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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."
Our jobs are BORING. Admit it. If the true essence of our profession was placed on film, people would walk out of the theatre.
... ;-)
Unless, that is, it was encapsulated in a vehicle like "Office Space"
This is more like "ten films I've seen containing computers, which I will describe in belittling terms". Okay, so some of these movies really did butcher the technology they included. But some of these complaints just show a lack of imagination on the part of the article writer.
/usr is? Or is the idea that girls don't use computers?
In particular, this guy basically loses for complaining about the "This is UNIX, I know this!" scene in Jurassic Park, complaining that a ten year old girl couldn't have "magically" known that the computer was running UNIX. Okay, except that at that exact moment the computer in front of her-- hell, he even has screenshots-- was in fact showing a real world file manager / demo program that came with SGI's IRIX operating system-- which is, as it happens, a System V UNIX. You don't think it's possible that a computer geek from a rich family might have at some point in her life used IRIX, or at least used it enough to recognize a very distinctive tech demo that came with IRIX at the time and could be used as a file manager? Is it really that improbable that a ten year old might know at least enough about UNIX to know what
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Hollywood can be reliablely counted on to screw _everything_ up.
..".
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Fire 20 bullets from a six shooter. 100 bullets from a semi auto and one magazine.
One bullet instantly kills any bad guy. (But good guys can get shot in the face and still go on to kick the bad guys ass.)
Have a round chambered, but work the action and one doesn't pop out, but hey, "working the action is cool and scary
Lasers being visible. Lasers being audible. Audible shit in space. And no one has ever heard of Newton's laws.
So given that we know Hollywood has such a rotten track record with the things we geeks know, I guess one thing we can rejoice about is this - all that sex the male leads are getting is just as fictional and unrealistic as the above
The sea changes color, but the sea does not change.
I think the worst movie about a computer guy would have to be swordfish. Creating a worm doesn't involve moving little 3-D blocks around on a computer screen.
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