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Antitrust
Jon's Review (continued from above)
Some day, a great movie will be made about the Microsoft era, about the arrogance and predations of Bill Gates' monumental power snatch, and the resulting hacker revolution that spawned the open source and free software movements and rocked corporate America.
But the idea that Antitrust is it, or even comes close, is a hustle. Watching a Hollywood studio take the open source idea and infuse it with one stupid line, cliched and inane plot twist after another, and try to turn it into a contemporary thriller, is mildly entertaining for about 10 minutes. But that can't mask the fact that Antitrust doesn't work, either as pop history or, more importantly, as a movie.
Antitrust is the first attempt by Hollywood to capture the genuine drama that occurred in the '80s and '90s when Gates and Microsoft very nearly monopolized the entire software industry, thus the Net and the Web. The media fawned and the government looked the other way for years, even as evidence mounted that rapacious business practices were out of control and the less-than-best possible software was all the public could buy.
It's also the first major movie to introduce the non-tech public to the idea of open source, and in a positive, if confusing and not particularly intelligent way.
Insofar as Gates got reined in at all, it was initially by a motley band of teenagers and older hackers and coders around the world who worked collaboratively -- sometimes for fun, sometimes for idealistic reasons -- to develop alternative programs and operating systems.
That's a pretty dramatic story. Moviemakers are under no obligation to render it literally, with technical accuracy, or even faithfully, but neither should they get away with concocting something this lame.
Perhaps MGM is banking on the fact that the movie is more or less technically accurate (the producers hired hackers as consultants); therefore, maybe for the first time in movie history. But the resulting almost-patronizing Open Source blabber and technical fireworks don't cut it.
Consider the film's conceit, for instance, that one of the ways the evil corporation NURV ("Never Underestimate Radical Vision") stays competitive is to use hidden video cameras to spy on the keyboards of all the smart young programmers in the world and feed their discoveries into a central network -- hidden in a day care center. They then commit their perfidy to videotape, and leave the evidence in non-encrypted, accessible files. That's only one example of the screenplay's foolishness.
Here's another: The geeks, male and female, may be work obsessed, but they are all gorgeous (with a couple of gorgeous girlfriends) and all from Stanford. They are all, as it happens, OS idealists working on a media delivery system as a gift to the world (although they seek venture capital funding for it from Silicon Valley -- huh?). Information wants to be free, and they intend to make it so. NURV, on the other hand, is working on a media delivery system called "Synapse," and it doesn't want to be free. It wants to control the earth, at all costs and by any means. And guess what? It's CEO thinks he's above the law.
Naturally, one of our brilliant young graduates, Milo Hoffman (Ryan Philippe), falling into a Faustian bargain with Gary Winston (Tim Robbins), the reptilian CEO of NURV, gets seduced in about 30 seconds by some fancy hardware and few potato chips into abandoning his friends and helping NURV pillage the noble Open Source ethos. His best friend Teddy (Yee Jee So) is disappointed in him, to say the least. Within minutes, he's also in huge trouble, courtesy of one of the dumbest plot developments in recent film history.
Controlling big media is a powerful lure for all sorts of people these days, but in America, you don't have to murder hordes of programmers to do it. You can just hire them.
Ten minutes into the movie, every upcoming narrative zig and zag is alarmingly clear. NURV's evil tentacles engulf young Hoffman, reaching into every corner of his life, into government, politics, and, of course, most of all into the mass media. The only witty or telling time the movie hits home is when it jabs at Microsoft's alliance with news entities like NBC, Newsweek and The Washington Post, pointing out what journalists seem to miss: this relationship undermines their credibility in coverage of technology-related issues.
Tim Robbins, who plays the creepy, Pringle-addicted, Gates-ish tycoon living in a way-over-the-top Portland (read Seattle) mansion with digital art all over the walls, was phenomenal in The Player, one of the best-ever movies about American culture in general, and about Hollywood valuelessness in particular. Maybe that was why he was chosen for this role. But he's a weak caricature in this movie, completely out of his element as the psychotic, power-obsessed CEO.
Certainly, people working around computers and in tech industries will enjoy the programming stuff, all the self-conscious, painstakingly "realistic" lingo and references -- our heroes start out in a Silicon Valley garage. Does anyone in the software industry start out any other way? ("Our problem is, we don't care about anything that isn't on a hard drive," says one geek ruefully.) Hopefully, even approval-starved geeks won't be bought off this cheaply.
Hiring good consultants isn't nearly enough to save this dog, which steadily degrades into a touch-typing war between Philippe and Robbins, a foolish stand-off that comes just when you think the movie couldn't possibly get any dumber. You really miss Schwarzenneger or Gibson at a time like this.
Maybe that's part of the problem with Antitrust -- the supposed threat of world domination comes down to who can type the fastest. By then, the rest of us are long asleep.
Mike's Review
A short preamble:
Antitrust is getting a lot of buzz in the open source community mainly because it employed John "Maddog" Hall and Miguel de Icaza as consultants, and prominently features the GNOME desktop on computers used in the movie. Because of this, I am reviewing the movie on entertainment value as well as technical accuracy.
Entertainment Value: two stars, out of four
The movie is about a brilliant programmer at a small startup (Ryan Phillippe) who is recruited by a software billionaire (Tim Robbins) to work for his software company called Never Underestimate Radical Vision, or simply 'NURV.' Phillippe's character Milo becomes suspicious when Robbins starts handing him code when he hits programming roadblocks, but refuses to tell him where it came from. Then, Milo notices that programmers at competing companies are turning up dead, which gives a whole new meaning to killing the competition.
The rest of the movie turns into standard PG-13 thriller material. The directing is uneven, and the acting varies from mediocre to bad. Phillippe is unconvincing as a computer programmer and looks bored in his role. Robbins, who was so creepy in Arlington Road gives a tepid performance as a megalomaniacal billionaire.
The movies shows promise early on, then just never delivers. It also reeks with the Hollywood-correct corporation bashing. Corporations will do almost anything to "kill" the competition (figuratively), but despite depictions like this one, murder is not a usual business practice in the real world.
Technical Accuracy (Geek Value): three out of four stars)
Although it is lacking in entertainment value, Antitrust is actually pretty technically accurate. The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME) and programmers have real code on their screens (it looks like some flavor of C). At one point Milo is at a command prompt using the "mount" command to mount drives. The underlying story line of using low-orbiting satellites to deliver content to PCs, cell phones and PDAs is at least plausible.
There are a few minor gaffes, but far fewer than in most Hollywood movies. At one point Phillippe solves a "bottleneck" in a program then proclaims "We are such geeks!" One scene depicts Milo burning a CD in a few seconds. I would sure like to have that drive!
Scott McNeely and Miguel de Icaza do have cameo roles, but you might miss them if you blink. They are briefly shown in video clips on a computer screen. Still the movie is very pro-Open Source. The characters in the movie sound almost like Richard Stallman when they say that "the software belongs to the people."
It's a pleasant surprise to see a Hollywood movie that is technically accurate and shows computer programmers in a (mostly) positive light.
Conclusion
If you go into this movie not expecting a great movie, Antitrust is reasonably entertaining. While the acting and dialog are bad at times, the technical aspects of the film aren't insultingly laughable. I wouldn't put this movie on my must-see list, but it is worth a look at a matinee or discount theater.
You might also wish to investigate the official movie website, or imdb's Antitrust page.
It's just an expensive piece of product placement on Apple's part. Not everything has to be some sort of conspiracy, some things happen due to much less machiavellian reasons. Sometimes Steve Jobs just waves a basket of cash at Hollywood.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Maybe you haven't heard, but I believe that Apache is the most used webserver by a larger margin.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Good thing I wasn't expecting great reviews. Geez. I didn't watch the movie, but you guys can't even get your reviews to be internally consistent: was it NURF or NURV? I haven't been following along all that closely, but when did GNOME add an operating system to their Desktop Environment and application framework? I don't see the updated status on their website?
Yet another Katz article with serious flaws in the quality of the grammar, editing, etc.
-bluebomber
The Daily Build
I have to agree, you couldn't have said it better.
-root is lord.
whats wrong with Jon Katz??
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
I'd like to say that after I say that 20+" sun flat screen... I didn't care what the hell the movie was about... I nearly wet my pants.
It had the same quality as Hackers (except DRASTICALY more realistic) But it still lacked the cold hard facts that make the world go 'round.
I'm sure you all noticed that the satellites had a network address of 10.* which we all know is a private address and can't be accessed outside of the local network. And the amounts of fiber that were running in building 21... omfg... SCHWING!
The concept was neat, all in all it wasn't too horribly bad.
In the first parts of the movie where Gary Winston is trying to justify what he's doing, he makes some very good points that I think were valid.
However after that point... whoa nelly!
GAPING plot holes, misinformation and other such things that make movies that could've been good, not so good.
On the other hand me and my co-worker got into a conversation about what the secretary at our work would look like bald... You all saw Star Trek 1: The Motion Picture (aka horrible movie but the FX were neat) You get the idea.
This is the first movie I've seen that showed computer geeks doing geeky things without being so ridiculously watered down it just made me want to throw things at the screen. You know what I mean *COUGH The Net COUGH*, 24-point fonts, users typing plain english into command prompts that actually understand them... I got a kick out of seeing real output from the *nix "last" command when he wanted to know who'd been on the machine.
So, guess what- I liked the film. It did something new I've never seen before. The positive open-source propaganda and other interesting bits just make it more fun. I think the "technical consultants" did a great job- thanks guys!
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314-15-9265
I really liked this movie. The best part of the whole movie was when they were connecting to the satalite by typing in 10.X.X.X ip addresses. I started giggling and my GF asked what was so funny. I told her that I would explain but then she would look at my like I was stupid.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Then, Milo notices that programmers at competing companies are turning up dead, which gives a whole new meaning to killing the competition.
Let's make sure Bill Gates does not see this movie. We do not want him getting any ideas....
*X-Files music plays...*FLAMEBAIT? Oh, you suck! Hmmmm, geeks find it funny when Microsoft gets bashed. Yeah, that's intended to incite flames. Dickhead.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Lousy Standard Oil. Way worse then Microsoft. Somebody needs to break them up so that we won't have these outrageously high gas prices.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Seriously, the only portrayal of open source software was that its free (beer) software....and that's it. What a noble idea that two kids out of college would write this fabulous software all by themselves and then give it away, only asking a few dollars for tech support. What happend to the benifit of the "million eyes" that open source offers?
I guess the producers could easily get this impression of open source software. Most people only use open source software becuase its free (beer), and they could care less about it being open. Look at the number of IE users we have on Slashdot....that just shows where most loyalties lie. Maybe it should be called Free Source instead of Open Source.
ÕÕ
Ding Ding Ding
Give the man a prize!
Yeah, Katz Fsked it up again
Never
Underestimate
Radical
Vision
Oh, and Katz just changed it to piss us off.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
My esteemed colleague's opinion aside did anyone else go into fits of shitting glee when the saw that Katz wrote:
a woofer that can't hide its inane writing and plot behind a lot of open source blabber and some tech-savvy consultants
God, Katz really is amazingly inept for someone that points out his own flaws so often. You would think eventually he would get sick of himself.
...out of four.
/.ers are slamming it), and has received little promotion from its studio.
This movie got a lot right. Some of it was silly. But almost everything in these reviews is wrong.
Katz is blatantly lying to say he got the ending from the first 10 minutes. It involves a surprise ending which is only partially telegraphed.
Tim Robbins does a brilliant job of showing both the good and bad side of Bill Gates (to say nothing of the guy who got Ballmer right). The corporate culture at MS is well portrayed, showing the internal competition as well as the unethical practices vis-a-vis outsiders (no, I don't think Microsoft murders anybody). The idea of taking that internal competition a step further (in the surprise ending Katz lied about) was a good filmmaking idea, even if some of the tech reasons for it were plain silly.
To portray this movie as Hollywood exploiting open source ignores the facts of the movie itself. It is clearly outside the Hollywood mainstream, made with a low budget (not a single special effect, that must be why
This is a good movie. I enjoyed it. It raises issues which the general public may not be aware of (such as accusations of MS stealing code). It presents a naive view of open source (taking "information wants to be free" one more step to "knowledge belongs to all the people"). Silly, naive, but not anything you can't read on Slashdot every day.
The reason why there may never be a good geek movie made is because geeks trash perfectly honest efforts like this with perfectly dishonest reviews like this one and the equally unwarranted attacks on "Mission to Mars."
An interesting side note: The name "Antitrust" is not about antitrust violations or government action against monopolies. It comes from the question of who can be trusted (and is it possible to trust someone who has violated that trust). This is an interesting theme and is explored better in this movie than this movie was explored in these abominable reviews.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Remember MGM --> MPAA. Suddenly it's okay for linux hackers to participate in the development and watch the movie of an evil company? I'm pretty much disappointed
But beyond that de-facto assumption, are there any other reasons to distrust them? Have they done any concrete actions which show that they're not trustworthy?
Because, frankly, I'm surprised that they're as trustworthy as they are. From the begining, it seemed like it was obviously a bad thing for MS and NBC to join together. And I wonder what pressures or initial conditions exist that has kept them clean, despite strong short-term pressures to act improperly.
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The thing that grabbed me, as the most immediately obnoxious, was that they didn't even pretend to use a real address. I'd like to give the producers the benefit of the doubt, and say that they did it on purpose. So that some poor real site wouldn't get slammed by ppl trying to connect to the satellites. More likely, they were just sloppy.
All in all, I've been recommending it to geeky friends of mine, as being great for a laugh. And advising everyone else to avoid it like the plague. I walked out smiling, only because it was so absurd.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
To the moderator: that's really cheap. Don't down-moderate people just because you don't like their opinions, because you wouldn't like it if someone did that to you.
I totally agree, this movie was just a hollywood movie, and was meant to get geeks and normal people into the theater so that geeks could have a movie that pretty technically accurate, and normal people could just have another enjoyable movie. Why do we care that "They then commit their perfidy to videotape, and leave the evidence in non-encrypted, accessible files."? IT'S JUST A MOVIE!!!!! Of course a real corporation would have taken more precautions, but it's just a movie Jon. I wouldn't have liked it either if I had picked apart every little detail of it. We all know the wonderful job that Hollywood did with "Hackers," and I think that many people went to see antitrust with the attitude that it would just be another bad wanna-be geek movie. You have to see this movie with an open mind and realize that it's not just for geeks. Sure this movie could have used a little work, but it had great actors (esp. Tim Robbins) and a decent plot, it wasn't GREAT, but enjoyable.
I too enjoyed, unlike others, I set my Reality to "Suspended". Yeah some things weren't possible, like burning a CD in less than 10 seconds, but so what?
I mean the basic technology of the story, streaming media to all devices, isn't really within the realm of reality now. But hey, it's a movie.
Besides, it had some really great lines. "Bill who?", 'Do you want to change the world?' 'Not really.'
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
ROT13 only helps unless you've used it for so long that you can read the cipher text as though it were clear text... :)
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jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I found it amusing that the message "Knowledge and information should be free to all people" was being touted by the same industry that brought you the DeCSS case.
Great at least there's someone who shares my opinion. And why do Open Source hackers contribute to a very proprietary Hollywood movie?
Guess they're even more money hungry than M$.
Second review was pretty close on. I went in *wanting* to like the movie, and although the script was *definitely* clunky in the beginning, things starting improving and it did, indeed, become a fairly enjoyable PG-13 thriller. I *expect* to have to grit my teeth at inaccuracies in any movie remotely involving computers (even 'Pi'), and my teeth were surprisingly unworn out when leaving, and that made it all good. Also, I went with my non-techie girlfriend, so it was especially good to see the geeks win at the end. I think the movie captured the essentially idealism of free software pretty well. Even my girlfriend laughed and cheered in recognition when the heros start scrolling the stolen-and-supressed source code on the video broadcast. It was great. =)
Granted, I've also distributed DeCSS on flyers in Times Square in New York, so the idea appealed to me deeply. =)
Now the promised geek notes:
That's all the geekiness I can recall for now. =) One other note, though: the movie skips quite a bit of plot at the very end --- actually, terribly typically for a PG-13 thriller. I'd love to hear people's ideas about *exactly* what happens after the Chinese dinner.
[
Goodlooking geeks? Now we're drifting into the fantasy genre!
Call me naive, but what is the fascination of geeks and bongo drums? Several geeks that I have met like to get tribal with these.
Hollywood sensationalizes everything they touch!
No big secret - you just have to be able to look at the small (and not so small) jabs on M$, and the references that only Open Source folks will see, and enjoy them.
If nothing else, OpenSource people should see it just so they can let their non-geek friends and co-workers know what the realities and exaggerations were when/if they start a "I saw that Antitrust movie this weekend - you're into open source, right?" conversation.
Go see it - at least a matinee - it's a good flick!
Hey Katz, what did you want, a documentary on M$? That'll be on PBS someday, and it will probably still be slanted one way or the other. It's called the media....
"It may, however, be the first film in history to prominently feature the GNOME desktop."
Edison's first film back in the early 1900's/late 1800's was "Fred Ott's Sneeze" which featured a several second clip of a man sneezing. Everyone already knows this. What I thought everyone ALSO knew was that Edison's second film was "Fred Ott's Linux Desktop Session Manager" featuring...you guessed it, GNOME. Sure this was back before 1.0, but all the major features were there. Fred even demonstrates an early version of Mozilla (although it core dumps when he tries to load the Java on Standard Oil's website).
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MailOne
Non-meta-modded "Overrated" mods are killing Slashdot
(Hey Ryan! Here's your proof!)
Those were two things I was going to comment on, the .java extensions are obviously Java. The burners used across the movie were ZipCD's, which are rewritable drives. So if you're merely re-writing something onto a CDRW it takes sheer moments. The fact that they were external, and possibly USB, means that if they were actually burning anything they were using the 2.2 or 2.4 kernel. Wow, that would have been funny to see a SIGSEGV or something fly on screen.
Sigh... NURV in Antitrust is based on MS. I hate explaining jokes, I hate explaining my lame jokes even more. It just exposes their lameness.
But I'll bet there's only a dozen people reading who understood what the hell I was talking about anyway, so I don't feel *to* stupid.
It's weird when people in movies have the same name as you.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
I actually liked the film. No, it wasn't 100% technically correct.. but it doesn't have to be. Duh, its the movies... not a documentary!!!!!!
Normally, I think Katz is on track with most his writings, but this is just dumb. Its a fricken movie people. Get over it. I enjoyed it, for its entertainment value.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
Has it ever occurred to anyone that Hollywood isn't interested in targetting US, or in getting in touch with US? Hollywood is OUT TO MAKE MONEY, and their in the entertainment business. To MAKE MONEY, they target the mass of people out there who HAVE MONEY and MAKE UP MOST OF THE AUDIENCE. Geeks are NOT a majority. The movie was most likely not for us. Go figure.
So why does everyone make a fuss about it? Second, I thought the movie was pretty cool; this is ENTERTAINMENT, not TRUTH for the MASSES, but FUN. So why does just about all of you take something like a MOVIE seriously?
I saw this movie last Saturday, over 13 days. I thought this was a great movie, however, I wasn't expecting it to be about opensource. I am a senior in college and am less than a year away from my BS in CS. For me, I thought this was a great movie. I don't like microsoft. However, I think the ideas that the CEO of NURV presented to Milo at the begining sounded great. I enjoyed finding out who Milo could trust, and couldn't. and the "Couselor" role that the CEO played for Milo. I treated any good opensource scenes as a iceing on the cake. You can't expect the world to understand opensource fully yet. I would put this movie as a cross between Sneakers, Net, and a James Bond movie. Lets face it, things in James Bond are stupid, such as the Carver world network, like synapsis in a way, and the corny or unrealistic scenes. My recomendation is to see the movie as a "what if this happened, or is going on, or will go on". All I knew about the movie going in was it was about some company with to much power and about a programmers friend being killed for some reason. Just don't look for the errors in the movie. Look for the fun intertaining scenes that are funny. (I personally liked the scene when Milo says, "Don't Bill Gates have that?". It's not often that a movie will take real tech stuff in to a movie. Hackers the movie sucked, but was stupid-funny, the net was unrealistic and dumb in some ways, but I think atitrust is the next movie on the ever-improving tech movie industry. --Brandon
"The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME) and programmers have real code on their screens (it looks like some flavor of C). "
;)
Actually over on Java lobby the've identified the piece of code in the still on the Antiturst website as a fragment of Java Web Server, which was open sourced.
Does this mean if I contact the producers they have to send me the complete Java Web Server source?
LOL. to the Tom Petty reference.
Those who don't know me, probably shouldn't trust me. Those that do know me, DEFINITELY shouldn't trust me.
Actually, there is a documentary on Microsoft.
How many chiefs of security at major technology corporations run off and leave their workstations unlocked and logged in?
How many CEOs of tech corporations routinely leave their satellite control computers unlocked and logged in?
How many TCP-IP-based networking programs are advanced enough to control satellite networks but are too primitive to actually REMEMBER IP addresses instead of requiring you to manually enter them by hand each time you want to connect?
How many people are smart enough to rise to the level of CEO but dumb enough to think they can base their company's success on murder without getting caught?
How many tech-savvy murderers would be dumb enough to leave video-recorded evidence of their crimes available on unencrypted file stores accessible by developer-level employees?
How many real-life "genius" developers do you think could immediately take some random piece of undocumented source code (written on a different platform by totally unknown persons), look at it for a mere 10 seconds, and not only understand what it does but be able to comment on the extent of its elegance or cleverness?
How many entry-level developers at Microsoft were recruited directly by Bill Gates, including a personal tour of his mansion?
Isn't it convenient how everyone in the world uses GNOME and unix-based OSes, and how easily portable all the code is among them?
There were so many completely unrealistic and unbelievable holes in this movie that all I could do was laugh and try not to miss my $7.50.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
Be a wise and responsible consumer - read reviews BEFORE you go see a lame-ass peice of crap.
Since when do we pay attention to what everyone else thinks?
Most people, or at least most Americans, learn everything from movies and TV. This may be the only insight most people have into Open Source and Corperate practices, so even if it only shows a slight peek at how Open Source could help the world better and possibly corperate control over people, then maybe we should be supporting the movie and other such endeavors more.
Outdoor digital photography, mostly in New Engl
Hour? No. DAY? - That's a bit more noticable. I'm not saying that MSNBC will put it off, just sometimes it won't hit thier newspage until it's been up on CNN for almost half a day.
And being called an idiot by an AC will hardly ruin my day... thanks! =)
Right is wrong when left is right.
Antitrust was made by a Hollywood movie studio Holywood movie studio == MPAA I thought that we were currently under a Slashdot recommended boycot of all MPAA works due to that little DeCSS Jon Johansen thing (remember that??) Any money you spend on this movie is money going directly into the coffers of companies that don't want you to have any fair use rights. Why is this movie being discussed on Slashdot so often?
I disagree. There's nothing like the breasts of Jennifer Love Hewitt. Not that I know from personal experience, but I will say that they do look very nice in her movies. And I find them much more enjoyable to look at than 99% of the code I stare at on a regular basis. (The other 1% in enjoyable in a "What in the name of God was this maniac thinking?" sort of way.)
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Brazil has decided you're cute.
The real purpose of the movie was Product Placement. Pepsi products and Pringles, Gnome, Open Source Software, Open Source Ideologies, Open Source Celebraties, Apple Hardware, Cars of Status, and houses doing tricks from Xerox labs twenty years ago.
If you're polarized on topics like Capitalism or Coca Cola, you'll like find the movie polarizing too. But if you're just out to see an action flick with fast talk and the occassional the-more-you-look--the-more-you-see layers of detail, it's a cool little flick.
Milo! That's got sesame seeds! What were you thinking!?!
Yeah fuck Katz. If you went in with an ego about the movie because it's a movie about geeks then you've already set yourself up to hate it. I thought the writing meshed well with the technological standpoint of the whole movie. It communicated on a few different levels to different audiences. The flaws I did see, being a native Portlander, are the fact that there is no show titled "Good Morning Portland", I've never seen rowhouses of that architecture anywhere in town, and there are no self-serve gas stations. Now Washington and/or Seattle is another matter... BTW the giant PORTLAND sign hangs on the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, not a restaurant. There are a few classy joints up and down Broadway near the Schnitz though. Even if I was completely computer iliterate I would have enjoyed it. They did a good job and the acting was excellent.
I mean, they are there for a reason.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
I'd definitely agree here. There are many points of view from which I could look at this film.
I could be a film critic, looking at every plot flaw, every shallow character, every blatant product placement, every buzzword thrown... all of which were present in this movie.
If I went to the movie looking to gain some deep-down philosophical insight, I would probably criticize the movie for lack thereof.
If I saw this movie for education on the current state of the software industry, I would find little more than stuffed shirts and lip service.
If I decided to view this film for a stirring emotional story, a compelling commentary on modern society, or a treatise on the moral ambiguity of our age, I would probably come away a disappointed.
However, none of these points of view represents me. I can choose why I want to watch movies. I can read reviews, and I can agree or disagree with them. But in the end, in my personal lifestyle, I choose to watch movies purely for entertainment. Perhaps for some people, to be entertained, they must also be intellectually engaged by the form of entertainment. There's nothing wrong with that - and if you are a person who does derive intellectual worth from films, then that's perfectly fine. I don't. My brain is stimulated by my academic studies, by work, by reading of literature, and by my observation and reflection on the real people around me. I watch movies because I want to laugh at stupidity, say "oooh" at "cool" things, wince at blood and gore. I don't go out to the first-run movies too often, so I am willing to shell out $8.50 on occasion to catch such a film.
I've had this discussion before, after riding home from several movies with friends who are film students. We basically reach the impasse that they are analyzing the movies, looking for the artistic qualities in them, and generally feeling disappointed. I, on the other hand, came away from those same movies feeling entertained.
I feel that both points of view are equally valid - people who are very critical of movies should realize and accept that there are those of us out there who simply aren't critical, and those of us who are not critical of movies need not feel threatened by those who are.
In the end, AntiTrust served its purpose to me of entertainment, and justified a rare $8.50 ticket price.
When I walk into a car dealership, I demand to see the engine. Sure I can't fix anything, but I think I can tell the difference between an 8 cyclinder and 2 cyclinder engine. Same thing - one should expect to see the source code to the software one buys, without having to sign an NDA. As an example, how can do you know that Quicken does not send a report for your finances to someone else. Without examining the code, how could you maintain it doesn't?
And what are the chances that the AntiTrust movie makers and writers will put their entire movie on the net for a free download?
Ironic isn't it?
Today, an MS programmer was poking through MS headquarters and came across a transparent tank of yellowish liquid which contained a blue-haired girl. She didn't react, except when Mr. Gates was insulted by one of her schoolmates.
In other news, Antarctica was completely annihilated by an explosion today. Early reports are that scientists using Windows 2000 Second Impact Edition irritated an alien life form that they were studying.
When I first saw the movie I couldnt shake the feeling that I was watching reverse-propaganda. I thought that It was mildly effective too. It was just annoying enough to make you pay attention. Its about time that we heard from the other side. Usually all we get is the shitty propaganda from the other side. I personally found the movie silly and inane but at the same time I walked away feeling refreshed.
I noticed in the opening credits there is a lot of HTML code in the font "Skia." There were a lot of tags like:
Secure? Secure? What the hell sort of DTD-compliant doctype is that? The W3C is gonna have their ass!
--hongpong.com
And next is female geeks who just ooze sexuality.. bahh..I been looking for gorgeous female geeks all through my life.
:) Bitterness is a turn off. Most of the female geeks I know are not only hot, but intelligent - twice the fun in one. Being a female programmer, I can attest to the fact that my peers and I can hold our own, both technically and physically.
I beg to differ. You just need to look in the right places, my friend
Lastly but most important, society and babes in particular looks upon geeks and the tech community with disdain...
Only because there are often reasons for that disdain. Your mentality that nobody else but a fellow "geek" can comprehend your mind is a prime example. You won't get dates but automatically dismissing the possibility that a person can understand you. I personally find men of a technical nature very, very appealing, but only if they are willing to share their knowledge and are willing to learn from me as well. Perhaps it's not your geekiness that is preventing you from meeting babes, it's your attitude.
As for the movie - I haven't seen it yet, but am looking forward to seeing even a half-assed attempt at getting the open source movement out into the general public. Any publicity is good publicity, and if my non-tech friends have a greater appreciation for what I do after seeing it with me, then what more can I ask for?!
This is obviously the worst movie about computers since Hackers, and no less insulting to the people they are supposedly representing. Meanwhile, real hackers are sitting at home trying to get their Matrix dvd to play with their illegal DVD software.
Good for Miguel, good for Gnome. When the film and tv crowd figure out that they can use Gnome or KDE or plain old X on a computer screen, they an stop spending ridiculous movie industry cash to the many companies that create fake computer software displays to get around IP issues with commercial OSes. Then more and more people will be familiar with what it looks like, which will further its kudzu-like spread across desktops everywhere. Now there's a plot!
Go rent Colossus: The Forbin Project, watch T2 again, but don't spend a dime on this atrocity. Even The Bridges of Madison County is probably a better movie about computers than this one.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
computer flicks like Sneakers on nights of gathering with other geeks Right on, Sneakers has to be on every Geeks saterday night's list. Damn good flick! Jim
"Life is art...Paint your destiny"
I give up! I have heard this, I am sure, but my brain is melting and I just cannot place it! You know, with age, memory is the first thing to go... and I forget the second.
Where is this from?
~cgr
--
If you want to live in a country ruled by religion, move to Iran.
Well, I saw this movie. And I enjoyed this movie. It was all I would hope for, given how little I'd heard about it, and how little I paid to see it. Bottom line: it entertained me.
What I found MOST amusing was the obvious product placement of anti-MS people: the afore-mentioned GNOME is obvious, but did how could you miss the prominent placement of Sun logos at times? Or how about the more subtle Handspring Visor on the main character's desk? These are companies I can see spending bucks on an anti-MS propaganda flick. It's the little things that make movies worth seeing....
note:--the Net, w/sandra bullock is the worst recent movie about computers that I can think of---Hackers is just cheesy, not bad--take out the silly computer graphics, switch out gibson for cray, etc, and it's not that far off. Oh, wait hackers don't go to neat clubs, and there are no pretty girl hackers, you say. well, there are some, and some do.
Sorry, too many people are bashing one of my favorite movies(that soundtrack!)--had too defend it!
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
dont you know? the TiBooks run Linux and NetBSD and so do the x86's. Some people said they even got XFree86 working.
I like meat helmets.
Sounds like I'll pass on this one, though. I'm waiting for "13 Days".
-bluebomber
The Daily Build
I just have this to say:
Series PS 17
Reindeer Flotilla
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
I think the first anti-MS story they posted is when MS first bought them out.
---
---
Don't lead me into temptation; I can find it myself.
The one thing I was disappointed in (well, maybe not disapponted) is the false advertisement of Milo getting it on with women. I thought it was funny that the trailer showed a "geek" getting it on with all these hot girls. But when I saw the movie, I see nothing. He does not even kiss the fellow NURV employee/geek and in the trailer it shows him in bed with her. I was pumped about the potential "geek" making out, but sadly there was nothing. Just a little with Milo's girlfriend. Oh well. Maybe next time a movie like this there will be geeks getting it on.
Can you see Iron City here?
(In other words, I don't think it's a matter of perception becoming reality, it's probably more a matter of healthy skepticism. But there may be a version of reality that's hidden from the average viewer. Does anyone have the scoop on such an actual not-just-suspected reality?)
--
"In the real world when you kill someone, they die. For real! And then you're fucked!"
Yet for some reason I was the only one in the theatre who laughed
---
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
hahaha john katz said power snatch
------------
a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
to tell the truth it looked like the same code over and over again to me--well, I remember seeing
something=buff();
something=buff();
something=buff();
over and over again, anyway
Slackware: old school feel, new school gear.
Where did Jon Katz come from? I hear him on PBS and I see him on Slashdot and he almost never says anything remotely accurate. Yet the media seems ready to adopt him as the geek spokesman. Would you (Slashdot) kindly stop perpetuating this shit?
My wife and I and our teenaged son all went to see this movie. Two of us are geeks; all of us liked the movie. Real *nix commands (perhaps not exactly used in the correct way but real *nix commands nevertheless), reference to open-source, a software CEO as the bad guy and a guy nicknamed "Stinky" in the plot. What geek hasn't worked with someone who thinks showering is a low priority?
For once Hollywood came close. I give the movie 3 out of 4 stars and both reviews 1 out of 400 stars.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
This was in the trailer, about his(ryan phillpe/milo) live in girlie played by claire forlani....
it seems she was working for nurv, but what i want to know is this,
why did they use her on milo, when there are just as many other geek hopefuls working there, and according to the chap in the beginning who said not many people come to nurv with girlfriends...what makes him such an uber-coder that they need to keep someone on him in case he does start to suspect things...its all too contrived...
that and considering every programmer there is the 20 something skateboarding kid with crazy hair...not quite in touch with reality...Im willing to suspend disbelief only so much
This is not my sig
This movie kept me guessing throughout it, and given, the plot development could have been worked on a little, but otherwise this was a good movie.
I agree with the comment on how the geeks were pretty. We're not. But unfortunately, putting up ugly people on a major Hollywood screen isn't the most sound idea, and hey, I liked the all of 2 chicks we got to see in the movie.
The technical details were correct insofar, as you have to remember that this is a Hollywood movie.
As for the comments regarding to "save your money" I say that we occasionaly need to leave our computer caves and venture out to the movie theatre. (even if it is to see a movie about what we are most interested in and do anyway.)
And remember, it was JUST a movie.
Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually make my website for other people to look at.
The tale took you through Berkeley, AT&T, FBI, NSA, Germany, Russian spy, and the early ages of internet. Yes, telnet, modem, tymnet, .mil domain name were mentioned.
It also seems that nowadays Hollywood tend to add some romance in every movie just to woo women. I very much adore the romantic scene where the author (an astronomer turned sys admin) was sewing quilt with his girlfriend and talking (or baby-talking) about how to catch the hacker. My idea of time well spent. :)
It doesn't have GNOME, but the view of VT100 serial terminal will send chills down your spine. I miss those terminals!
--- You make things foolproof, and they'll find you a damn fool.
No manhatten style, clams have the right to smile
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
How about coding the trailer in a format that can actually be viewed on open source systems.
...can be found at LinuxWorld.
For his review, Joe Barr actually paid attention during the movie and asked maddog, Linus and Michael about their participation. His comments are more to the point as well.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
But not in the way of Hollywood stars or Prom Kings. As a chiXor, I've always thought that there was more outright goodlooking people on the developers' side of the line than in the suits', if you're willing to see the inherent sweetness in the "flush of youth" (it's literal -- it's a reddish line in the face), gently rounded bodies, equally gentle voices, intelligent soft hands, and a look of (mostly) excited happiness. You're all goodlooking! Sorry if I can't phrase it in macho enough terms...
teleny, friend of cats.
I would not call selling people software without letting see the source very ethical.
That seems a bit odd. What is your actual idea here? Your examples seem to imply that you have issues with companies comitting fraud. I won't argue with that, I don't like the idea much myself. But, it's rather silly to equal fraud with not giving access to the source.
Also, the car metaphor is rather a bad one. Code is a trifle more... shall we say... transparent? Easier to copy? Even if one took the time to discern all the details of an engine through examination, it still leaves a person a long ways away from actually manufacturing an engine, ne?
I think this movie was, in reality, a new MS program called "MS GeekLocator 2000", merely find the people who got the stupid geek-culture references, and attatch some form of "moonbeam powered, satellite linked, high-resolution quickcam" to them so that MS can steal their code (HAH!).
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Did anyone besides me catch the new FOX show Grounded for Life on Wednesday night? Without getting into a flamewar about how much the show sucks or rules, there was one scene of interest. It had two parents who were worried about their daughter, trying to log into her AOL account. Her younger brother's friend knew the password had to be "timberlake".
The whole thing was from the point of view of the monitor, in a parody of the typical hacker scene in TV and film. When the AOL "Welcome!" sound played, the father said "We're in!" They proceeded to read the classic spam in the girl's mailbox and have an Instant Message conversation with the daughter's best friend. ("What R U doing tonight?")
I turned to my roommate and said, "This is the most realistic hacker show EVER."
----
"Here to discuss how the AOL merger will affect consumers is the CEO of AOL."
grep -ri 'should work'
Don't tell me you don't know the first rule about posting at /.? Never say anything that goes against the status quo. As long as you know your role and say what you should say you won't be moderated down. But /. (or the /. community I guess I should say) is less inclined to tolerate those who rock the boat then, say, Nazi Germany. Keep your mouth shut, and keep repeating the same onerous pro-Linux/anti-Microsoft drivel ad nauseum and you'll be fine.
This was a very sarcastic post brought to you by Rotten168. Thank you and please moderate me down, fuckers.
When I saw the movie I wondered if Sun was involved in the production. We see the Sun logo in the background when Milo and his friend get their prices and they seem to be programming in Java if Im not mistaking...
why does everybody on /. hate the matrix? that movie was fricking cool as hell, yet you all have to examine it and shit like that... just enjoy it goddamit.
What you say!? ---Captain
He had a jacket on over the gray shirt, it reads "pussy"
/dev/pussy; echo .*.*O /dev/pussy; umount me baby!"
woah, a true hax0r there! I can hear his GF now:
"mount me baby!; fsck
Ever need an online dictionary?
would have the movie's source code - the SCRIPT - available for comment and peer criticism before shooting begins and maybe get a plausible plot about this software drama from the point of view of those actually involved, instead of being relegated to the role of mere technical advisors.
What I'm getting at is the irony that probably everything in this flick is copyright protected, controlled and produced by a small group of writers, cathedral style, just like what 'evil' software companies produce.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
fuck that. What the review said was that it wasn't worth $8. Most crap at the theaters isn't worth $8. Was it good enough to wait for video rental or second run ($4)? sure, guess so.
But remember, it's not the audience that started this whole "taking movies too seriously" thing, it was the movie industry, who decided that they were entitled to billions of dollars in profit, regardless of the quality of the product.
Be a wise and responsible consumer - read reviews BEFORE you go see a lame-ass peice of crap. If it's bad, DON'T reward "them" by paying $8. Sneak in, or wait for it to be second-run, or watch a matinee, or wait for it to be on PPV or rentals, (or Scour).
The more you encourage them, the more ticket prices will climb, and the more the quality will drop.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The letter is written and sent, with credit to Chaim..very neat..
jonkatz@slashdot.org
Lead badguy is thin man with thin framed glasses (just missing the rose tint), with plans to rule world.
NERV = NURV
Lead hero has 'special skills' to control 'new technology'
Look at the poster. 1 Man. 1 Girl, short hair. 1 Girl, reddish long hair.
Bloody hell.
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Um, DeCSS?
the code in the opening credits was obviously html... in several of the screenshots the code was JavaScript, you can catch document.write('<title>...</title>') at one point. (yeah i was looking pretty hard) :-P
I'd say that it is very doubtful. But, if they don't, wouldn't that show what side of the script/fence they are on? :)
I can just see it now. People getting busted for using DeCSS on Antitrust -- and the movie studio trying to sue over it.... How many articles would mention the NURV of the Studio?
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
Since when has the open source movement "rocked" Corporate America? What sort of blathering fantasy is that?
As it much as it pains me to say, the official score is still Corporate America 1, Open Source Movement 0.
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
Okay, I went to see this movie with two fellow computer enthusiasts. We went in expecting a pile of pointless, inaccurate drivel. We left laughing, impressed by the technical accuracy, and generally entertained. My friend Ryan and I have been making NURV jokes all week.
Point being? Have some fun, fer chrissakes. You seem to expect every movie to be an Oliver Stone epic (his recent Any Given Sunday excluded) worthy of an Oscar. The fact is, this movie won't win any awards. It certainly won't further the careers of any of the acting talent. What it *will* do is earn a spot next to my copy of Hackers on my video rack, vying for the humorous foil to other entertaining computer flicks like Sneakers on nights of gathering with other geeks.
This might be blasphemy, around here, but screw it -- I had more fun watching this than I did watching The Matrix.
NURV.. check the site. www.antitrustthemovie.com
Yep, that's a Mercedes. Right down to the nifty pop-out key. Here's a link.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
Anyone with the hardware to do what they were doing can write content delivery software. It seems that in a situation like this, the business links would be the issue, not the software. The thing about Synapse that seemed so threatening was not its software but simply the fact that it existed with the power it had. Unless I misunderstood what they were coding (which is likely I did), it seems that if they just made the protocol open, it would solve the openness part. From what I understood they were mainly working on the backend operations.. is this right, or was I put to sleep that early in the movie?
If only the free programs wore blue and the non-free programs wore red... Maybe give them the ability to absorb colors from each other... And discs! Every program should come with a disc that can be used like a frisbee... And a game brig! That would be cool... How about a Master Control Program?..
End Of Line.
Someone here said that they groaned a lot from the reference to the :\ keys being used mostly by geeks..
:) .. because of the obvious c:\ (m$ filesystem) stuff.
:: to identify modules! :)
and scoffed at it (please, i'm just making a statement here, i mean no one harm
don't forget about perl, epic, c, and many of the other languages which use \ as a way of escaping characters, and also Perl uses
- Alex
hmm if the movie is about opensource maybe its ok for me to sell bootleg tapes of it...
Many of us were inspired by the geeks of our youth - Einstein, Feynman and the like were loved by the media like film stars. But todays generation of geeks seem too corporate, too boring, too robotic to be idolised. Who will the next generation of geeks be inspired by? Nobody, I guess.
I think it is about time that we made a conscious effort, starting here on /., to inspire and entertain the youth of the world. Throw away those biros! Get rid of your pocket calculator! Buy a pair of Bongo drums and start grooving with the geeks of the 21st century.
If you don't, our type will die, and technology will grind to a halt.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
To moderate this as offtopic because its pro jon katz is not fair
What about "When was the last time you saw a bad cohen Brother Flick?"
Alas, poor clippy, I loath him so.
Referring to "three kings"... dumb. Very dumb.
-bluebomber
The Daily Build
I saw th movie last Saturday by myself. I thought it was mildly entertaining but there was one big problem I had with it. First NURV is killing so called "open source" developers when they crack a problem but before they tell anyone. I don't see why NURV had to kill anyone. Why not just grab the source off a website or ftp it. If Synapse was closed source then how could anyone find out if the source used was from open source developers. I assumed that all the killed hackers were OP'ers. That made the movie that much more unwatchable.
...NURF or NURV?
And that ethos is far from noble. It's the ethos of leeches
Have you ever met a corporate lawyer? I'm related to a couple. They don't produce anything and contribute nothing to society. Ever seen a marketing or sales department full of good-for-nothings? Same deal - they leech of the creative and physical labor of others. But we support these hoardes of parasites.
Either way, it's non-productive parasites all the way down...
I have to say I got a good laugh out of it. Rachel Leigh Cook and Claire Forlani were hot, a definite plus. The code detector was a cool thing, as was the "multimedia" bit at the end (probably my favorite part of the movie).
I have a couple of bones to pick with the film. First, Milo actually outsmarts the evil Tim Robbins character. I guess one could say that Gary Winston has some sort of tragic flaw that allows him to be conquered, but I don't believe that it's very realistic. Evil people don't build an evil empire to take over the world without covering their bases. I'm not that evil (I'm quasi-evil, semi-evil. The diet coke of evil: just one calorie, not evil enough), and I never would have let Milo get that far.
Second, (possible spoiler), when Gary gets into a typing war with Milo, I could not believe it. If I had a global network of satelites, with the control running over IP [side note. Why did they have to use 10.0.0.0/8 addresses? 192.168.0.0/16 or 172.16.0.0 / 12 would have looked better] I think I would have memorized the IP addresses of the 12 satelites I was using (I think there were actually 14, 2 mother satelites and the 12 Milo and Gary were trying to control). I can probably list 50 IP's, what the name of the device is, and what's running on it from my job. I would expect the head of an evil orginization trying to take over the world would memorize his IP's.
Finally, the source code (looked kinda java-ish to me). Whenever someone showed someone else code, the looked at it for 10 seconds and said "that's amazing." The didn't even page down or anything. I guess if you actually fit all the code for a worldwide communications system into 30 lines of code, it would be amazing. The clips I caught from the code were like:
that's not the actual wording, but it looked like that.
The film was interesting. I think any geek would probably get a laugh out of it.
Still, with a plan, you only get the best you can imagine. I'd always hoped for something better than that. -CP
When computer programmer Milo Hoffman (Ryan Phillippe) used the term "open source" for the first time, I ducked. Why? Because I was afraid I was going to get nailed by some flying geek spooge. Let's face it: The possibility of a couple of repressed computer geeks blowing a load after hearing a germane computer term is substantial. To a hardcore geek, "Open" and "Source" are like the nipples on the breasts of Jennifer Love Hewitt.
Yum
eg. truckloads of gold driving around You referring to Die Hard: With a Vengeance? I thought they did a good job with that ... having Sam Jackson struggling to carry his ONE bar, and commenting on how "fuckin' heavy" it was.
There were many other subtle things-- Synaps=.NET, Gary Winston's initials are GW-- William Gates is WG, etc. Just my 10 worth.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I don't want to get into a nature v. nurture debate here, but I'd say that geeks don't need role models to become geeks. We're not inspired by role models, we're inspired by tech. And Lego. Er, I mean, tools... tech and tools, that's our inspiration. Any role models are strictly gravy... yeah, Einstein, Feynman, and "Real Genius" are great and all, but I was a geek long before I even heard of them.
And anyway, Einstein and Feynman are timeless. They'll always be cool.
Although I agree that we need more geeks with bongos. You can never have too many geeks with bongos. Inspire and entertain!
And they didn't have to name the most prominent sub-villain Phil, either!
It occured to me after watching this that a great scene at the end would have been to have a Linux user glance over at his TV to see the big broadcast and then look back at his still working Gnome desktop and shrug at all the fuss.
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Seems like in the movie, greed is evil (capitalism), and giving everything away for free is good (communism).
Ummmm, greed is evil and giving everything away for free is good, at least in my experience.
God, I hope that was irony.
I seem to remeber a story they did when these mail worms were coming out - they were talking with an MS rep and they were discussing how to deal with it - they said you could d/l a patch from MS to fix it. No mention of the fact that you were immune if you were using any other mail reader (Eudora, etc.). Not majorly bad - more a sin of ommision than anything really evil, but made me kind of wonder...
I'm grateful to everyone who has created so many wonderful things and released them freely, whether as full-functioning shareware, freeware, public domain, BSD, or even GPL or $-ware. The author of any package is the rightful person to decide the terms by which others my use and change it. But to lay claim on all yet uncreated software and demand that it be open source -- as a "moral" imperative -- is a priori theft.
-B...
LOL. Holy crap. I know that's your sig and everything, but it would make sense in your post even if it weren't. You planned that, didn't you? ^_-
But surely Prof Frink says more than just "glavin." "Gehoiten," maybe, or something similar.
< tofuhead >
It is still the dark of night.
Is there any/much evidence that MSNBC has done anything that would decrease their credibility? Other than just the image thing?
I've been very surprised by some of the anti-MS stories that have showed up on MSNBC. Or is this just a ploy? Put really obvious anti-MS stories up, but when there's something that isn't so visible but could hurt MS greatly, then don't air that one?
--
Flamebait? Now if that ain't a slap in the face, I dont know what is flamebait about it, I was addressing someone else's flame about moderation, which was admittedly offtopic. If I had been modded down as offtopic, I could care less, as I am not interested in karma, but rather having intelligent conversations. But flamebait, is, frankly, just wrong. But then this whole post is offtopic, so feel free to mod this one down. I know I probably would.
Way to go Jon Katz for telling off those shallow Hollywood people for jumping on a bandwagon and making inacturate, largely fictional, and stereotyped depictions of "Geeks", pretending that they are on our side when they really don't have a clue what they are talking about!
(Maybe he should have patended the business model...)
Anyone notice during the scenes of Milo flipping through the spy-cams while in the daycare center that one of them showed a man wearing a red fedora with his feet up on his desk? :)
Also, I thought the movie was fairly decent for a first shot at open source in hollywood. We can't expect a big summer "blockbuster" the first time out. Take it for what it is: Good press. And invite all of your friends to see it.
As I was leaving the theater last night I noticed a fair number of old people. I really wonder how many of them (or of the audience in general) understood what was going on. We need a real solid documentary on open source that is light enough that the average person can find it entertaining.
Again, totally agreed.
Look -- if Hollywood came out with a true, straight up, accurate portrayal of anything in computers, whether it be open source, system cracking, or anything else, it will be a four hour long pile of boring drivel that I sure as hell wouldn't want to sit through.
It's fun to live vicariously through the eyes of Hollywood -- Bill Gates Could Be Watching You! You might, someday, screw over a company like Microsoft and make a contribution to the world! Someday, every geek will be accompanied by a beautiful mate who loves him or her very much!
Until then, we can all only live our own little worlds, where we might have one or two of the above. Lighten up. Enjoy it as a movie, not as a screenplay generated from a Stephen Levy book.
Reading through the articles (Slashdot, the Forum on the Antitrust website, and various reviews) I have to say that I am the most amazed at the Slashdot audience.
:> ), 3D modelling, whatever. I am sure there is no shortage of techs who would be interested in helping out. Instead of constently saying "All Hacker Movies Suck", make a real one. Don't think it will get played? Find the Independent theaters.
I understand when some lame Reviewer says it sucks because of this and that -- since I/we never trust their opinions anyway.
And even comments on the Forum, where people are asking how to get into this or that -- and some people are leaving extremely long commentaries about what hackers are(not). I understand the ignorance some of the posters might have if they are new to all of this.
But those of us on Slashdot should be a bit more open-minded than that. When I first saw the preview, I decided I had to see it. I did NOT expect that it would be a great flick, or all-accurate, or any such nonsense -- it is from Hollywood after all -- but I wanted to see what they came up with. I was ecstatic to go see it, because I thought I would be entertained.
And I was.
Due to the setting being Portland, which is where I am, I was looking for clues about whether they might be alluding to Paul Allen (now the 4th largest cable company) -- specifically when they made comments about Bill Gates as another guy. It probably wasn't, but it kept me looking for little clues. I loved recognizing the snapshot in front of Oracle Corp downtown (where the Portland Java Users Group meetings are held), and was only slightly annoyed at them having Oregonians pumping their own gas (for realism sake).
Startups in Portland? Hell yeah -- all over the place. That is part of the reason why this is nicknamed the Silicon Forest. Since most people here have DSL and not Fiber drops, I assumed that the timeline was slightly in the future.
I did have a problem with them seeking VC for Open Source -- but, most startups look for VC whether they should or not -- so that was acceptable.
All the little Geekish references (including the tail end of the Credits) were quite to my liking. I would much rather they show a programmers environment with toys, lounging, caffeine, etc -- then try to show it as some normal suit/tie business. Even the "surprise" that he had a girlfriend -- I heard many giggles in the theater.
When I saw things like the Alien Kitty moving tapestries -- did I think it was trite? No, I was trying to figure out how to make them.
Admittedly, much of the movie was predictable -- but it was also enjoyable. Some of the posts here are talking about how it is going to hurt the Open Source Movement -- when in fact I heard many people leaving the theater talking about how it was a REAL problem ALREADY. Even my girlfriend, recently being introduced to these ideas, liked the movie and wanted to know more.
So, I say, if everyone is going to bash a movie that tries to appeal to us -- then take up the torch and try to make our own movies. We don't have to have a large budget. Use the local cable access facilities (ours includes a blue screen
Don't just complain -- try to fix the problem!
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
The only way a "geek" movie will be made that most "geeks" will like, is if its made in an "OpenSource" style.
hmm quick search on google brings up a couple...
http://www.ablen.org/movie/
http://www.uni-magdeburg.de/carl/montague/
No I'm not in anyway associated with those, just a quick search and copy-paste from google.com
(like this movie?)
I've been hearing that this is a great movie to laugh at; is it really full of MST3K fodder or what?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
I now refer you to my previous post on this subject.
"I'll take the red pill. No! Blue! AAAaaaahhhhhhhhh"
- Monty Python meets the Matrix
Even if it is presented as a way forward, if it is confusing, the general public will not think any more of it, except to say "it's all too complicated for me". It cannot benefit the open source movement if it is not clearly presented. The differences between free software and open source are difficult enough to distinguish, let alone open source by itself if presented badly.
Also you don't need to be running Solaris on Sun hardware to look at Solaris code. Text editors tend to work cross platform when viewing code.
"I'll take the red pill. No! Blue! AAAaaaahhhhhhhhh"
- Monty Python meets the Matrix
Justin Frankel of Nullsoft is the closest person to that. And he got bought by - AOL-TimeWarner --Ryv
I don't give a damn about how 'accurate' the tech was. While I agree, it was pleasant to see a couple Unix commands flash by, the STORY itself was totally inane. As a movie, it was horribly cliched and predictable. Not one REAL plot twist, aside from his hot sexy girlfriend worked for THEM! That's about it. And as plot twists go: "Yay". This movie is so by-the-numbers that we were calling off what would happen next as it went on, and we weren't dissapointed. I mean, there was zero suprise: the company really WAS doing it. *GASP* Gary Winston really WAS having people killed! Oh my! The digital paintings that react to who is around -- they changed into Gary's favorite painting while our hero is rummaging through his desk! Didn't see that coming at all! The girl he befriends at the company turns traitor! Absolutely zero imagination in this movie...
:P
I was trying to think of some ways to make it a more interesting movie... maybe make Gary be innocent. They could have had his employees be under so much pressure (but love the job so much) to produce code, that they turn to stealing the source code of open source projects and end up beating the shit out of, and sometimes killing them to protect the company. I dunno, that's dumb too, but no more lame than the tripe they ended up filming.
This movie has MST3k written all over it -- and we helped outselves to a nice heaping of jabs the entire time. We went into the theater on a positive, but not OVER positive recommendation. But alas...ugh.
BytesTemplar.com
how many of the 1337 script kiddies who read Slashdot now'days even know hwat rot13 is? -Zvxr Eboregf (jub qbrf:)
It's a non routable IP address "dumbass"
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
I admit that the plot had some serious holes, as pointed out in Katz's review, but at least the technical merit, for the most part, was there. OK, so it was fairly predictable, but it's getting pretty difficult to make a movie that's not at least somewhat predictable anymore.
At the very least, can't you just get a good laugh out of what Phillippe's character does with the Synapse code at the end of the flick? I think I was the only one in the theater who truly appreciated the irony in that - like I said, it was predictable, but so what?
And I thought it was great that they included the footage of him using the "mount" command in the play area, even though 99% of the people in the audience would have no clue what it meant.
the nice thing about most new movies these days is that you can usually tell just how stupid the film is when you see the preview. Such was the case with AntiTrust. There are exceptions, of course, as you can squeeze all the good scenes from some movies into the trailers (like Phantom Menace), but usually a preview can't save the movie, or rather a movie can't save the preview.
My moviegoing experience is a 1 or a 0: entertained or not entertained . . . with that said, i was entertained, so i guess it was good, and as i said before (in another story) my favorite part was the 700x CD-R drive milo had
http://community.roxen.com/developers/idocs/rfc/rf c1918.html
in case your slow.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Well, yes, it's obvious that it's much easier for Microsoft execs to incorrectly influence MSNBC stories if they chose to, than it would be for, say Oracle, to influence CNN stories.
Larry would have to call Steve to "take care of it."
Fistgrrl
"We're tired of all those Microsoft developers shoving their Win-Ho's in our face."
everyone of the developers is using an x86 running GNOME, but everytime Tim Robbins hands Milo a piece of code, Tim always shows it to Milo on the new Titanium G4 laptop. Does anybody else also think that there is a subtle reference to history here??
Is it NURF or NURV? Can we get an editor, please?
i must agree with this one. the movie was very realistic, everything seemed reasonable, and sure if you really are a programmer (which i am not) you can probably find flaws and inconsistencies in a lot of the code and commands used, but a lot of it was realistic. hackers doesn't even seem realistic to non-geeks. this movie makes people ask questions and think. that's what it was meant to do. it attacks microsoft, but not just that. if you really know whats going on with patents and how the patent office just gives patents out to almost anyone, it attacks that as well saying that human knowledge should be shared. you may not have liked the tangents, but for non-geeks, the tangents are needed to give the movie a bit more of a plot besides the computer stuff. it was definitely a predictable movie, but overall, i'd say it was pretty good. it's a good movie to make you think about how things are done and make people who don't know much about open source think about it and learn more about it. if people find something interesting, they don't just stop with the first mention of it, they will look more into it and see what it's all about. this movie will help more people look into the open source world and see what's going on here, and i think (as an advocate of open source) that's what we want, more people to learn about the movement and see what it's really all about. many of you may not agree with me that it was a good movie, but you have to admit, it makes you think.
please me, have no regrets.
having attended said snottish, snobbish school, there are plenty of brilliant minds running unchecked. microsoft was always recruiting grads and i'm sure that N.U.R.V. would've done the same. i did notice that when milo and teddy both had two bachelor degrees in engineering (B.S. in C.S.E. or something) which was pretty rare at Terman. at least they had java & GNOME and cool chicks, right? -me
...but there was one behavior that drove me crazy...
People would walk up behind someone else who was writing code, look at the screen for about 5 seconds, (which contained a for loop that was counting) and then say "Brilliant!" as though the code was a miracle cure for genital herpes.
I can honestly say that there are very few times when I'm trying to solve a large problem that anyone could look at less than 24 lines of my code (that goes on for 10,000+ lines) and say "Brilliance!"
Other than that, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. I t was entertaining, and Claire Forlani did very little of her annoying look that she does. (Anyone who's seen Joe Black knows exactly what I'm talking about).
--
"A mind is a horrible thing to waste. But a mime...
It feels wonderful wasting those fsckers."
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
...Just cleaning the jolt off the monitor, never, never drink jolt and laugh at the same time!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
as geeks, we are pretty boring to outsiders.
So what? I mean, did anybody see High Fidelity? That had to be one of the more realistic geek portrayals, although they were music geeks and not technology geeks. I had no idea who they were talking about most of the time, but I was entertained nonetheless. Why can't we have a movie like that? You know, just some film about tech geek life and tech geek culture that doesn't involve some big crack as the main plot point? Clerks was about the closest I've ever seen, yet it still didn't come all that close.
And, I'd also like to say, I highly enjoyed this piece of crap film. There was something cool about seeing this in a seattle theater and having half of the theater (presumably RealNetworks employees) laugh at the line, "Our startup is going to produce an application that distributes real time streaming audio and video to a wide array of devices."
Also, I would like to commend all of the NURV programmers for apparently writing flawless code, since it seemed that they were going to ship Synapse without any internal QA, beta testing, or even code reviews. Who needs that crap anyway, right?
EDS
http://www.evildave.net/
I suppose there are really two breeds of open-source supporters. One of them finds it a method to produce quality software by joining the talents of large numbers of people. Fine. I have no arguement with that.
The other breed, however, is so wonderfully represented by the line, "the software belongs to the people." Really, what kind of hell is that? Software, like any other human creation, belongs to whoever creates it.
And that ethos is far from noble. It's the ethos of leeches. In the case of a producer (which frankly, is not where you're going to hear most of it), it's the ethos of a person who doesn't think he's entitled to keep that which he creates. In the case of a non-producer, it's nothing but the plea of a parasite.
Hey, it was better than hackers.
i thought that antitrust was a good movie but me and my friend have a bet going on what kind of car milo drove? i belive it was a silver mercedize suv. am i right? i also heard a roumor that antitrust was not going to come out on tape/dvd is this true?
get a data switch for your monitor they're pretty cheap, and another video cable. to keep this on topic, im gonna go see this movie at the cheap theatre tonight what can I say I've been a Tim Robbins fan since shawshank redemption.
=== Are you all mad? This movie rocked! ===
Ok, ok, Let me elaborate. I went into the theater expecting another Hackers (in fact, I really wanted to see Thirteen Days, but my wife insisted on Antitrust). I came out, however, thoroughly amazed, and I argue that you should be, too. I understand that there were some things about the movie that could have beed done better, but all you naysayers are overlooking several outstandingly positive facts that seem blatantly obvious to me:
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. <ASSHOLE TYPE=POMPOUS>
- There was very little 'Hollywoodization' of the computers. It could have been like in The Net, Jurassic Park, or *shudder* even Hackers. There could have been VR gloves, head plugs, and skateboards galore. But no, we had real operating systems. We had prominent featuring of a free Unix. We had a prominent featuring of Gnome (which is great, even for a KDE fan like myself). The hero used a what looked like a real command line. We had real code. We had real code. WE HAD REAL CODE.
- The hackers were the heros. With all the assaults on hackers that have been cascading from the media, it sure is nice to see an audiovisual mass communication system showing scenes where the hacker is the hero and the media, law enforcement, and corporations are the bad guys. Someone had some serious cojones to do this...
- The open source movement got some very positive, prominent advertising. So what if it was simplistic and inserted somewhat haphazardly into the script. It was open source, it was the good guys, and many everyday people will walk away from the theater with some understanding of what it is (along with a positive bias).
- One of the movie's main statements was "knowledge belongs to all the people". Isn't that what many of us on slashdot have been fighting for for?
- WE HAD REAL CODE!!!
- I'm sorry, but seeing, on a giant movie screen, a Bill Gates lookalike with the words "I AM MURDERING PROGRAMMERS", superimposed and flashing, will be something I will cherish for the rest of my life.
People, this was a movie, made by a move producer and friends. Given the limits on imagination caused by their lack of first-hand knowledge in the programmer's culture, this was an excellent job.--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I thought that the use of the 10.0.0.0/8 IPs was hilarious. Obviously, some tech-savvy consultant for this movie had a sense of humor. Those are the internet equivalents of a 555-XXXX phone number!
The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME)
I give this review 1 out of 4 stars on technical accuracy. GNOME is not an OS!
Another interesting thing I noticed about the movie was a moral of the story seemed to be "Geeks: never trust women. They always have ulterior motives." Truly sad.
-- Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. - Arthur Miller
Does anybody else notice the similarities between this movie's "NURV" and the "NERV" from Evangelion? (Software called 'Synapse'? Geez, rip off!)
Hmm. Looks like someone is running around modding down all the anit-Katz comments. Let's see if he get's this one...
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
More like 60x, which is perfectly reasonable if you look at this movie as being in the "near future".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The irritating things about the source code scenes: 1) NO COMMENTED CODE 2) i dont care but i find it hard to believe one can glance at a single screen (the IDE gave about 25 lines to look at) of uncommented code and then say, "This is amazing." They did this at least twice in the movie and it was (cliche insert alert) like nails down a chalkboard.
I flee dead people.
I've not seen the movie (and won't), but something from the trailer got me to thinking. They hired this boy genious programmer (and many others like him) to supposedly change the world. Am I right in thinking that there are very few programmers who single-handedly make large social changes? Instead, IMO, it seems like the people with the ideas behind the programs are the ones to actually change the world (and even then, it's rare).
I ask, only 'cus I see programming as a language, that, while sometimes difficult, can be learned by a lot of people...however, the idea behind the program is what seems to make the actual change.
[again, I'm not writing this as a troll/flame]
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
You know, I think I'm person number 5, but I'm going to enlighten everyone else and reveal that this quote is from The Hudsucker Proxy, a film about the hula hoop starring the great Tim Robbins. That was sortof a geek movie too. If you're looking for a cheap rental, get it. I've never researched if it's based on any real life account or anything.. Probably not. well I liked it.
It's sad that every time anyone trys to do something to please us unix guys/gals we just tell them it's not good enough ... I mean hell, GNOME is on the big screen and they're pushing Open Source! Sure, it would be nice to have good actors and decent lines, but they're starting to at least attempt to make it realistic ...
.. this movie for example, another example is Loki .. hardly anyone is BUYING their stuff ... we all want all the games in the world ported to linux .. but nobody is buying them..
Every time they try to please us somebody bags on them
I dunno, just sad to see that even when they try to make us happy we don't return the favor.
It's great hearing this on /. It means that people here believe that they can expect substandard crap in their culture because it is a MOVIE. What if it were software?
Reviewer: "It's insecure, unstable, bloated spaghetti code that was obviously written by a finite number of monkeys."
Slashdot: "But it's SOFTWARE! It's not supposed to be good! It's supposed to be predigested porridge that fills checkboxes! It's worth $50! Really!"
Whatever. It's shit, and a waste of time and money.
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
As for code, other laws exist to deal with people copying your code. Patent law could be useful that way.
Was that the "hero" made TWO copies of the crucial data. Everything else was pretty predictable.
"We can offer you 42 thousand a year and a buick"
heh never did say what NURV's offer was did they?
Of all the people that i would assume to support the movie AntiTrust, you guys just come around and say it's no good. I don't expect this to get anything higher than a score of 0, so i'm going to make this brief. Lets look at other "hacker" movies that have been out in theatres:
Hackers back in the 1990's completely got it all wrong. Nobody can sit down at a computer, after having been legally restricted from any computer until his 18th birthday, and then suddenly with 6 keystrokes hack into anything. It's not like that, you know it, i know it, and every true geek knows it.
Actually that's the only other hacker movie i can think of. i was thinking also about the movie "Masterminds" but then i realized it wasn't so much at all about computers. Hollywood did something right for a change. They made a movie about what its truely like to hack into computers, and tell what open source code is all about.
AntiTrust gets 4 out of 4 stars, and is now MY favorite movie ever, completely overthrowing movies like "The Matrix" and "Mission: Impossible - 2". And wow, there wasn't even that much action in this movie. Heck, my memory may be a little shoddy, but i don't even think i can remember a time when a gun was ever fired in the movie. (Please, if i'm wrong, let me know).
I liked it too. I really dont see why no one seemed to like it. Mind you, my girlfriend goes to school at UBC, which is where the movie was filmed.... I have been inside the building (The "Chan Center") which is where most of the movie was filmed, like the caffateria, the main room where all the programmers sit, the mansion, all that was the chan center. The daycare center was called "the mini chan center" by all the ubc students, because it looked like the chan center, only smaller, and it was built by the film company.
So, seeing where they filmed it, and being in the building, it was interesting to see the movie, and it kept both my girlfriend and myself entertained.
I'm going to have to put you on the game grid.
Dancin MCP Santa
I saw it, and I gotta say, I loved it. But what you have to bear in mind is, it's NOT trying to be a movie that represents. For crying out loud.
The biggest thing that impressed me about the movie was, THEY ACTUALLY got it all right. When they opened up a shell, *IT WAS A SHELL!*.. I mean heck, traditional movies would have this fancy 'undelete' screen that would magically recover files.. They actually had him restoring the friggen inode table. That just rocked..
Basically, to make my statement short, and very sweet..
** LIGHTEN UP GUYS.. IT WAS A MOVIE.. **
Heck, many geeks favorite movie is 'Heathers'. My personal favorite as well. I suppose you guys wanna rip it to shreads becouse it doesn't 'acuratly portray the typical highschool students'.. Shesh..
Have a beer. Sit back.. Relax..
Oh, one more thing.. *I SO WANT their CUBES!*
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Consider the film's conceit, for instance, that one of the ways the evil corporation NURV ("Never Underestimate Radical Vision") stays competitive is to use hidden video cameras to spy on the keyboards of all the smart young programmers in the world and feed their discoveries into a central network -- hidden in a day care center. They then commit their perfidy to videotape, and leave the evidence in non-encrypted, accessible files. That's only one example of the screenplay's foolishness.
Oh for crying out loud Katz. Normally, I like some of your insights..
IT'S A MOVIE
Do you really thing if that Nightmare on Elm Street is about a REAL street? Or could even happen? LIGHTEN UP!..
Besides. A good majority of the world doesn't live in an IT utopia. Seems to me that when real hacker broken in to Microsoft, they wheren't looking at encrypted data either.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Controlling big media is a powerful lure for all sorts of people these days, but in America, you don't have to murder hordes of programmers to do it. You can just hire them.
Oh *COMMON*. And in the last Star Trek movie they coulda just blasted the bonehead from space. But what fun would there be in that??
It's Movie.. Makebelieve..
Man, you musta had one SUCK of a childhood, or your to darned old to remember..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I did find one oopsie as I was watching the movie. At one point, they display a file clearly written in 'C', but he saves and compiles it as a '.java' file.. :-) We forgive you..
Say, anyone actually get enough of the source to see what the functions actually *DID*?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I think the reason movies like this (see also Hackers, The Net, and other poorly done techy movies) fail in the geek circle is because as geeks, we are pretty boring to outsiders. Being a geek is reality. People don't want to watch a 2 hour movie about reality. Open Source is reality. No non-geek really cares what open source is and although the geeks would say "ooooohhh... linux!" anyone else in the croud would be saying "huh?". A movie about a teenage geek who eats lots of cold pizza, drinks Mt Dew, and spends his weekends at LUG meetings just doesn't sell. It's too real. If this kid was a revolutionist who defended his right to open source by gunning pro-M$ people down and starting his own secritive culture underground kinda thing (sensationalizing Linus and adding machine guns, basically), now that's a movie plot.
I guess my point here is that these movies aren't made for us. In terribly done movies like Hackers geeks screamed about how far off it was but the average person was either terrified of "hackers" IRL or they were just entertained by the stupidity of it. It wasn't real, but it was entertaining, and that's how Hollywood sells.
"You'll die up there son, just like I did!" - Abe Simpson
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
My favorite part was when it scrolled on the screen..
"This Transmition brought to you by this source code.."
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Not to mention, why would I want to see a movie about what we all see *EVERY DAY*? :-)
/comments.pl in order to allow everyone to have a fair chance to post.
As a side note, this was funny:
Slow down cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait 1 minute between each submission of
It's been 1 minute since your last submission!
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
But my big problem with the film isn't the fact that the story was bad, or that major technical errors were made. I believe that the movie trivializes the entire open source movement.
The movie basically said that the company was bad because they killed programmers, without getting into the topic of anti-competitive practices that still obeyed the letter of the law.
It upheld all the stereotypes that have plagued our comunity throughout its existence.
It leads us to believe that if the Windows source code was to be broadcast over the internet tomorrow, all the problems with microsoft will go away.
Ñ'
It is funny. Every big lawsuit (government antitrust or trial lawyer class action) seems to have a movie released around the same time. The Insider (Tobacco) Antitrust (MSFT) Forget name, but the movie on HBO about the two doctors who did the first breast implants. What next a Movie about cell phones causing cancer. Godzilla versus the Asbestos creature.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
No man.. It's very technically acurate.. :-) Play a drinking game where people identify how correct it is.. :-)
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Is this the sort of movie we will all be able to play the Hacker's Drinking Game with?
You know the game, you watch Hackers with a bunch of computer literate friends and when someone sees something that is complete bullshit they yell out "BULLSHIT!" Everyone else has to take a drink. Before long, everybody is too drunk to finish watching the movie.
-=-
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
We haven't had a movie that shows anything about the hacker mentality except a few horrible and misguided ones like Hackers, the Net, and the Matrix, so when I saw that Antitrust was coming out, I was very excited. Here was a chance to show the world just what we were made of, and I think it did an admirable job.
Remember: for all its foibles, Antitrust is still a good film by a good director. Ryan Philippe owned the screen last year in Varsity Blues. He's followed up that performance with a real gem in Antitrust.
Read the rest of this comment...
First name of one of the villians in the story is Redmond.....
Didnt know a female geek would read my thinly veiled attempt at making other female geeks read .. heh heh..
Pretty good. There must be some attractive female geeks out there then.
Rapid Nirvana
The plot was poor. Who cares what push it tries to give the open source community if the movie cant even hold itself up? There could have been so much more to the story had they given it a true techno thriller treatment. Where is Tom Clancy when you need him?
I've lived in this "hellhole" you call Canada all my life.
Love it here.
guess you never met me...there are sexy tech chicks out there, I agree with daemia, maybe it is your attitude
I saw the movie and I thought it was quite good. Also what I thought was cool if you take the movie symbolically you can see M$ in there, and I like the nasty remark that they did about Bill Gates house in it. All in all I will be getting the video when it comes out. And the code on the screen is not C like Mike said, if you look at the compilation of the code you will see that the output of it is .class and to me that says Java. Also for those of you who are interested stay for the end of the credits and watch the spacial thanks, you will recognize at lest 4 names in there.
man..i don't know what you guys are getting hung up about, movies won't touch geek stuff because it is to geeky and only applys to us...i was supprized they wen't as technical as they did..it has to have some kind of plot or else it wouldn't be a movie...but in your review it is portrayed as weird plot twists...what else did you ecspect when you encounter betral?..i thaught this was the most acurate prortrail of hackers hollywood has ever seen and probubly WILL EVER see...hackers becase of the gov. and corpaerations are thaught of a petty thugs ..in this movie they are portrayed as the elite of the elite of computer guys as they are and should be ...the rest of the world doesn't know this kind of hacker ..and people probubly think comptuer geeks as freeloading couch potatos ..now they know better..i don't see what you hated so damn much in this movie..i saw a lot of positive things
While what you say is how it SHOULD be, I know a security chief that is just like this guy. Their jobs are boring as hell and they tend to get into the power trips. If an event happens, there is no way they'd miss being right there in the middle of the action.
It was like watching a TV slasher movie where you're screaming "Don't open the damn door you stupid bitch." Instead, here it was, UPLOAD YOUR CHANGES YOU STUPID GEEK!
btw, who keeps their backup server array 1 meter away from their primary storage (the day care scene)? Er, they need to contact EMC and set up mirrored storage up to several kilometers away, connected via fiber or fast IP link...
ps: last post... :(
i'm pretty sure that the cd burner featured in this god-forsaken movie must have a rating of nearly 900x. I think.
Antitrust was overdramatic and not very realistic, but i noticed that it went way over the heads of most of the people in the theater, which made me feel pretty good actually. After seeing all these dance and cheerleader movies, it was a huge leap. I mean I thought it was worth it just for the line "Doesn't Bill Gates have one of those?" "Bill who?" The fact that this movie promotes open source and shows that selling out to a corporate giant isn't all its cracked up to be overshadowed any of its minor shortcomings. Though, personally, I dont really see why it was rated R other than the beating scene.
- yezzz, my name is a joke.
Personally, I think anyone who came out not enjoying this movie was too busy analyzing it to let themselves enjoy it.
While open-source zealots may have thought that the "open-source" movement may have sounded like a one-liner repeated over and over until the kid was beaten to death, I hate to say it but that's what you all sound like. I hear a lot about open-source, but it's mostly about how everything sucks if it's not. That was captured perfectly in the movie. Everything would be better if it were open-source, regardless of what that means.
I liked the way Robbins portrayed the Winston character, just a bit over the top at times, but showed some of the manicness that Gates is known to display at times. Eloquence when "on camera," quiet wonderment when with other geniouses, and flashes of frustration and anger at any lack of creativity.
And I definitely liked the idea that things were not quite where Milo expected them to be, and it kept me guessing as well.
It was a good movie, not spectacular, but definitely one I'll see again (and probably own), and well worth the money. Loosen up a bit, don't go into it expecting too much, and you'll come away pleased.
Gosh! this movie sucks. Lets disect it part by part.
,Indians and few Americans. None of them happened to be from Stanford though..
:)), but they cant comprehend our minds, they cant gather whats going on in our intellects. They are scared about what they might find, and they hate what they cant understand and so they brand us as geeks. Well, with Ryan Philippe leading the way, if any of us gets to bed some cute babe now on, then I would say this movie was a success..
First of all Geeks are not six foot hunks, have any of you seen how Cmdrtaco looks ? Even his mother wont recognise him.. heh heh..
And next is female geeks who just ooze sexuality.. bahh.. I been looking for gorgeous female geeks all through my life. The only ones I ever found were in the HR dept with an IQ of one digit and in the bloodsuckin marketing dept, who has no clue of wht the software does and what it doesnt do.
I like Tim Robbins, I wouldnt call this his best yet, but atleast he has tried to pretend like Gates, sans the facemask..
And what was Scott McNealy doing there, giving away prizes. Did Sun fund this whole thing. I thought only Larry Ellison a.k.a Alpha male was dumb enough to snoop around Redmond. Or maybe he had no clue till the movie came out, and now regrets putting his face in this crappy movie.
Well the Skullbocks or whatchaever you call them, it seems that only the snottish snobbish Stanford produces intelligent minds. I wouldnt listen to more than two mins to a Stanford graduate. I have seen better minds from Cornell and Illnois. And this movie kind of attempts to spread the notion that whole of silicon valley is full of brilliant minds out of Stanford. Jeez..gimme a break. No offense, the best minds I have seen till now are mainly from Russian colleagues, Israelis, Chinese
You cant take a crappy movie which stinks like s@#t and then put an interview with Maddogg about the benefits of Open Source and Linux and then try to ride on that hype alone. And the worst part, was if you check the forums for the movie, you would see an ongoing fight with so called open source advocates and so called closed source advocates, and its so childish.
I dont know what this movie stands for, but I hope we wont have to look back and shudder. I hope there are no future releases, and this is laid to rest six foot deep under ground, left to rot.
Lastly but most important, society and babes in particular looks upon geeks and the tech community with disdain, not just because we are geeks and we get a six figure paycheque (atleast used to
Rapid Nirvana
thank you! im glad someone agrees with me! i mean for god sakes, it didnt involve any shooting or exploding, that in itself is mind boggling. i was really suprised when i saw this movie, i was expecting it to be highly glamorized. as for the nerds in the movie.. the asian guy wore the same shirt in every scene he was in, no matter how many days had passed... isnt that enough? j/k.
- yezzz, my name is a joke.
That's just the issue though. Credibility is entirely a matter of perception/image. It doesn't necessarily matter that they actually may have been responsible in their reporting. If people percieve a bias, real or not, then their credibility is shot.
Now I'm not saying they have or haven't shown any bias. I don't watch MSNBC so I wouldn't really know. But I personally would tend to take what they say with a decent sized hunk of salt regarding tech issues just because of who pays the bills. (no pun intended) I doubt I am alone in this though I also doubt very many people have thought very deeply about it.
Katz hated it? Must be good. Doesn't he hate horses and America too?
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
("Our problem is, we don't care about anything that isn't on a hard drive," says one geek ruefully.) Actually, it was "our problem is, we don't take anything seriuosly that isn't on a hard drive".
Bah
Someone mod this last one up !! :)
Antitrust is actually pretty technically accurate. The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME) and programmers have real code on their screens (it looks like some flavor of C).
Oh well.. just how many of those 3 stars should disapear ?
I saw Antitrust yesterday and of course I went to check out skullbocks.com, skullbocks.net, and skullbocks.org when I got home. It looks like MGM hasn't thought of a good idea for what to host there. (At the time of this posting they have a generic "under construction" page posted at all sites)
Then I had an idea... I wondered what would happen if somebody like Jon Katz posted an open email to MGM with some of the following ideas:
Just an open idea. What else can you think to add?
thanx, chaim
It depends... just how "melty" are you?
The First Wives Club featured Microsoft Office, so does that mean that it instantly lost karma in its Slashdot rating?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
I also appreciated the cameo by a Rocket eBook.
And the fact that even the handhelds everybody uses aren't Microsoft devices.
d
"What's with the Mission Impossible 3 bullshit, Milo? You're a geek!"
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I thought this movie would deal a blow to Gates's public appearance. Instead, Antitrust makes it clear that Winston is NOT meant to symbolize Gates; Gates was actually meantioned in this movie.
You get a lot of Gates's view, too. There's a lot of defensive comments in this movie for him. In addition, when all hell breaks loose and the conspiracy is discovered, it's too unrealistic to implicate that Winston represents Gates.
Even propostrousness aside, this movie was not what it appeared (to me) to be. Still, JonKatz had a good point when he said that at least "a lot of people will be exposed in a positive way to the open source idea." It was unfortunately a sorry medium between geek and mainstream.
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Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Ok, I'll be the first to admit i'm technically and computer inclined (a geek), I use Linux everywhere, and I'm always up for a good conspiracy theory. But have we gotten so deep that any movie that attempts to encroach upon the technical world, that we have to put it under the largest maginifying glass possible? Can we not enjoy "semi-technical" movies? It was a movie. Of course it wouldn't be accurate. So why diss it because they "commit their perfidy to videotape, and leave the evidence in non-encrypted, accessible files. That's only one example of the screenplay's foolishness. " yeah, so what? If they did encrypt it you'd confuse 70% of the general population and you add that extra 10 minutes to the movie that you don't need. Like I said, it is just a movie, not a documentary about the lives we live or the things we do. I'm suprised that it wasn't slammed because it didn't mention the RIAA or any other copyright quagmires. I challenge Jon and Mike to go back and watch the movie without the technical maginifying glass and enjoy the twists and turns of the movie. Not everything is linux, computers, mp3s, script kiddies, hackers, and irc. There are other things in this great big world we live in. Go out and find it!
"Do you perform a thorough inspection of every roller coaster before you ride it?"
Do you inspect a roller coaster everytime you ride it?
Seen:
Tues. Jan 16, 200. 10:35 showing at the Paramount in Montreal.
Synopsis:
Geek version of "Wall Street" (1987)
Entertainment value:
2 out of 5 (non-geek)
4 out of 5 (geek)
Review:
Plot followed "Wall Street"...Ultra-rich corperate type seduces young graduate with dreams of money and power. Graduate goes for it, luxuriates in the comfort of it all...then notices somethings is wrong. Finds out that someone close to him is being screwed by the company he works for. He then uses the very skills that he was hired for to make things as right as he can. Happy ending...the moral ones win, the evil ones loose and you walk away with a warm fuzzy.
Like most geek things, the fun parts are in the details! The DVD of this will probably spend a lot of time in slow-mo and freeze-frame on geek owned DVD players when it comes out.
Personal:
I enjoyed the film. This was no 2001, Schindler's List or The Great Escape (Or it's send-up, Chicken Run). A couple of things surpised me, but I won't mention them for fear of causing a spoiler. Go see it, maybe they will make a better one if this one makes lots of money!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
If Loki would port games that I am interested in, I would buy them. And NO, I will not buy any old game to show support for Linux games. If I buy the FPS, then they will make more of them. I don't want more of them. I want them to make RollerCoaster Tycoon, C&C, etc. Then I will buy those games.
Until then, it's dual boot (well, actually, unplugging the monitor from the linux box and hooking it up to the Win box.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Wait... But I'm a good-looking geek, aren't I? c'mon...
"Ummmm..."
Well, Katz is a fscking moron. AND this story wasn't filtered by /.'s No Katz preference -- so I'm going with NURV. Even if just to be a jerk
IANAMR (I am not a movie reviewer)
signal, noise, to me it's all the same.
The movie is fiction. If you want the reality of Open Source, then take a look at C.H.I.M.P. and see Open Source in action!
:-(
This article slipped by my "Exclude Jon Katz" filter.
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David Schwimmer was in it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
not i mind if it is; the fact is that we know that the news on this site has a slant -- most people don't know that most of the "mass media" also has a slant, and this is where the problem lies.
Or maybe "NIRD of Undramatic Reels of Dross", where NIRD stands for "NURD of Improbable Reactionary Drama".
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
"Bill Gates tries to tempt free software programmers to come work for him. When they refuse, he kills them."
That's a gross exaggeration, but it puts it into the category of "Ok, that's so silly I have to see it."
Besides, don't geeks always go see movies like this just to count geek references? I know I do. How long before the Antitrust FAQ shows up to tell us exactly what code they were looking at in all those shots?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
I agree for the most part with the authors up top. The technical side of things was pretty sweet. Except for the fact that we're supposed to believe that from a single computer, you can send a video signal via satellites to every hand held and TV screen in America. I would have to assume that these huge broadcasting companies would give access to Microsoft (OOOPS, I mean Nurv) that would allow them to send a pirate signal over the regular broadcast.
Also, if these guys could zoom in on a person's desktop while they are working, and "steal" code, couldn't they find out what their most valued employee was up to?
Also, these smart open source "hackers" that just graduated, they seemed to be all about venture capital. Yes, they meant to give away the code, but the constant drive for venture capital was annoying. Also, the last scene in the movie was cheesy as hell.
I will give it huge props though for the constant shots of Gnome. I hope this made people realize how functional a Linux workstation can be, and how it can be customized for your needs.
[Spoiler material. don't read me if you haven't seen the film]
I thought this film was totally ridiculous. It looks as though someone with a great idea for a movie just slapped a whole much of sequences together with cheap glue.
Seriously, if you were a multi-billionaire, would you really resort to murder? Do you know how much you risk? One mistake and you lose everything. And I mean everything! This movie would've been much better if they didn't resort to this low-level, Rambo-style plot. It would've been much more intellegient had NURF used other "non-murdering" ways to get what they wanted.
And those evil henchmen... where'd they come up with these people? You mean to tell me some simple blackmail would get them to all work for you to commit more crimes? And isn't Tim Robin's character afraid that they might come and blackmail him back for the evil things he's doing?
The security manager... oh that's even more ludicrous... Whenever something happens he just takes off out of his monitoring station, leaving everything un-attended? I think in real life he would've dispatched security guards to check things out while he stayed put to watch what's going on.
Just when things couldn't get any better, the writer/director got stuck... What to do when the security manager catches Filipe's character? Well how about this? We just add a one-liner, something like... "wanna know what really goes on in this place?"... and magically, Mr. Security joins up with the "good" guys. Sigh...
Those password screens... A few keystrokes and magical events take place. Just to break into an NT machine with a user password would take you hours our days, if you had some password cracker. No... all he needs is his 10 fingers and 50 keystrokes.
Let me ramble on...
After Filipe finds out about what might really be going on, who does he go to? Some co-worker (that black-haired girl) who works for Mr. Evil? Isn't that the stupidest thing to do? You trust no one, yet you spill your guts out to someone who works on the inside?
Last but not least, in the beginning of the movie when they talked of open source, I just had to laugh... Yeah, we'll give the source out to the world for free, and get paid for "support"! After all why do we have capitalism instead of communism? Seems like in the movie, greed is evil (capitalism), and giving everything away for free is good (communism). Wake up already!
To say this movie brings the Open Source Movement (TM) into the limelight in a positive way is similar to saying people should take astrology seriously because it's included in each piece of Bazooka gum.
/. will have a front-page story about the upcoming BLAIR WITCH 5: THE NIGHT OF THE KERNEL HACKERS (but it atually features gcc in action!!!)
This movie is fluff crap, and no one is going to take one, two, or three glances at it and go "wow, there's a real serious and deep philosophy at work here." This movie been rightfully shrugged off and scorned by every major critic. No one took anything important awat from it, and no one ever will.
I don't get it.. I guess some people will get excited by anything. Next thing you know,
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
Could it possibly be that they are getting modded down because they are both offtopic and redundant? It's a friggin movie review, people. Yeah it's got Katz but it's also another guy, and its an opportunity for geeks to discuss a new geeky movie. It's not the usual Katz articles, so I don't see why you have to whine so much about ONE stinking article with his name on it. He didn't even say Columbine or Corporatismitistics or similar nonsense in this article.
If you like to want to see how exactly a tech firm works..then go see "OfficeSpace". Its absolutely hilarious and you can relate to almost everything and anything. However I wish they had put more focus in to the office environment.
Hackers, The Net both sucked. However I have heard that "Sneakers" was a good movie. I guess that would be my second choice.
As for Anti trust, I wouldnt see it twice..
Rapid Nirvana
Did you try his new game, Killer Homosexuals from Venus?
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Don't lead me into temptation; I can find it myself.
Comments from other critics:
Prof. John Frink: "Well, as any real geek can tell <glavin> this movie is highly overrated...what with the self-referential cliches <glavin> and the inaccurate depiction of programmers, and the clacking and clicking, and the spying, and the killing, oh the killing! <Glavin>!"
Comic Book Guy: "I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, a DIVxed copy of which I downloaded a week before it was released to theaters, from alt dot nerd dot obsessive."
Pedro: "esta película lastima mi cerebro!"
Burns: "Exxxxcellent. Why, you know, in this day and age it is so rare to see the head of a giant corporation portrayed in such an honest and favorable manner."
Lisa: "Obviously this is just more pop-culture tripe from Hollywood, and just another weak attempt to appeal to geeks."
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Compared to THe Net, this movie was great. The scene I enjoyed the most took place in the day care center(no, I wont go further). The music was perfect for when he makes the revelations.
As for keeping all the incriminating evidence(avis, changed records, etc)? I'm assuming he's doing that so he can blackmail his employees. Dare to turn your back on me? I'll just give the cops all this evidence. Easy way to control your evil employees.
I noticed there was quite a few open source jabs here and there, making me think that Slashdot's zealots had a hand in this movie.
The work environment at NURV makes my place look like a dungeon.
The computer screenshots and all that blabber was lot less inaccurate than any other movie I've seen. yes, I was trying to parse the HTML in the opening credits, seeing if I could find out what website it went to. It looked like a typical corporate index.html, where there was a link mentioning "download our latest beta!".
I loved the source code detector they had rigged. If you saw the screenshots quickly it had labels for changed source code and new code.
I'm assuming the source code that they were working with in the movie was all BS code. Anyone with quick eyes care to comment on it?
I enjoyed it. It was fun. I wasn't looking for technical accuracy.
I enjoyed the movie.
M.
Apparently you don't recognize java when you see it.
Look, the movie was not very good on story or plot. But is is PG-13, and made in America. Those two restrictions make pretty much any movie bad.
There were a few funny lines.
There were some cool screenshots.
I thought the "Ted" character seemed a lot like most open source people I know. Emotional, gifted, etc.
In a way, it was unfair to Microsoft. AFAIK, they have never directly killed anyone. Some people committed suicide when their companies were destroyed, homes and families lost, but that happens during economic downturns, etc. as well.
I didn't expect much from this movie from the second I saw who the actors were. I figured it would have one-dimensional cutsie pie acting, and a story line that a drooling imbecile (IE, most Americans) could follow.
Therefore, I wasn't disappointed. I reccommend all geeks see it, but fer chrissakes let the criticism go for awhile -- it's a silly movie for kids. just let it go.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
At least this ostensibly pro-OpenSource movie has interviews with OpenSource folks on its web site in Quicktime format using anti-OpenSource Sorenson codecs.
Fuck 'im up, Tim! His views are invalid! -Pirate Corp$
The computers have a real operating system on them (GNOME)
I thought GNOME was a desktop environment, not an operating system.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
"You know, for Kids."
Alright, now if any of the five people on slashdot who got that have mod points hand em over!
The Windows source code was released a long time ago.
ACK!
Right is wrong when left is right.
I thought it was pretty obvious that they were supposed to be writing in java (the .java extensions on the source files). Of course the selection of java for a time critical piece of code is bewildering, but being that java is "cooler" to say then C or assembler I can understand it from a movie standpoint.
As to the CD burner's speed, it doesn't have to be that fast when you are just burning a compiled (into bytecode at the least) program. The finished product would probably be less than 10MB or so.
"From my cold, dead hands you damn, dirty apes!" - CH