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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.
If Hollywood isn't accurate regarding computer technology, I shudder to think what else they've depicted might be wrong. Next you're going to tell me good guys don't have unlimited ammunition, you can't trick a killer to confesing to a murder on national television, and that ugly women can't be transformed into supermodels merely by taking off their glasses!
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Take Swordfish for example where he hacks into some top secret site whilst having a gun pointed at him, a gorgeous blonde giving him a blow job and Halle Berry looking on. In my entire working career that's only ever happened to me twice (ok probably cos I live so far from Halle Berry). But still.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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
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
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.
... that projects the back-to-front green text onto the face of the user.
Oh, and the image processing software that takes a poor quality security camera image, and 'enhances' it so you can see the villains face reflected in the sunglasses of the victim.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
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.
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?
From the beep man page (in Debian):
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.
Makes sense to me. You have to understand, that like every other being in the galaxy in the year 1996, these aliens were forced to use Windows 95. Very easy for Jeff Goldblum to hack into from his laptop.
In fact, that's why the aliens came to Earth; they were looking for Bill Gates...
. . . When you were gwowing up, didn't you notice that anything was possibwe in cawtoons? Do you weawwy think Howwywood movie diwectors ow pwoducers awe any diffewent? It isn't weawity, you know?
Oh, BTW, that weminds me . . . I went out hunting this weekend and the stwangest thing happened. Weww, I saw this wabbit, you see. So, I chased him down and he wan and jumped into this howe in the gwound. I said, "I'm gonna get you, you wascawy wabbit!!". You wouldn't bewieve what he did!! He jumped out of the howe, gwabbed my big, fat cheeks and kissed me wight on the mowth!! Then he jumped up again, spinning in a compwete bwur at about a thousand times a second, to which, at his apex he jack-knifed and did a Gweg Wouganis-style dive, wight back into the howe. So I stuck my double-bawwel shotgun in the howe and said, "Now, I've got you, wabbit!!". Suddenwy, I fewt a tun on my gun, and befowe I know it I was in a tug-of-waw with him. He yanked and I yanked back. Yank . . . yank. . . yank, . . . back and fowrth. When I finawwy puwwed my gun out, it was tied in a knot!! As a wast wesowt, I puwwed the twigger and bwew my own face owff. That was the wast time I went wabbit hunting.
Now, I just wook fowawd to duck season. If that doesn't wowk out, I'ww just take up painting.
as a senior unix admin, I gotta say I personally enjoy the mystique surrounding our profession, especially that of the hardcore sysadmin. if they wanna think that it takes some uber-genius to be a sysadmin, and therefore keep our pay up in the ranks, let em! I may even buy a skateboard and hold onto limos while I intercept garbage files on a floppy from the teenager who just rooted my Sun e25k. heh.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
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:
We put blips on a computer screen for the same reason ipods chirp when you press a button. Psychology.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
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.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm always vaguely confused by the Jurassic Park complaints. The Jurassic Park movie had almost nothing wrong with its presentation of computers or technology in general. (I'm not including the sci-fi cloning in that. I'm sure there were problems with that.)
First of all, yes, that's a real Unix system. A very stupid one, but a real one.
Secondly, the system was crap. And the point is?
It's a very badly designed system. It was designed by one person, and it's not finished. No one was trained in it yet, and the only person who understands it dies early, and it was sabotaged. Of course you have crazy stuff like not automatically switching the power over or the fences going down.
I mean, yeah, some stuff was slightly improbable, but it's the kinda shit that actually does happen in emergency situations, at least the first time...you discover that, hey, the damn generator didn't come on line or that the carefully constructed key-card security system is not, apparently, on the battery backups This is why you don't test with live data, or, in this case, live dinosaurs.
Again, unfinished, crappy system. Sorta like the actual park itself, when you think about it. Remember it was being worked on by someone who, at least for a short period of time, knew he was going to fleeing his job with a boatload of money for selling them out, and ask yourself if you think he really was working on fixing bugs during that time?
About the only thing I actually have issues with is the 'We can't get a phone line out' plot. But I guess, logically, those couldn't be 'real' phone lines, it's not like the phone company ran lines to the island. No, they have a sat or underwater cable connection with somewhere, and a PBX, and Nedry screwed up the PBX, and they don't know what the hell they'll talking about, all they know is they can't get a dial tone.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?