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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."
No, it's not funny. This sort of geek-complaining-because-it-isn't-100%-realistic crap is what gives us a bad name. No one cares about shit like this. Please stop posting meaningless "Top N" lists like this. That "Top 10 Geek Girls" article from last week was bad enough. How many decent, informative articles were rejected to make room for this dreck?
As with anything, Hollywood has a weird way of viewing computer technology and the people that use it.
It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
Ever watched E.R. with a doctor? This is hardly a computer geek specific trait.
There's nothing unusual about someone with knowledge in a specialized field finding the Hollywood portrayal of that field amusing. Because they are, 95% of the time, wrong and 50% of the time they're wrong enough for it to be funny to the person who knows better.
"I know this! This is UNIX!" is funny as shit. Okay, it's not funny at all to non-computer-geeks, but neither are the Hollywood gaffs that doctors, lawyers, auto mechanics, and ninja assassins find amusing to people not in those fields.
The enemies of Democracy are
A more impressive absentee is one that they mention in the "things code doesn't do in real life" list - Jeff Goldblum from Independence Day. He hacked an alien spacecraft with a Mac in the space of a couple of minutes.
Some attitudes replaced or by cgi optimizes
they do that because it is quicker. Actual computer work is boring as hell to watch in a movie.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Was Barnard Hughes as the I/O port in TRON (systems programming as allegory, all "Through the Looking Glass") all covered with patches and patches and patches so that he was literally an imobile tower... Somebody who got it wrote that scene.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
movl (%esp),%eax # Load NPX control word.
andl $0xfffff2ff,%eax # Set rounding mode to nearest.
orl $0x00000200,%eax # Set precision to 64 bits. (53-bit mantissa)
pushl %eax
fldcw (%esp) # Recover modes.
popl %eax
is not binary. Writing something that is easily translated to machine code is not the same as writing machine code.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
I'm willing to bet that ER is (or at least was, Crichton lived it) more accurate on medicine than any of the movies listed is on computer tech. Now, any series about the court system... there you're entering pure fantasy land.
From ER you can actually LEARN stuff. Like the different forms of cardiac arrhythmia and how they present, causes, etc.
i also can't believe they left colossus out. tsk tsk tsk.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S
Indepence Day has flaws--many, many, many flaws--but the whole virus-on-a-Mac is not one of them. What Jeff Goldblum's character did was standard cross-platform development. He wrote the virus on his Mac, compiled it to an EvilAlienOS binary and uploaded it via the EvilAlienNetwork port on the captured spaceship.
This is more or less exactly what you'd do if you were developing for, say, an embedded microcontroller. The host computer doesn't need to be compatible with the target.
If you want to quibble, you could ask where he got the EvilAlienOS programmer's reference manual or the EvilAlienCPU's architecture description or how he managed to find an exploitable vulnerability in EvilAlienOS so quickly. But enough about the frickin' Mac, okay?
This reminds me quite thoroughly of how movies depict video games as well. No matter what game, what system... most of the time, it's nothing but beeps and blips... usually not coinciding in the least with button-pushes on the controller.
Hell, half the time I recognize what game they're playing from a quick glimpse of it, and I'm thinking to myself "Oh come ON! I know that part, and there's nothing even CLOSE to those sounds there."
According to Hollywood... video games as well are stuck in the 80's.
HEY HOLLYWOOD! Move up another 20 someodd years, and you might stop parents from buying horrible crap games for kids, because then they might have a vague idea of what's good or current!
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
I can code for hours without touching the mouse. What purpose does a mouse serve when writing code? What does it provide that a keyboard doesn't? This isn't photo-editing or game-playing we're talking about, it's coding.
The only benefit I could see would be for cut-and-paste purposes, but even then a couple quick keystrokes in a good editor will do the trick faster.
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
I read the list about things code doesn't do in real life. The one about text not making noise when it is typed on the keyboard struck me that the one making the list is just a kid. Anyone who has used a real VT100 terminal, or a clone of such (remember Wyse terminals???) had a keyboard with a very quiet touch...so quiet that people were uneasy about typing on it, so they added an artificial key click on the keyboard, with a volume control. Every key pressed made a very short beep, at the same time it appeared on the screen.
And the part about the Gibson in Hackers being a 3D city and having a problem with it just means this guy has no imagination. Anyone remember the movie Disclosure? There was a "cutting edge" operating system being rumored to be developed in real life that was a 3D world that people walked around in and interacted with files, etc in a virtual reality. That metaphor was used in several movies. How else can non-geeks understand anything about what we geeks do without clear visuals? It's called artistic license.
What bothered be about movies is when they substitute one thing for another. For example, in Tron, when Flynn gets "lasered" back into the real world, the printer starts printing. The printer was a daisy-wheel printer, and it made sounds like a dot matrix printer.
Oh well. Lighten up!
And obviously nobody wants to watch a real hacker sit and type code that doesn't look like it's doing anything. The point was simply that anything is going to look more realistic in Hollywood when you're not familiar with the field, but once you get into something you recognize, you can see that they decided using something easy to film and interesting was more important than realism.
I work in Level 2 tech support. I occasionally have other techs ask me to help them figure out why they can't mount a CD on a customer's server they're dialed into. I always start by asking them to check with the customer to see if the CD is in the drive SHINY SIDE DOWN. You'd be surprised how often the disk is upside down in the drive. I don't blame the non-techies, when every single TV show or movie that shows someone using a computer's {C|DV}D drive shows it shiny side up.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
No matter what your area of expertise, you'll find flaws whenever a Hollywood screenplay tries to mimic whatever it is that real people do for a living, or even hobbies for that matter. As a guitar player, I find 90% of the instances when Joe-famous is playing guitar to be utterly hilarious. I'm surprised that even the audience can't tell that the actor obviously isn't playing what's being portrayed on the screen, but that's probably because I'm the only one paying attention. I'm sure Doctors, Lawyers, etc. all find movies portraying their profession to be as ridiculous as us software folks do.
like infinite resolution (can you enhance that?), or clients that pull every available record on the database from the server and flash them on the screen while searching for dna/fingerprints/faces (no wonder they constantly complain about the network and servers being slow on 24).
--
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I've always wondered what the patients on House think when they get the bill afterward? I mean every show has the same formula:
1. Patient gets sick with some obscure condition.
2. Doctor 1 orders standard stuff, it doesn't work/makes it worse
3. Doctor 2 orders some obscure test
4. Doctor 3 orders an MRI
5. Doctor 2 orders another weird test
6. House has some drama with his own life/leg/whatever
7. Doctor 4 makes some final off the wall test, and decides on a rather extreme course of action
8. House jumps in at the last minute and explains how all they needed was an aspirin
I mean what HMO would authorize that crazy list of tests? You gotta figure these people get back and have enormous hospital bills.
I watched it for awhile with my wife and the first few shows were interesting, but then the whole "House is a jerk" angle got kinda stale and I didn't really have any hope of trying to figure out the medical mysteries when half of the stuff they say sounds like it came from the medical version of the Star Trek Technobabble generator.
I read the internet for the articles.
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
At the time of that movie, most computers didn't have the ability to make sounds at all, and even fewer had graphics. It was all text and more text. I'm sure that there was a traceable moment when someone thought of doing that, but don't think that it's a reflection of reality.
These little "helpers" have been around for a lot longer than computers. There was a time that most plays ended with the gods coming out and making everything better. Like Deus Ex Machina, It's a crutch to support a bad design - like the non-instantaneous phone-tracing, and having the characters think aloud as a form of exposition. Realism is part of good story-telling, and all these things take away more than they add. There are other ways of doing it.
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,
Okay, so you need sound. You've got a few real ones to work with - keyboards make sound. Mice make sound. And then there's that whole "soundtrack" thing you can work with - you can time the things that are happening in the music to accentuate what's happening on the screen. I've seen quite a few movies that let the soundtrack swell as the detective surfs.
Unlike the other unreal things I mentioned, most people have a computer, and most people know how they work. You're going to hit a lot more disbelief if you fake a computer than you are if you fake a phone trace, so it's worthwhile to get rid of that cinematic crutch.
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... because while the downside about knowing a subject well is the wincing, snickering and occasional audible snarls, the upside is the thrill when it becomes clear that the writer understands the science, understands the culture, and has pulled it all together with a story that works.