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10 Terrible Portrayals of Technology in Film
Luke Hachmeister writes to mention a light piece at GideonTech on some of the truly terrible portrayals of technology in film. From Hackers to AntiTrust, Hollywoood just can't stick to reality. From the article: "Harrison Ford plays a security expert at a bank. He falls prey to a scheme to steal money for a gang that has taken hostage of his family. The film tried very hard to keep it a rollercoaster ride of thrills. From the beginning, you have Harrison Ford typing furiously to stop a hacker by writing new firewall rules. At least this time, these rules didn't float around in a rainbow of colors ala Hackers. What really puts Firewall at the top of the list, is the dumbest and non-believable use of an iPod to date. This is 2006, not 1995, you can't just make stuff up like this anymore. In the middle of the film, Harrison Ford happens to not only be a security expert, but an Apple hardware developer too."
Agreed. There's no way in hell an advanced intelligence would be Windows compatible.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I have to laugh at all the people responding "He used a mac!" ... they totally missed the point of what you were saying. Namely, that the Alien AI would be adaptive and self-healing, and would totally block out Windows, leaving Mac as the only option ... :)
Maybe you could render it useless by installing WinCE on the nuke itself.
Ladies and gentlemen, a big round of applause for The Slashdot Effect!
"Oh sweet, her laptop has a 28.8 modem! Whoa!"
Since when are half of those films NOT science fiction?
Jurrasic Park? War Games? Independance day?
Could they please give me tickets to their dinosaur park? And, while they're at it, give the ID4 aliens my number, I'd like to have lunch sometime.
Clones are people two.
The line is delivered with such egotism and authority that she can't NOT know unix! In fact, *only* Unix admins can be that cock-sure and arrogant.
(Sidenote: I am a Unix admin, at times.)
Indeed, they used Mac OS
(Wouldn't it be System 7 around that time?)
Of course, Goldblum used the Powwerbook 5300- the one with the exploding batteries, so the aliens were doomed either way
"...and on the seventh day we wrapped." JMS 4:22 May 5, 1997
the Alien AI would be adaptive and self-healing, and would totally block out Windows, leaving Mac as the only option
:) well other than jeff goldbloom.
They have been watching us for years and protected themselves from the known operating systems of the world... thus, they completely missed seeing mac as noone had any
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that device driver conflicts would activate the countdown.
77 HITS
Really Long Off Topic Combo
Hey, after a day of being effectively dropped off of a cliff in a car, chased by dinosuars, snotted on by a dinosuar, almost being run over by a "flock" of dinosuars, seeing your little brother get electrocuted, and come close to being eaten by dinosuars a couple of times, I have to say that, personally speaking, *I* might come off as a bit cocky if finally faced with something that I know I've got nailed. =]
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
#Shot 1 of glass office building
Narrator: She was a innocent data entry operator, he just wanted to finnish his perl program.
BUT! they were destined for a roller coaster ride from hell
#Shot 2 Close up of smoking server, flickering lights
Male Geek 1 with shocked voice: "Whats happening"
#girl screams
Male Geek 2: " I dont know I just posted a link to an article on one of the servers to slashot"
Male Geek 1 shouting: "Oh my god it's going to blow"
#Shot 3 Glass Office Building on fire lots of smoke and running people
Narrator: if you have never seen a movie about computers this movie shouldnt be missed
#Shot 4 Little Girl with Del Computer
Little Girl "Daddy I can turn on your laptop"
Father screaming "NOOOO"
#Shot 5 Little girl getting blown to bits.
Narrator: the slashdotting coming to a cinema near you, just pray you never get linked.
Well, it was a dystopia.
You know the scene in Hackers where Joey logs into that one computer, and rainbows of stars and other shit come streaming across the screen?
Somehow, I think the audience would have gotten the point if we just got a zoom-in of "Login successful. Welcome to Cyberdyne systems model 101." Especially if he started doing the victory dance.
I don't know about you, but if the "Login successful" screen did the stars shit every time *I* logged into a computer, I would drag the developer into a dark alley and beat him with a crowbar for a couple of hours.
Of course, that wouldn't excuse the other egregious hackery that comprised much of the dialog. You gotta love a line like "Run Antivirus!"
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Yesterday, my dental hygenist attempted to create an analogy of "not brushing my teeth" as being the same as "not updating my antivirus on the machines at work".
:)
She didn't get my point when I said they run "Linux".
Too bad my mouth doesn't, though. Heheh
Back in '93, it would be very unlikely a 10 year old girl would understand UNIX since it practically didn't exist at home computers and kids usually don't have access to UNIX servers.
Standards compliance is a wonderful thing.
...while dancing like a retard in front of 15 screens, drinking red wine ..
And most unbelievable, a president who understands, and gives a speech in favor of, science. Man, that scene brings a tear to my eye every time.
-Grey
Silver Clipboard: Time Management Tips
Oh! Oh! You're gonna love this one:
In gawd-awful NBC show "Surface" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0452718/, there was a scene when the heroine had to release the hero/nut-job from a prison cell locked with a retinal scanner. The buildings gonna blow, so she's in a hurry. Tries pressing everything, no dice.
There just happens to be CCTV displays in the same room! yay! She manages to find full-face security footage of a guard on one of these displays (lucky!), and zooms it (say 10,000X) so just the eye is showing. No, really.
Resourcefully, she then rips out the LCD display showing an image of a big eye and holds it up to the retinal scanner. The door pops open.
At this point my disbelief got up, left the room and shot itself.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
It has a space shuttle that noisily swoops and accelerates into a crash landing on an asteroid with its main engines still burning at full power -- even though it has no fuel tank. That's just about every spaceflight rule in the book broken in a single scene. It's a triumph of art over reality... OK, actually, it just sucks.
...or dentures?
Yes, ideed. This was still the time when the idea of malware did not pentrate society to a deep level. I only asked myself: WTF the extraterrestrians build starships as big as cities but they do not protect theyr system at all (they did not even talk about skipping an protection).
Maybe they send a mail like this:
Dear Extraterresrtian friend,
you have not heard of me up to now but i am sure i can trust you. I am the son of the late ruler of this planet and twenty others. However, rihgt now i can not access my power, since enemies of my family have grounded our operations. I now come with a offer to you which i make to you only because i heard of your good morale. If offer you a significant share of my imperium if you can help me to regain power on earth....
Superteeth! Repelling Plaque at every turn, by virtue of being completely incompatible with it!
ive allways look at hackers as an art-house kinda movie
...Homicidal.
and the "rainbows of stars and other shit" that come streaming across the screen are more what he is 'feeling' inside his mind rather than whats really happing.
Though i do agree that showing Login successful, him doing the victory dance would show the point, but common... think of the physical effort! hehe
So, uh, what's your interest in Kate Libby, eh? Academic? Purely sexual?
The fun part of this is that you guys actually spent time trying to "track down this item". (Oh, I forgot - you are smart, most people are not. Right.)
Well the little guys inside my PC thought it was pretty spot on.
Now that's just a blatant lie, a lot of white text on a black background can be very interesting!
...then again, I guess most other people don't get excited looking at emerge logs.
Dunno if he mentioned it as the site is Slashdotted straight to server hell, but Simone was fucking horrid. Okay, so the guy has software and a wicked computer that can render photorealistic CGI in realtime. Okay. Then it has a goddamned 5.25" floppy drive in it. The fuck it would! Then he puts in a 5.25" disk called "Plague" which wipes it. Okay, that's plausible. Then he pulls all the drives, discs, basically everything with a record of this software and destroys it. Then his daughter somehow brings it all back with a keystroke, even though the damned drives were GONE!! Not to mention they were completely scrambled before they were gone! Oh yeah, and the rest of the movie sucked ass too.
No, I think it makes Linux equivalent to bad hygiene.
Apparently, the Aliens forgot to read this security advisory: CERT(sm) Advisory CA-96.13.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
>Creating a worm doesn't involve moving little 3-D blocks around on a computer screen. ;-)
Pah! You clearly don't get object programming
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
They could even have an X-factor type competition to decide who plays him.
Of course the winner will be the guy who gets his PFY to rig the votes.
liqbase
The hacker used trojans to bore the viewer with technical details? I guess that's a new sort of DoS attack: Instead of attacking the computer, attack the people in front of it by giving technical details
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
>In a world where they're cloning dinosaurs, I think it's perfectly acceptible for them to also have unrealistic technology.
Especially their version of Unix.
Uhm, you mean like Irix running on a Sun? (* shuffles swiftly back into his hole *)
i am a film buff. so i knew about the movie swordfish a few months before it came out (from fan sites like aintitcoolnews.com, etc.), and i knew sketchy plot points about the movie, namely that it would be about illicit transfers of illicit funds
i also used to work for a large multinational bank as a programmer. and a few months before swordfish came out, i was developing a system used by the bank for monitoring internal transfers. on a lark, i code named the system in development as "swordfish" for my own personal use as a joke
but in email conversations with my boss, i, um, kept calling it swordfish. oops. my boss wound up raving about the system, to his bosses, to other middle management, to everyone. he started telling everyone who would listen about it because the basic idea behind the project was a sound one and it was important for the bank. unfortunately, he kept calling it "swordfish," and the name stuck and went into general use
awareness of the swordfish project just happened to peak when the movie came out. to widespread media coverage and exposure and advertising. and the basic details about a hacker breaking into a financial computer system to transfer funds became common knowledge, even to people who didn't see the movie. and at the same time, here was my boss making an internal push to distribute this program to wider use for testing, and trying to drum up support for it amongst the higher ranking middle management... and it was called swordfish
he stopped raving about the program, and my boss got in the habit of shaking his head and smirking every time he saw me. but we never spoke about the "coincidence". he must have gotten laughed at pretty hard on my behalf
so the plot guys get the technical details wrong sometimes
i am living proof that sometimes the technical guys get the plot points wrong
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If the had wanted to break *every* rule in the book, NASA would have *missed* the asteroid for a change.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
"Run, antivirus, run!!" "Life is like a box of worms, you never know which one you're gonna £"£$"ERWL.."
"So there he is, risen from the dead. Like that fella, E. T." - Father Ted Crilly
If the Aliens had used Windows..they wudn't have taken off their planet in the first place
Or perhaps we now know why they crash landed in Roswell. . .
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
What a terrible portrayal of a working web server.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Maybe that's feasible, but on the screen it shows the machine establishing a TCP/IP connection to the mothership.
And "Vint Cerf" sounds like a name actual human beings would give their offspring?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Don't you know that in US English, you can substitute any vowel for any other ?
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
TCP/IP, wireless LAN, both invented after the alien spaceship crashed at Roswell. Where do you think we got the ideas from....?
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
So, it's safe to conclude the only Mac virus that ever existed saved the world from an alien invasion. ;-)
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Heh. I once created a fictitious item to test a stock control system (a Sanderson running PICK) at the last place I worked. The order code I created was CIG-B&H/20 and the description was "Cigarettes, Benson and Hedges, pack of 20". When the system was replaced with a new (but reckoned inferior by everyone who had to use it) Sage Tetra system, we had to get in temps to re-enter everything from the old system into the new one (open source would have made it too easy to create our own import filter). As far as I know, CIG-B&H/20 is still on the stock control system there although there were never any kept in stores.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Linux would be dentures. They don't come with the system, you have to install them.
(I know, the analogy fairy is going to kill me now. I'm sorry.)
When whizkid sits down by the fence control computers.
Starts flying around in some 3D interface. In 1996.
"This is a UNIX system! I know this!!!".
Yeah. Real UNIX like...
Linux is kinda like flossing. It keeps everything clean, but it's uncomfortable and no one really likes it.
I have mixed feelings about War Games. Some of it was good and realistic, the text logins and the war-dialling, like you say, but some of it was pushing things a little, like computers are alive and one them has been put in charge of the nuclear button.
And some of it was just complete fantasy-land, like the cute girl wanted to hang out with the class nerd while he played a computer game in his bedroom. I ask you.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
And some of it was just complete fantasy-land, like the cute girl wanted to hang out with the class nerd while he played a computer game in his bedroom. I ask you.
Indeed. Reality would be if the cute girl kicked his ass in Global War. Turns out those cute girls can be vicious little killers.
KFG
You had modems?
:-)
Young'un. Spoiled brats with their newfangled tech. IN MY DAY, WE SPEEDREAD ACOUSTIC PHONE SIGNALS DIRECTLY INTO THE DAMN RECEIVER. KZZZCHHHHZKKKKZHHHTTTTKKKCHZZZZZZZZBLEEEEEEP. Hoarse for days, I tell you. And all that clicking on connect? That's an obscure Bantu dialect of Swahili. I tell you. When you said you learned a new language, it was a real language, not that that object-oriented fiddlesticks you have today. Internet? We'd just SHOUT PACKET CONTENTS at each other REAL LOUD.
That is, when we weren't busy touching live wires together to program in binary. There's a reason why a lot of 1970s hackers had huge frizzy hair. I tell you. Computing got a lot more interesting after electricity was invented.
Man, I'm an old fart too, but I so hate old-school technology downmanship
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
Of course, they kept it realistic. The class nerd couldn't think of anything better to do with the cute girl in his bedroom than play a computer game.
The line I loved the most is, "what kind of jerk lives in Seattle their whole life and doesn't learn how to swim?"
Yes, Hollywood movie producers, Seattle is actually in a deep swamp. Our secret is out. It's impossible to go to the corner drugstore without swimming at least a mile. You'd think they'd build the city on the huge rolling hills, but, no, on the swamp where everyone has to swim.
Comment of the year
That's rediculous!
Brilliant, I'm going to steal that. Since you posted as AC, I don't feel too bad about it. ;-)
It could have worked the other way as well. We know the aliens had visited earth earlier so maybe Microsoft licensed Windows to them. This also gives them a great motive for the attack. WGA also pissed me off when it screwed up my system.
P.S. I know Goldblum used a Mac. Why would I let that get in the way of a story about revenge on Microsoft?
You know the scene in Hackers where Joey logs into that one computer, and rainbows of stars and other shit come streaming across the screen?
I know that scene, and I found it to be very realistic.
It reminded me of my days dialing into local BBS'es run by 16-year-olds, where every successful login was accompanied by a three-page-long piece of blinking eight-color ANSI art.
Later I would log into more mature systems, where the login message was instead a single-page long fortune, usually an excerpt from a Monty Python script.
Listen, lad. I built this [city] up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other [people] said I was daft to build a [city] on a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So, I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp, but the fourth one... stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest [city] in these [lands].