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

It's funny? Laugh?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

no, no they don't...

[User 956]

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.

Re:no, no they don't...

[euice]

It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.

It's the other way around, the "average joe" sees it that way because of the movies.

Re:no, no they don't...

[DragonWriter]

It may be weird to you or I, but Hollywood does it that way because that's how your "average joe" sees it.

No, Hollywood does it that way because it servese the interests of the plot and cinematic pacing without conflicting so much with people's experience that it breaks suspension of disbelief, not because it accurately reflects the "average joe" impression of computers.

(Note, this also applies to general Hollywood portrayal of basically everything: physics, police procedure, military tactics, whatever.)

Re:no, no they don't...

[Deadstick]

You can often see that effect in news coverage of a shooting. Some earwitness will say "I didn't think it was a gunshot because it didn't sound like one"...meaning it didn't sound like a movie gun.

rj

Re:no, no they don't...

[Jerf]

I find I'm generally happier when I consider what we see on the screen to still be a little symbolic, more like a book than a true "what a guy on the scene would see" documentary style.

Many things make more sense that way, hacker displays are just one thing. All space combat at all ranges happens in a way to frame the combat precisely in the screen, even when there are multiple ships. Real space combat would presumably take place at even greater ranges than modern naval combat; I'll be conservative and call the zone of influence of a carrier group many tens of miles. (Depends on how you measure it, I suppose.) Yet the two space ships always approach within a few hundred meters... well, they have to or there's nothing to show. Sure, I'd pay to see a realistic movie, but it'd make Serenity look like a spectacular financial success in the general market.

This presumably also explains why the good crew of the Enterprise misses so many point-blank visual-range shots; it's symbolic of the fact that at a few tens of kilometers it's a lot easier to miss.

In Serenity, the scenes with the Reavers between them and the planet Miranda has to be a little symbolic, because space junk at that density would be unstable. But the real situation would be completely unfilmable, and most of the same effect can be had with a re-arrangement of the situation.

Space combat is just one of the easier ones; a lot of things are better taken as symbolic.

This leaves you more worried about good characters, internal consistency (even with silly rules), and other more story-related issues. Taking this viewpoint has mostly satisfied my inner geek, although he still sometimes notices things that still can't really be explained this way.

(It probably helps that I still read and enjoy science fiction from the 1950s and back; the rules are very silly by modern physics standards, but as long as they are consistent, I still can find the stories interesting and entertaining; in fact in our zest for realism we've lost some interesting story worlds.)

Maybe it's just me

[porkThreeWays]

Maybe it's just me, but I seem to find the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park a little less believable than a kid getting root.

Re:It's funny? Laugh?

[Chris Burke]

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.

My favorite bit

[$RANDOMLUSER]

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.

Re:MIA:

[kv9]

i also can't believe they left colossus out. tsk tsk tsk.

The Mac in Indepedence Day

[cgreuter]

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?

Mice?

[finiteSet]

Regarding the "things code doesn't do in real life" list, am I the only one who spit out my coffee upon reading:

9. People who write code use mice
According to Hollywood most programmers haven't discovered how to use a mouse. Sure, we type fast, but a mouse is a very useful tool and there's no reason we'd abandon it.

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.