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More Than 20 Years of the Web on the Big Screen
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "WSJ.com has compiled clips from a dozen movies over the past 23 years that depict the internet, with varying degrees of accuracy. Among the selections: WarGames, Sneakers, .com for Murder, and Mr. & Mrs. Smith. The Matrix Reloaded used real Linux code, while Mission: Impossible had the improbable email addresses Job@Book of Job and Max@Job 3:14. In a related article, WSJ.com reviews some of the more-absurd Hollywood conventions when it comes to the web. Harry Knowles, of Ain't It Cool News, says, 'The thing that always gets me is watching people send emails. You click "send" and the entire document begins to fold into an envelope and disappear into the screen. I tend to send around 300 to 400 emails a day, and that would drive me insane.'"
Allthough that's a common complaint about that scene, the GUI she recognizes as UNIX was actually a real Silicon Graphics 3D File System Navigator for UNIX.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Great article! It's not just the web that gets misrepresented in movies, though. Most computers in film are generally similar in that they're always generating some sort of sound. Anything happening on screen, in some cases just scrolling down a window, is accompanied by a click or a beep or some noise, assumedly, to make sure you didn't miss it. Besides being completely unrealistic, the thought of having to actually work at a computer that noisy, or even a room of computers that noise would drive anyone insane.
I can't believe they forgot this; I've seen it in dozens of movies and TV series, including "realistic" ones like CSI.
Surveilance camera catches a blurred, grainy, black and white image with a 2x2 pixel head on it, software enhances the face into a highly detailed 3D model and even autodetects the name of the person.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
One of the ways I've heard the voice synth explained is that it was pretty likely that both Matthew Broderick's character and the government bought the voice synth equipment from the same place.
Most of the voice synth hardware in the 80s used the same voice synth chip, the venerable SPO256-AL2 from General Instruments...so yes, everything is going to sound similar, if not the same.
A. So what's your point? Admittedly with your current draft-dodging coward of a president, I can understand your skepticism (if you're not American, I apologise for that).
Our current draft-dodging coward of a President was actually trained as a fighter pilot (in a unit that had no realistic chance of seeing combat, but that's hardly relevant to whether he could fly a fighter plane if he needed to.)
At the time the film was made, the previous President had been an actual combat fighter pilot. So no, not unrealistic at all. Although if someone told me that either of the Bushes would be an effective pilot in combat during their presidencies, years after having flown anything at all, I'd be a bit skeptical.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Breaking launch codes a single digit at a time was one thing they got glaringly wrong
Will people please stop complaining about this? If you've read Tanenbaum's book on Operating System Design, you'd know that this was a very real hack. In the system he describes (Tandem Computer, I think?), users could attach a listener to the page fault handler to know when a page fault happened. The system also checked passwords one character at a time.
A common method of breaking the super-user password was to align the password with the page boundary. If a page fault occurred, the hacker would know that the correct letter or digit had been found. The hacker would then move the password one character back in memory so that the next digit would be over the page boundary. This process was repeated until all the characters were found.
As a result, these computers were actually capable of being hacked "one character at a time" like you see in movies. Hollywood was just slow to update to the latest methods used.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...which someone wrote as a result of the movie, not before the movie.
It was actually fairly useful.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Um, I actually USED that graphic file system viewer on an SGI workstation in 1992, BEFORE Jurassic Park came out in 1993.