more drama and plot.
Jumpin' Jack Flash (Score:2, Interesting)
The Incredibles (Score:2)
Handsome and plausible retro-tech on display throughout the movie. The ultimate Geek fan-boy as the villian. The Mac logo on the keyboard. What more could you ask for?
Apollo 13 (Score:2)
Of course, what is amazing is how said 'role' was upstaged by the slide rule - and how both managed for the most part to get that roman candle to the moon and back more than once; vacuum tubes and pocket protectors and all.
Apollo 13 (Score:2)
The Falcon and the Snowman (Score:2)
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.
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Dragnet (Score:3, Informative)
Not movies, per se. But it has to be said: (Score:2)
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JACK: I need you to open a socket so that I can upload the data from my thumb drive!
EDGAR: Jack, I can't. The terrorists have overloaded the router with IP addresses!
JACK: Can you borrow some bandwith from Division?
EDGAR: I can try to sneak in through a subnet, but they might notice.
JACK: Do it, I need to get this data to Chloe quickly. She said it could take hours to decrypt!
As much as I loved that show, it was difficult for me to
24 has some parts 'right' ... or interesting. (Score:2)
Even if they don't get the terms correct they are at least pro eno
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
Philosophically... (Score:2)
Robocop (Score:2)
Still one of the scariest films I've ever seen. Silly software glitch causes complete failure of safety system with tragic consequences? That's too real.
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?"
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"...There is a goof on Sandra Bullock's The Net (1995) where she types an IP address which starts with a number greater than 255... "
Might be a deliberate goof to stop a million horny nerds trying to pwn whomever has Sandra's IP. A bit like the 555 area code [wikipedia.org] used in a lot of film & tv phone numbers.