On Hollywood and the Portrayal of Computers 609
"Can a movie show a programmer who is not working on a Macintosh (Apple's product placement team should get a medal)? Can the exposition describing the virus/program/whatever not make me wince and/or laugh out loud? Can a programmer work without muttering under their breath to explain to the audience what they are typing? Can the breakdown of a system be indicated in some other manner than every screen in the room flashing in exciting patterns?
As a programmer, I recognize that part of the problem is that real programs rarely look cool when they work. Just about every one of my favorite programs has had pathetically uninteresting results to the uninitiated. "Look, it printed a 6 instead of a 3! That's so great!" Or, for the glorious day when the test suite is passed without errors, there's no response at all. I realize that this is not easy to make exciting on screen.
In the interests of research, we went out and rented "WarGames" and "Tron" last night. "WarGames" was just fantastic -- and the hacking was generally excellent, I thought. I don't have a phone phreak bone in my body, so I have no idea how silly that stuff was, but I enjoyed it all. "Tron" was boring and silly and we had to give up not a half hour in.
Any other votes/recommendations?"
My take? Hollywood just has problems fitting in the all of the non-verbal and cerebral aspect of compter use and falls back on the tried and true method of glitzing things up to make up for the shortcoming. What do you folks think?
Only geeks would watch (Score:1)
Uhm... (Score:2)
Can a movie do a good job of making anything seem dramatic without being stupid?
OK, they do make exceptions now and then. But the baseline fact is that most of reality simply isn't dramatic. If they try to make scrambling eggs dramatic, it's going to come across as stupid. If they try to make taking the dog out for a poop dramatic, it's going to come across as stupid. Etc., etc., etc.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
nah (Score:2)
Well, look at it this way (Score:3)
Short answer: no. (Score:5)
Computers themselves are just plain boring. Say you're a mega-leet haxxor trying to break into some system... (not a skript kiddie, trying out one root kit after another; although that'd be boring too.) You're the real cheese, so what do you do? Pour over the source codes, look for holes, etc. Text terminals aren't interesting to look at to the public! Hell, they're not even interesting for me, and I have to write perl on em all day! ;)
And once you've broken into a system, what do you do? Transfer money from billg's account to yours? Copy the solaris sources to your own ftp server? Leave backdoors? Again, what on earth could possibly interest Joe Beer in that? Now if you had porn in the netscape window in the background...
Not Likely (Score:2)
WarGames nitpick (Score:2)
How to make this stuff interesting. (Score:2)
and political consequences, such as cryptography stuff, *BUT* (unlike
in every movie on the subject I've ever seen) they should hire a real
cryptographer to make them leave the bs on the cutting room floor. I
am pretty sure they won't do this, but if they did it might be fun. CME's
cryptography timeline
http://www.clark.net/pub/cme/html/timeline.html
has loads of interesting historical stuff they could use.
JMR
Sneakers... (Score:1)
Of course, I'm sure that some of you will now chime in and proclaim "Hackers" to be one of the greatest movies of all time. You are entitled to your opinions, but you are also wrong. God, that movie had many elements this article/question was trying to dispel. Yick!
Programming in not a visual activity (Score:1)
To think of it another way, do you know of any good movies about writing a book? I don't mean the action described in the book, I mean the actually process of an author writing.
the problem with computers is.... (Score:3)
And cracking is another area that is even more internal to the computer, and has nothing to do with what's on-screen.
I've decided that computers will _never_ be portrayed correctly in movies, simply because people can't bear to think that most people still use _windows_, or worse yet some other WIMP interface like CDE. People see movies for something cool and fantastic, not what they see all day every day.
And what about _Sneakers_? They used a minimum of macs and flashy graphics and made cracking look cool!
Difficult... (Score:1)
What happens inside computers, on the other hand (programs, viruses, networking, port scanning, hacking), is essentially abstract and lives only in the programmer/hacker's mind, so it's quite difficult to represent it visually.
I don't remember exactly that quote from "The mythical man-month" about the programmer working from thin air with invisible things", but I think it's the most appropiate one here.
Movies great (Score:1)
Same old, same old (Score:1)
Accuracy is not Hollywood's purpose in life. (Score:1)
I can't count the number of times I have seen an action movie where the firearm action was, well, pretty damn inaccurate (e.g., someone firing thirty or fourty rounds from a handgun, or shooting an MP5 full auto for an extended period of time without reloading). The only reason I notice such things is because I have a working knowledge of guns, just like you notice the blunders in computer movies because you (seem to) have a working knowledge of computers. I'm sure vulcanologists laughed at Volcano.
Hollywood's function is not to produce movies that are accurate in every minute technical detail. Movies are for entertainment. If you want accuracy, go watch the Discovery Channel.
Re:Only geeks would watch (Score:1)
Try "Sneakers" (Score:1)
It can be done... (Score:1)
what's dramatic? (Score:2)
There is a fairly decent hacker movie... (Score:1)
Same with police, or anything... (Score:3)
I think that it's just a fact of life that peopel don't go to movies to see mundane details of life (with some exceptions... mostly not mainstream films), people go to movies to see dramatized and crazy stuff... It's always been that way, and i think it'll probably stay that way for ever more, with computers, cops, etc...
Coverage (Score:1)
Let's be honest here, how would you turn "The Cuckoo's Egg" into a thrilling movie? It's kinda hard to do. Or even Snow Crash would be hard to do. Cryptonomicon would make a good TBS movie, but they'd have to cut 90% of it. "Pirates of Silicon Valley" had to cut out a good portion of "Fire In the Valley" to do it - and they had to throw in side notes to explain some of the finer points.
I don't think that it's that Hollywood can't make the movies. They can't. It's just the subject matter is very specialized, and hard to create into an interesting movie and be confined to 1 hr 30 min.
Is coding flashy??? (Score:1)
Coding isn't flashy, neither is a compile, but that is what real programming is. Hollywood needs to make it flashy to draw in a crowd, so the only way to make programming, cracking, and hacking flashy is to dumb it down so that it looks easy.
As my friends that do 3d animation, some people would believe there is a make art button, to get some the cool 3d graphics in movies. After watching some of the makings of movies I might even agree with them. Carry that a step farther, those that have never attempted to write full programs, and debug them, would believe that creating programs just require you to drag what buttons and scrollbars on a screen and you have a program.
So to finish beatting around the complete issue, I believe that until the majority of computer users know what, and how to program(even little scripts for their own guess books), Hollywood will continue to make computers to be a flash and little else.
Well I will let you ponder the abstract axioms of life; while happily hack away creating new ones.
--Joe "Ender" Mitchell
How about 2001? (Score:1)
nope, not in this lifetime.... (Score:1)
Furthermore folks, let's face it... in a time where AOL boasts a usership of 17,000,000+, you're just not gonna get a quality hack/crack film.
Not until.. (Score:1)
Think about it, there can't possibly be a complete lack of literate people in Hollywood, and yet there has yet to be an honest movie about computers. Why? 'cuz people would run screaming from the theaters. The things hackers do are too technical to be explained in any satisfying depth (I'm talking satisfying to geeks and to reg. moviegoers) in the movies (guns, guns, car chase, jiggly women) as they are made now.
People who don't understand what they are watching don't keep watching, and today's moviegoer doesn't want to have to sit through an education just to get the plot.
At least that's the thinking in Hollywood.
fh
Re:WarGames nitpick (Score:1)
What is needed.... (Score:1)
It's sad but true. I doubt that we will ever see a movie that is centered around computers and appears to be possible. Maybe some movie studio will prove me wrong, but I doubt it.
Hollywood (Score:1)
You ask if they can make a movie without doing this... of course not. Nobody'd go see it. Just teh same as I wouldn't go see a movie about someone cutting their lawn or brushing their teeth. You have to add atomic bristles and ninja-star blades or it's nothing out of the ordinary.
Other examples. (Score:4)
Hah! You've hit the nail right on the head. This is a trend I've noticed so much, and I can't seem to understand why they can't make things more realistic. I avoid computer-related movies b/c they just piss me off.
Independence day cracked me up particularly because of the way that they uploaded a "virus" to the alien "mainframe".. good thing those alien ships had serial interfaces, eh?
One of my favorites is the movie GUI. Anytime you see people using computers in the movies, the windows ALWAYS zoom, make neato swooshing sounds, the mouse clicks always are audiable (*click!*), etc. etc. Hollywood computers are the most audiable computers, even more than the Game Boy. Being a geek, this ticks me off for some reason. Hell, they usually do such a ugly mock up GUI, I find myself asking "Why don't they just use friggin Enlightenment, it's alot cooler looking than that!"
The South Park movie made a good joke relating to this, I'm not sure if everyone picked it up. When the kids are trying to look at the Internet porn of Stan's mom, it says in big red letters "ACCESS DENIED" (something you always see on computers these days
Also, it gets annoying when computers always talk to their users in movies with that oh so pleasant female voice.
I always love it when people staring at computer screens don't have just a glow over their face, but the letters on the screen are actually reflecting off their face! That's always funny. Usually this is used when a person is looking at random "code" or something (or even ones and zeros) flying by on the screen Matrix style.
The list goes on, but I'll let everyone else go off from here.
Re:WarGames nitpick (Score:1)
It isn't just us (Score:1)
That said, I can't stand it when they show those 72-point fonts indicating that Sandra Bullock has broken into whatever, and it really bothers me when they show computers exploding instead of dumping core. Hey, at least they aren't showing spinning tape drives any longer.
Hackers (Score:2)
I'm sure that some of you will now chime in and proclaim "Hackers" to be one of the greatest movies of all time. You are entitled to your opinions, but you are also wrong. God, that movie had many elements this article/question was trying to dispel. Yick!
I certainly don't think "Hackers" was the greatest movie of all time... just an average (teen) film. BUT... I think the people who made Hackers realized they would fail if they tried to portray hacking realistically, so they went for an abstract angle. I really appreciate and respect that.
I don't believe it is possible to respectfully depict computer programming, hacking, or cracking in Hollywood. Obviously they tried to do that in "The Net" and failed to do their homework- which is always bound to happen.
Here's why: A realistic depiction of computing, hacking, etc. is not fit for mainstream public consumption. It will just fly over their heads. And if you try to educate the audience, you're just going to bore them to death.
It's been done (Score:1)
Triumph of the Nerds and Nerds 2.0.1 are also great, although they don't exactly fall into the category of high-profile Hollywood movies.
Sneakers? (Score:1)
I enjoyed the movie immensely while I was watching it (and I still do to some extent) but surely you all realize that the plot has holes you could throw a dog through.
Example: When Redford sets off the alarms in the big building we get an outside shot of security cars/vans racing everywhere in the parking lot. Minutes later during the escape we get another wide angle shot of the parking lot: totally empty. They couldn't find the burglar so they all went home?
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Metaphors and Subject Translation (Score:5)
These problems are not, however, restricted to our little baliwick. And they are not caused by "writers/producers/directors who just don't care", though they are exacerbated by such people.
The problems are basic ones of the art of storytelling, and I guarantee you, that the further from mainstream experience something is, be it hacking, neuroscience, or astronomy, the more it will be altered in the art of storytelling.
This is not an evil, because storytelling is about emotion, and emotion is not about technical details. The flashing screens are there because they elicit the emotion in a non-technical audiance that the 5 character error message would elicit in a technical audiance.
They are called "metaphors", and the form the cornerstone of storytelling, and incidentally, learning. We start with what the people already know, and we add something.
So when you watch a technical film on a subject which you know something about, ask yourself this: "Was the metaphor of representation good, and did the audiance come away with a better understanding AT ALL of the subject?" If the answer is no, bitch away, but if it is yes, don't critasize the writer/director/producer for poorly explaining a subject in 90 minutes which took you 5 years to understand.
-Crutcher
Re:Sneakers... (Score:1)
From an entertainment standpoint, I thought "Hackers" was a great movie. And anybody who doesn't think Angelina Jolie is gorgeous needs serious help.
However, from a technical standpoint, Hackers was lame.... The stuff portrayed was cracking, not hacking. (I'm not a cracker, but a true hacker. I do R&D for a living.) Either way, you can't glamourize those things without lying about them. 99% of the people I know don't really understand my job. So trying to tell them is hard enough. Then they watch what I do.... Ever watched a programmer/engineer at work? 'Nuff said!
Beep beep beep beep. (Score:1)
Chris
--
Grant Chair, Linux Int.
VP, SVLUG
Hackers - an entertaining movie (Score:2)
The movie covered all the 2600 basics: The infamous red box, Unix, Social Engineering, Dialing for dollars, and getting raided. In the beginning when Crash Override was walking in school he bumped into The Phreak who was making an international call from a school pay phone. They didn't stop and explain he was red boxing but to the people in the know they understood. The Phreak also mentioned NyNEX - anyone not in New York would not know what that was but I did as many as you did also. I knew the whole LOD vs. MOD story we knew they just about controlled NyNEX.
In The Net they were trying to be realistic and they failed. So in a sense Hackers stayed true to computers not by having realistic computer interactions but by having realistic ideas and by mentioning those things I was able to sit back and enjoy the show. Now in my day, when BBS' ruled, we didn't have the Hacker/Cracker debate so I didn't mind the title.
So in my opinion Hackers is an excellent movie and I have it on laser disc - not to mention the soundtrack was awesome.
I rather dug PI. (Score:1)
Ok, the guy was a mental case, but headaches that bad would probably drive me batty, too.
Re:Programming in not a visual activity (Score:1)
Two words (Score:1)
They have. (Score:2)
Okay, so it's not a real representation. But think about it. All those scrolling green lines look just like code to the unitiated. A big chunk of the manipulation happens with one guy at a keyboard (or six).
So how did they make it dramatic? The only way they know how. Turn the code into real objects, like chairs, and old style television, a dojo, a woman in a red dress, etc, etc, etc. Then, my friends, hacking is cool.
Otherwise, it's just some guy doing bit manipulation in a fairly well lighted room to get the desired result, which is usually a lack of stuff happening. Wow. Big deal. I think I'll go watch something more interesting, like the grass growing.
Which brings me to my next beef. How come nobody hacks in a well lighted room, a la ST:TNG? Why is it always in some dingy dark hole? Explanations wanted, apply within.
Movie portraying spirit of hacking (Score:2)
Re:Note the word 'CODE' in coding (Score:1)
Re:nah (Score:1)
Stealing sources (Score:2)
"Why not get the Linux source code instead?"
"Fine, hack into the ftp.us.kernel.org mainframe instead."
Here's one movie that portrays real computers... (Score:1)
Pi (Score:1)
Until then, appreciate the camp value (Score:1)
Then I realized why they loved it.. It's friggin' hilarious! By the time I got to the scene where they were admiring the girl's "sweet", "cutting-edge" laptop, I was rolling on the floor, right along with my friends.
Movies like this provide a great source of entertainment, just don't take them so seriously. Or seriously, at all.
fh
Re:Try "Sneakers" (Score:1)
That aside, Sneakers is not too bad. I liked it.
:P
kaniff -- Ralph Hart Jr
Re:Programming in not a visual activity (Score:2)
Re:Sneakers... (Score:2)
"essentially abstract" (Score:1)
look. (Score:2)
Ok, now for the POINT of this story: No, mavies won't ever accuratly portray hackers and crackers begaouse it just isn't interesting for the dumbed down masses. Just sit back and relax, for some they may be thrillers - - maybe we can just treat them as comedies? That way there is a REASON the most advanced computers in the world make the noise of a cholichy dot matrix printer (see Alien).
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Get used to it.
If you think you know what the hell is really going on you're probably full of shit.
Portray ANYTHING? (Score:1)
Does the public want Hollywood to portray the world in a realistic light, or do they want movies that support and build on their pre-conceived notions of how life works?
This is entertainment, remember...
Who cares? (Score:5)
"The media is portraying us as something we're not." The media does that to everyone. At least everyone they cover, which discludes 90 percent of occupations. Techies get almost as much coverage as polititions. We should be proud.
"Non-tech people always use hacker instead of cracker. It makes me feel like crying" Once again, no one cares. The battle is lost, and it was a stupid, pointless battle in the first place. We don't have a copyright on the term, and it happens to be a slang term. In other words, it's meaning is decided by those who use it. And fifty million people are convinced that a "hacker" is someone who breaks into their computer, and causes icq to shit purple rainbows, or whatever the current myth is. Give up, go write some code. If you don't know how to write code, go learn. Stop complaining.
Re:Well, look at it this way (Score:2)
If you saw a TV show in the 70's dealing in any way with medicine, emergency or otherwise, every problem was treated with lactated ringers (basically a saline IV) and a quick trip to the ER. Didnt matter if it was a trauma, or a medical emergency.
But the American consumer has grown smarter, and now a realistic portrayal actually has to include the relatively correct treatments for the conditions being handled on TV (ER, Chicago Hope, etc).
Right now the American public only really comprehends the equivalent of 'lactated ringers' for hacking... given time and more widespread understanding of programming and ocmputers(it will happen!) movie makers and tv show producers will be forced to create more realistic portrayals of situations/problems and their resolutions.
Will they ever be 100% right? I doubt it. Thats the nature of the beast, though, when it comes to entertainment. And thats also very key to remember: movies seek to entertain, not act as a blow by blow instruction set on how to break into the FBI and have your next door neighbor put on the 10 Most Wanted List cause he called the cops on your last party....
FreeLSD (Score:4)
A buddy of mine coined this interface (as seen in Hackers [imdb.com]) "FreeLSD"... :^)
Never (Score:2)
For instance, take a popular hacker issue that involves a big, evil government and has at its heart the invasion of privacy. The bad guys would naturally be the NSA and the good guy could be pretty much anybody who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. For the stupid audiences out there, it would hammer home the point over and over that we have to worry about our privacy now while we still have some.
This could be made into a dramatic movie, right? And it would probably involve hackers typing away on computer terminals, right? Right on both counts - such a movie has in fact been made and if you've seen it you know exactly the movie I'm talking about: Enemy of the State.
It isn't a very good movie. It's your typical action plot that involves corruption in high places, and the guy (Will Smith) has a wife that keeps nagging him that we have to worry about our privacy, which makes it very campy. And of course the computer geek is a fat messy Dennis Nedry sort who has a mean streak a mile wide and types fast and has a maniacal laugh.
That's about as close as it'll get I think.
--
grappler
Re:Not Likely (Score:2)
umm, is 3D/OpenGL charting of an athletes salary history really required?
Re:Other examples. (Score:2)
Re:Movie portraying spirit of hacking (Score:2)
However, as long as we're talking about 'cool hacker portrayals' hasn't anyone mentioned The Matrix? At least it was at attempt to glamorize, and the product placements were all for G-man sunglasses and heavy weaponry, not *sniff* Macs.
It'll be a cold day in Hell before anything as cool as Pi comes out of Hollywood, though.
Slashdotter -- daughter of Slash.
Slash -- guitarist from Guns and Roses.
Guns and Roses -- cheesy glamrock band from L.A.
L.A. -- Kingdom of crappy tech movies.
Crappy tech movies -- topic on Slashdot.
Slashdot -- where the Slashdotters live.
It all makes sense now...
Re:WarGames nitpick (Score:3)
The particular system had an OS call (or trap, or whatever) to change privilege levels. The call took a password string as an argument, and reported success or failure. The interesting thing about the routine was that it checked the password one character at a time, from left to right. As soon as it detected an incorrect character it returned a failure code.
To exploit this, the crackers allocated two consecutive pages of memory, and marked the second page as unreadable, so that a fault would occur if it was read. They installed an exception handler to catch the read fault. Then they stored a single character at the very end of the first page of memory, and passed its address in as the password to the mode change call. If the call failed, then it must have failed on the first character. If the call faulted, then it must have accepted the first character and tried to read the second character from the unreadable page.
Once you've determined the first character it's pretty simple to move the password back one byte and guess the second character, etc.
/peter
Don't think about it too much (Score:2)
Obviously it is bull - if it worked that way the problem of breaking the key would be reduced from (assuming letters and numbers like they had):
36 * 36 * 36 * 36 * 36
tries in the worst case, to
36 + 36 + 36 + 36 + 36
tries, for X number of digits in the code
--
grappler
Re:Cuckoo's Egg (Score:2)
Stereotyping rules because stereotyping pays (Score:3)
The same goes for just about every profession and group. The reason they do this is because if you suddenly deviate from the public image, you may end up confusing the dumbed down audience.
The safe money lies in following the beaten path.
Here, let's count the stereotypes:
1) Hackers: nerdy, unshaven guys wearing odd colorful clothes; often wear glasses; weird laugh; stumble and spill stuff. Or.... the opposite extreme - goth freaks with wild outfits and rapid typing skills.
2) scientists: mostly male, always wear long white coats, glasses. Talk technobabble and look thoughtful. If a scientist is a female, she has long legs which are revealed at some point, and the plot surprises us in the middle of the movie by showing how she is a repressed sexual tigress.
3) Politicians: sinister eyebrow action and lots of glaring, dark suits, depraved sick lifestyle.
4) Japanese: funny mannerisms, thick accent, lots of bowing. Skilled at gadgets.
5) Construction workers/truck drivers: If it's the hero, he's handsome, witty, and a dashing Romeo with the ladies (oddly, he has a sweet tender heart which is supposed to surprise everyone after the depiction of disgusting tobacco habits and prolific booze consumption). If it's not a hero, he's just disgusting and stupid. Lots of body hair, bad clothes. (And geeks think they have something to complain about unfair portrayal?
6) Women : 'nuff said.
OK, add your own. Maybe geeks get off fairly generously. Just imagine how much worse it could be if movies showed them as drunken child molesting perverts who live with their parents.
Oh, one excellent movie for portrayal was Contact - the female scientist (Jodie foster) was quite nicely shown as informally dressed, passionate about science, smart, etc., etc. Big win for astronomy geeks there. I liked this one a lot. It was surprisingly realistic in the dress code. Hardly any difference from Nova documentaries.
L.
Re:Well, look at it this way (Score:2)
.M
Apples in Fight Club (spoiler) (Score:2)
Don't you remember what the man said?
"Why do you know what a GUI is? Is it something that's essential to your survival? In ten years you'll be standing here, in leather clothes that'll last you your whole life, watching people typing cryptic commands on text terminals, using computers that don't come in your choice of five fruity colors. You are not special, do not think different, all your bits are part of the same core dump as the rest of us."
...it was something like that anyway.
Re:Sneakers? (Score:2)
>bland in the last 6 months or so?
Sounds like you're getting bored. Maybe you'll be leaving soon (maybe not I don't know). It'll be sad if you do. I mean you're a prolific writer and I've enjoyed reading your posts, I recognize you as an individual amongst all the humanity here.
Recognizing someone was never an easy thing to do here, and it's become a lot harder as the months have gone by. This place seems more like the crowd outside an express train at peak hour than any kind of community.
Once you've or I've gone I'll miss you along with all the other "reconizables", so many of whom I've forgotten. I'll miss the jerks like meept and Ivan the terrible (you remember the GUIs are evil guy?), I'll miss they cynics Zico Knows, Cassius and like you've become, as well the good guys like "This is linux country on a quiet night.." . Because you've all been part of my neighbourhood, I mean I post here but I don't even talk to my neighbours in meatspace.
I've come to the conclusion that Slashdot is self congratulating and selfish, the HOF (hall of fame) contains no listing of the most recognizable posters, personalities don't count here.
Anyway I just wanted to say good bye to all those who have left and been forgotten, I wish I could remember you all.
Serial Experiments Lain (Score:2)
Lain is an exceptional series about a girl, some cool tech themes, a lot of surreality, and the idea of artifical intelligence being more viable than natural intelligence.
Further, Lain's father has a __6__ head display! That is 6 monitors for one machine! He's introduced into the series when he comes home gloating over some new cards.
Lain is a must see for geeks, from the theme song (which is in english, nicely enough) to the bizzare imagry and Hellmouth themes to the accurate portrayal of computers (albeit futuristic), Lain is a geek's geek anime.
There is even REAL LIFE C Code in Lain's class. She's learning control structures as the story begins
See it.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
perl -e "print join q( ), split(q.z.
The issues (Score:3)
The second issue is screen presence. Any computer that is used for something real will have more information on the screen than is good for dramatic impact. The viewer needs to be able to quickly find and interpret the information displayed, and an 80x25 screen would just have too much text displayed too small for that (not to mention the 80x50 or 132x60 screens that some of us use). It always looks goofy when they make a computer display have huge characters in a proportionally spaced font, but that's something we're always going to have to live with.
The third issue is time. The director needs to have some things quick, so they don't get in the way, and some things slowly, to build suspense. This may contradict how long things really should take. For example, in the X-Files, they often will bring a photo to the FBI Imaging Lab; the viewer doesn't want to spend 45 minutes watching the technician line up the right region of the image and trying a few hundred filters on it to extract a good image; they bring in the photo, give the guy a few directions on where to look, and bingo, a clear zoom of a poorly developed area of the photo. On the other hand, in Wargames, when Joshua was trying to crack the code to launch the missles, it took a long time as it solved the problem digit by digit; nevermind that any code that you can solve that way is inherently weak; the ticking down of the digits were used to build the suspense, the climax of the movie just wouldn't have worked if Joshua used standard cryptographic procedures on a strong code.
The fourth is capability. Look at Max Headroom; they managed to encode an entire human personality, including emotions, into a (presumably digital) computer. If they have that level of computing power, they surely would be able to do other magnificent things with computers, but they generally can't.
Basically, computer use in movies has been (IMHO) steadily improving, but they will never be perfect. Most movies, even by the most knowlegable moviemakers, will run into a point where they have to decide between art and reality. I don't think I need to tell you that art generally wins, and for a very good reason, it's just more entertaining that way.
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Computer-friendly Movie List (Score:2)
Sneakers was fairly good, with the main stress point being the plot device (a math function that can be used to break military-strength encryption, which isn't really all that unbelievable). The geeks use more social engineering tactics, and the computers aren't all that special or (in some cases) useful. Good emphesis on how the government is interested in reading our information while keeping their mail private.
Office Space showed the real underside of the computer industry: the intolerable management beaurocracy, the crappy peon work, dealing with moronic coworkers, and the brainlessness of downsizing tactics. Again, nothing unbelievable is done with the computers -- in fact, one of the programmers even writes (gasp) buggy code.
The Pirates of Silicon Valley. Again, the Industry (and in this case the industry leaders) gets a well-deserved working over. While this is a "TNT Original Production" and not actually an honest-to-god theatre movie, we'll count it in 'cause I liked it.
Contact had believable computers used for astronomy, and little subliminal niceties like a button that said "Unix Party" scattered around. The idea of HR Hadden breaking into the research computers seemed a bit far-fetched until I considered that he had actually provided those computers in the first place (and thus had ample opportunity to install Back Orifice). Again, not a really computer-heavy movie, but then again I don't think the more emphesis there is on computers the more liberties are likely to be taken with their abilities.
Clear and Present Danger used a lot of computer and spy tech that pushed the envelope without being unbelievable or unlikely, but I'd sort of expect that in a Tom Clancy movie. After all, if there's one thing that guy does well, it's research. The part where the computer dweeb guessed the guy's ATM PIN was funny, since I know how stupid users are with their passwords (while thinking they're being clever).
Anyhow, that's my "top of the head" list. The list for "bad use of computers" is easier and much longer, but I'm sure I've missed more than a few easy computer-friendly flicks. Anybody else have a good one?
----
Re:My beef with movies... (Score:2)
screen display, he was clearly punching keys on the control unit completely at random. C'mon, at least make it
believable.
You have to admit that watching anyone enter commands in emacs or vi can look suspiciously like punching in random keys, especially if he/she is good at it.
Right On! But can we keep pandering to audiences? (Score:4)
Few enough people understand enough about computing to truly understand what coding is. My mother still thinks I'm BS-ing her when I say I'm coding. Unlike the work she's seen done in visual basic (gag), I do my work in C, with editor du jour: Vi. She refuses to beleive I do work.
This is the sort of mentality is what movies have to appeal to. It's amazing how slowly people believe a dull truth, but how quick they are to take to a flashy generalization or outright lie.
Movies like Hackers and The Matrix are direct results of this. Hackers was a failure, because it was so generic that it lacked any informaition.
At least The Matrix had spirit, it had style, it made the admission that computer code is pretty much incomprehensible to people who don't know it. That much was ok.
I suppose we'll see more lousy movies in the future. Grit your teeth and educate.
- Paradox
Man of the C!!!
perl -e "print join q( ), split(q.z.
Mac with a DOS Prompt (Score:2)
Why do they always have to put together these obviously false screens for movies? Wouldn't Enlightenment be cool enough?
Office Space & Mac emulators for DOS (Score:2)
Did anyone notice the Macintosh GUI that reverted to a C:\ prompt when he shut it down? Sheesh.
Hollywood never gets anything that accurate (Score:2)
Having some experience in the military, it is easy for me to spot glaring inaccuracies regarding military tactics, doctrine, etc. in Hollywood movies that might escape other viewers. However, I would have little understanding of just how badly the legal profession is distorted, since I have no experience in that field. So I don't complain about the way Hollywood depicts lawyers because I don't know enough to.
It's not that easy to capture the reality of a profession or lifestyle or philosophy or whatever. At least to do that and sell tickets. If a movie really got to the essence of hacking, would anyone but geeks watch it? And how much money does a wildly inaccurate but non-geek-accessible film make (such as The Net)?
Maybe that would make a great indie film - "Hacking the Hackers". Something only a dyed-in-the-wool, pocket-protecting-nerd would love. But also would something which lets ordinary people into the world of geeks - "Hackspotting".
Code? (Score:2)
A good movie makes the computing blend in (Score:2)
Take Hackers for example. I first watched it recently on DVD. It is a must see movie, just because it's so funny.. anyway... they flaunt technology to the point where they are throwing out technical words and even making up some of their own. Pointing out the active matrix display and the 28.8kbps modem on the laptops wasn't necessary for hte movie.
A computer oriented movie should be sort of timeless. Don't specify out loud what sort of computer it is, don't say it has a 2400 bps modem that kicks ass over everyone elses 300bps modem.
The computer should be nameless, and the GUI should be generic. Not Windows, not MacOS.
If they're making a movie for geeks, don't do things like in Office Space... we notice things like:
A Gateway computer, that boots to the DOS prompt and runs Filemaker or Dbase or something in MacOS.
Making things more realistic wouldn't hurt at all.
But to be honest, why would I want to go see a computer movie? Hackers and The Net are good for people not in the industry. I want to see a movie like Fight Club or American Beauty! Sex and Violence is what I want.
Re:Metaphors and Subject Translation [LONG] (Score:3)
the problem, simply, is that they do not have a clue how to make a decent movie.
don't misread that. their technical knowledge is unparalelled and their ability to shoot and edit "correctly" is better than people generally can understand. my argument is with the general "feel" behind the movies they make. much like the train wreck that the latest star wars installment turned out to be, 99% of hollywood's movies are overly formulaic (sp?), dumbed-down (think jar-jar), and generally devoid of any kind of creative, emotional, or intellectual content.
a good example of this idiocy is the recent release "Stigmata". before i begin to lace into it, i'd like to state that i LOVED the idea behind the movie and i tend to enjoy the work of both patricia arquette and gabriel byrne. that having been said...there is a generic trick put into all horror movies that's fairly obligatory. you take the score, the dialogue, and all the incidental sound and slowly turn it down lower until there's barely any sound at all...and when the audience's ears have become used to the low volume make a REAL LOUD NOISE and everyone goes ACK! while this practice is, like i said, fairly obligatory...i do belive every horror movie should have at least one of these...stigmata had three of 'em and it got a little tired after the first one. a movie that had this much potential ingrained in the story and plot shouldn't have to resort to standard sophomoric moviemaking tricks to get a response from its audience.
another example, from the same movie, is the way they put together the references to st. francis. i believe he was first mentioned in the movie during the conversation in the church between gabriel byrne and the priest who had been excommunicated (i forget the character's name) then, at the end...when byrne brings patricia arquette out of the house wrapped in the blanket, they pass by a statue of st. francis which sits unobtrusively in the background (the statue of the guy with the birds, as st. francis is usually portrayed...we had a statue of him in front of the chapel of the college i went to
this is the same general problem that geeks have, only we're the only ones who know about it because nobody else picks up on it. how many of you who saw the movie knew that the statue was st. francis? it's the same general deal with geek stuff. what percentage of the population would know a unix shell prompt from a mac gui? while this annoys me...i would rather see hackers working on old unix or vax boxen (with real damn unix or vax interfaces, none of this gui crap) it probably won't happen anytime soon. what i'm really sick over is the rest of the problem...the utter lack of imagination, talent, and creativity in the moviemaking industry.
don't take this to be a complete generalization...there are quite a few movies that are absolutely perfect, but, for me, they are generally few and far between....most of the other stuff i can put up with as long as it doesn't really attempt to be creative, i can live with it being a stale rehash of some formula. movies like "12 angry men" which takes place entirely in the jury deliberation room during a trial, or any/all movies made by stanley kubrik or alfred hichcock who both knew exactly what to do, and more importantly, what NOT to do in a movie...these movies, in their perfection, are able to get their metaphors and subject matter across to the audience without beating them over the head with it, a practice which seems to be the recourse of every halfwitted hollywood director/producer/writer/marketing agent active in the movie industry today.
any spelling errors in the above are also the fault of the moviemaking industry, i swear...
Re:Metaphors and Subject Translation (Score:4)
Using my piss poor analogy you don't see many pee scenes yet you see tons of 'I'm sitting in front of my powermac scenes.' Literary-type devices are developed to make it work, like the programmer who talks to herself or a big countdown in the background till detonation/end of the world/widget-tension-builder. These are very condescending, and I'm sure non-technical people feel its cheesy too. "Hey my windows98 doesn't do that!"
The solution is to quit producing scenes watching someone use a computer for dramatic effect. Have the user in the background or off to the side and leave other characters talking about what she is doing, play with time lapse, and let computer use be assumed i.e. "I downloaded the virus last night when the movie was showing you getting away from the terrorists!" They are about as exciting and dramatic as a wrench, to the non-initiated. Thats why movies like Hackers are doomed to look cheesy. Computers only really look cool in alternate-type realities and in the future. Tron tries to play on both ordinary and extraordinary and does really well in one and really bad in another - you can guess which is which.
Wargames cleverly uses videogames and voice-synthesizing to make its computer fun and easy to comprehend. Take tick-tac-toe, global nuclear warfare and a creepy robot voice and you got yourself a great digital villian. Two points for using a war-dialer and one more point for not making it a dramatic element. Now compare this movie to the ridiculous computer scenes of Weird Science.
The problem isn't technical expertise vs. the lowest common denominator as much as failing at proper storytelling. Now that computers are 'mainstream-hip,' expect more of this from lackluster writers and directors.
Not that any of this is new, car chases and crashes still look bad, you can almost see where the wire is connected to the car to pull it away right after the collision and this is after almost 100 years of cars in cinema.
Re:Independance day virus. (Score:2)
There is one movie! (Score:2)
Real Programmers use Jurassic Park Unix (Score:2)
I've been using Jurrassix for years; it's great once you get the hang of it. For a while I found flying around between my file systems a bit tricky, and I had to completely restore my system about a year back after I hit /root at full tilt. But now it's second nature. The process scheduling algorithm works much better now that it can fly around all the processes on my system and bring 'em on in to the coral, and since I got the codes for unlimited ammo in my grenade launcher, we've had no more virus problems.
You've got to compare that to those old character based OSes. Remember how they used to display about 3 cps, beeping for each character? Then suddenly you'd get hex code scrolling up at lightning speed when the system was about to crash, you'd dive for cover, and *BANG*, the monitor would explode, the keyboard would explode, damn, I've still got scars from that. sed, awk, they were good, but they're just not worth the medical bills.
Anyway, I hope hollywood can catch up to the real world. Maybe whirling fractals, virtual monsters, zombies, self evolving viruses and mesmerism enabled super AIs don't provide the colour and movement that the average Joe is looking for, but please, the odd VR suit, or maybe telepathic workstations... a little reality is virtually too much to ask it seems.
Re:Short answer: no. (Score:2)
Hackers are odd people (and I mean that in a good way) and people find oddity absolutely fascinating. The novelty of the hacker lifestyle itself is interesting enough without the need for dramatisation through technical inaccuracy. Everything you need for a good movie is there: the ego conflicts, the ideological wars, the long hairedness, and the dramatic exploits (I'm thinking RMS smashing down a professor's door to get at a computer...)
I'd personally love to see a movie or some sort of biography of Richard Stallman. RMS has great star potential: my girlfriend, an absolutely nontechnical person, finds him fascinating. If the frigid duo (Steve jobs and Bill Gates) can have popular show made about them, then RMS definitely has the potential to be the star of tommorow.
23 (Score:2)
Slashdotters might object that this sort of thing feeds irrational fears about the bad guys with modems. But the film made the point that the media wildly exaggerates this stuff -- the info leaked to the KGB was almost completely harmless, and yet was portrayed as huge data hijack. Also, some of Koch's friends served as technical advisers and evidently helped it get a fairly accurate "feel" of what they were doing.
I think most of you would like it a lot. But alas, the movie business being what it is, there will probably never be a version in English or any other langugae about a paranoid, drug-addicted suicidal hacker.
TBS Superstation: Fatal Error (Score:2)
Error". Talk about really bad movies. The
plot is a computer virus that has mutated to
a carbon-based virus and is killing people.
It's on this week I think. Check it out for a
few laughs.
Re:Short answer: no. (Score:2)
Just to clarify.... (Score:2)
in a movie who was not a terrorist?
BTW, that was a rhetorical question...
I guess I should have known better than to throw that in the midst of people who'd take it literally and dissect it apart, while providing voluminous data as to examples and historical origins.
_Sneakers_ (Score:2)
Take a look at _Sneakers_. With the likes of Redford in the cast, the acting is definitelly on the level. Granted, the plot is a bit fabularized for the common Joe, but the concept is a Holy Grail of computing. It's an intelligent computer movie, that doesn't use the machine as a deus ex machina device.
Re. Dark dingy holes.... (Score:2)
http://slashdot.org/pollBooth.pl?qid=lighting&a
I would agree that the Matrix is the best of the bunch.
GRH
"Hackers" ruled! (Score:2)
Sneakers [imdb.com] might have been more accurate about [whatever], but it was absolutely terrible as a movie! Look, if you want to see a bunch of geeks, just look around. They're not dramatic. They don't lead cinematic lives.
That's why Hackers [imdb.com] was such a brilliant movie! They knew which parts to keep and which parts to throw away. It didn't fail to match reality because someone didn't understand what hacking was, it failed to match reality because someone did understand what movies are.
I don't know any hackers who look like Angelina Jolie. But that's not the point. Their portrayal of Joey shows that they did understand what ``real'' hackers are like -- and they had the sense to realize that a movie full of only that kind of character would be boring as hell.
(The Net just sucked on every level, though.)
Re:Programming in not a visual activity (Score:2)
Re:Programming in not a visual activity (Score:2)
DVDs are the Hollywood Computer made real (Score:2)
Have you gone through the ``special features'' on a DVD lately? The GUIs they use for such things look like computers do in the movies. They've finally managed to put it in people's homes and make it real.
Computers are eventually going to act like they do in the movies because people expect them to! This is the same reason cell phones look like Star Trek communicators.
Re:WarGames nitpick (Score:2)
My pet peeve with the movie was his modem setup...
He's using an acoustic coupler to dial all of those machines (he makes a point of dialing the school's computer with the phone's keypad) but his wardialer can automatically dial 40000 numbers... (how, exactly, does it HANG UP to dial the next number in the sequence?)
hmm... anyway.. other than that (and the bit about the passkey sequence) it wasn't too bad of a movie... I think I watched it about a dozen times when I was 12
It took so long because... (Score:2)
Re:Metaphors and Subject Translation (Score:2)
Disney, for example, is famous for taking a good story and distorting it horribly in order to make it into a children's movie. To them, it doesn't matter that the Hunchback dies, or that Hera was the cause of 99% of Heracles' problems, or that the Little Mermaid becomes sea foam at the end of the originals. What matters to them is that the kids get a happy ending, and so the original data gets massaged into forms that those familiar with the originals almost can't recognise. I have friends who refuse to watch Hercules because of what Disney did to the myths.
Similarly, movies that focus on technical things often distort and misrepresent the actual facts in an attempt to make a good story, and those of us that know how the originals work often find the movies based on them appalling if not downright offensive in their lack of accuracy. I could handle flashing lights and the like if there were some attempt made at preserving technical correctness, but Hollywood likes to treat computers and the Internet as a magic prop: they do whatever you need them to do and require no explanation.
"Independence Day" has the heroes upload a virus into the alien computer system and disable the shields. The hoi palloi sees this and says "oh, right, ok" and never thinks twice about the sheer absurdity of this proposal. That we could have acquired the level of knowledge that they'd have to have about the alien computer technology in order to do this inside the time alloted is rediculous, to say nothing of the prospect of uploading the same using a Mac Powerbook.
Now, just to show that it isn't ALL bad, there are movies like "Sneakers". It does a very good job of balancing technical detail and user viewability. There're several scenes of encrypted screens of data being magically resolved into meaningful text by connecting a decoder-chip on the fly. No reboots, no hardware manipulation, just attach the leads and voila! The explanation as to what the chip is and how data encryption works, however, is accurate if somewhat oversimplified.
I think that one could dump all this back into the study of "suspension of disbelief". The typical moviewatcher is not likely to have a high level of detailed technical knowledge, and so on heavily scientific matters, writers make little effort to be technically accurate because it doesn't pay off. This means that, unless the movie is a rare one, those who DO have in-depth knowledge of what's being distorted will find the holes much faster than those who don't. This is true of any field, not just computers.
What about "Fatal Error"? (Score:2)
It's about a computer virus that "escapes" from the computer, and then mutates into a virus that can attack humans.
I think that pretty much makes the computer scenes from Independence Day look like a Discovery Channel documentary. (I mean c'mon, the aliens COULD be running Windows NT or MacOS!