Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies

Billosaur writes "As with anything, Hollywood has a weird way of viewing computer technology and the people who use it. To help quantify things, take a look at The Top 20 Movie Hackers, the Top Ten Movie Servers, and the things code doesn't do in real life." From the servers article: "3. UNIX environment - Jurassic Park (1993). The UNIX environment here is a classic geek joke. Everything we saw was real - created by Silicon Graphics and called IRIX. InGen was the corporation funding the island, and from an IT perspective they let the worst possible thing happen: they allowed one programmer to design the infrastructure with no supervision. What's worse, they obviously required no documentation of what was done. The result was a kid had to hack in and gain ROOT privileges. The likelihood of a young kid knowing a way to get ROOT (and not a more experienced programmer) is pretty hard to swallow. The hardware for this server was probably minimal, running door locks and starting Quicktime movies. 'We spared no expense!' You would think that with the millions of dollars they spent on the park, they could have hired a couple newbie programmers and added a server on the backend."

Comments

They weren't paying attention to Jurassic Park

[iabervon]

The screenshot for Jurassic Park looks like a normal Irix screen. But what anybody who actually watched that part of the movie noticed was that the screen in the movie was some weird flying-through-a-virtual-reality-landscape thing, which the kid immediately recognized as UNIX. Almost everybody with actual UNIX experience just laughed at that, because it was classic a Hollywood computer representation. Except that it really was Irix, but running a window manager only available to people whose UNIX system had superfluous accelerated 3D graphics in 1995 (i.e., movie CG folks). What the audience couldn't see, but the kid would have been able to, was that the landscape had, written on the ground, things like "sbin" and "usr", clear signs of a UNIX system of some sort. As for breaking in, when dinosaurs are taking over your facility, chances are you aren't patching sendmail every day. And, in '95, that would have been a problem.

Re:They weren't paying attention to Jurassic Park

[houghi]

That program does exist. It is called "3D File System Navigator for IRIX 4.0.1+"
More information on this page

Similar systemes do exist like the linux clone called fsv

The same goes for Legal shows

[Freaky Spook]

IANAL but I do provide IT support to a few firms.

You never, ever, see any paperwork, stacks of document boxes or any case files being used in any legal shows.

They make it seem(Especially in Boston Legal) that the defendant or plaintif just tells the attourneys their problem and then just go to court and argue it.

Re:That fake computer sound!

[rutwms]

I'd kill to have a program that makes terminal output sound like it does in the movies!

From the beep man page (in Debian):

When using -c mode, I recommend using a short -D, and a shorter -l, so that the beeps don't blur together. Something like this will get you a cheesy 1970's style beep-as-you-type-each-letter effect

cat file | beep -c -f 400 -D 50 -l 10

The window manager is real

[Shadow-isoHunt]

The window manager showed in Jurrasic Park is actually real, it's fsn. There's a linux port, fsv at sourceforge. As you'll notice, the view does make it possible to tell that you're in a *nix enviornment.

Re:The blip noise

[iluvcapra]

A statement:

I am a sound designer and a programmer. I have on many occasions intentionally, even without being asked, cut "blip" sound effects for code scrolling across a screen -- not just code, but any sort of stdout/text output/situational awareness display.

I do not do it because I'm stupid, or am trying to dumb down the audience, it for a few specific reasons:

• There are several storytelling conventions in cinema, namely, computers make beeping noises when their graphics change. Though most computers don't now, they used to, and the convention was started around the time Robert Redford was passionately waiting for a teletype to emit an important bit of data.
• Aside from the computer convention, there is the strong convention of providing a sound effect for any physical change that occurs on screen that humans cannot account for with alpha, beta or delta motion (see phi phenomenon for a discussion of how humans interpret 2-dimensional images). "See a sound, hear a sound" is the first commandment of sound effects.
• Along these lines, I could show you footage of a computer screen and give you nothing but a fan whirr, and you'd be bored and immediately looking around the room, and the sound helps keep your attention on the data on screen. This is important, since computer displays often are bearing an embarrasing amount of exposition. Sound is like control characters in ASCII: it's out of band and can do magical things to your "session" (in the broadest sense of the word).

We put blips on a computer screen for the same reason ipods chirp when you press a button. Psychology.

Re:It's funny? Laugh?

[Chris Burke]

The next time you watch a swordfight in a movie, watch where the swords are being swung. Most of the time, if the opponent just dropped their sword to the floor, the attacking swing would miss completely. In hollywood, they swing the swords at the other swords - blade to blade - instead of trying to actually hit the other guy.

A very noteable exception -- or maybe not since it isn't Hollywood but what you're saying is common of action movies from everywhere -- being The Seven Samurai. Everyone who uses a sword in that movie uses it to kill, and as a result most sword fights are one or two strokes long. While lacking the acrobatic beauty of a good ten-minute lightsaber duel, it did have a gritty reality that just felt right.