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What Movies Got Computers Right?
boxturtleme asks: "There have been several posts recently about how movies have gotten computers, hackers, and other geeky stuff entirely wrong. A while back there was an article on Servers, Hackers, and Code In the Movies and another on Usability [of a GUI] in the Movies. Now we all know that most movies out there that have anything to do with technology get some part of it wildly inaccurate, though it often makes for a fun movie. This brings me to my question: What movies got technology right? This could range from movies about the past that represent it correctly to modern day movies or movies about the future that slashdot readers think present something within the realm of possibility. With all the complaining about bad movies, what movies do Slashdot readers think of as the good ones?"
I think OfficeSpace hit computers dead on especially the printer.
God spoke to me.
There's that obligatory exploit Trinity uses in Matrix... but I think like any movie, for every thing they get right there's a bunch of things they get wrong.
Peronally, I like Wargames.
And as much as everything else was completely wrong, I liked Wyatt's PC in Weird Science because it was black and looked powerful and had a modem. And they Enter key had two red LEDs. That was my dream computer as a kid, actually.
I suppose all the best movies I like didn't get technology right... like Short Circuit... but at least Tron had some basic information about what a "bit" was and some concept of users and sort of represented actual computer technology although in a very abstract and fantasy sort of way.
Tron.
None. There's never been a fictional movie that features computers as a central theme thats got it right. Coz computers are very dull to watch. As interesting as I find writing code, I really wouldn't want to pay $10 for a ticket to see someone doing it on the silver screen.
Plus, as annecdotal evidence in favour of Hollywood's glossy shine, I was very nearly chucked out of univeristy for 'hacking' an email server, and I'm sure it gave several women the idea I was more interesting since they'd seen Hackers and associated hacking with Johnny Lee Miller. Thank heavens the director of the film used a daft 3D swooshy interface instead of vi I say.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
A movie is just a movie and you most compromise and use computers to "help" the handling of the film. Computer folks are always bitching about how computers are shown in movies, but you need to realize that films simplify not only computer but medical services (my wife being a doctor is always horrified of how movies use X-Ray and Scanning techniques), mechanics (how cars can defy gravity and be fixed with simple tricks). A chemical professor would just ROTFL seeing how the prepared a formula for the invisible man, mixing the water BEFORE the acid sunbstance (a big NO-NO in real life) and so on...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
Its the true story of Kevin Mitnick and as far as I can tell only showed what he had actually done.
Hackers 2 also goes by the title "Takedown"
Of course, Kevin Mitnick did social hacking more than computer hacking.
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
The movie Antitrust had many things right.
If I remember correctly, it had real gnome desktops, actual C and HTML code and showed *nix command line operation that made sense.
the only movie i can think of where computers played an important role that got them really close to right is you've got mail.
maybe it's not a "computer movie," per se, but computers were an important plot element, and the use that was made of them was very close to real life.
also, i second someone's earlier mention of office space.
my pet machine
We all know that the truly 1337 hackers hang out in graffiti laden warehouses with skateboard ramps.
Uh...don't you mean "*Which* movies got computers right?" ?
I think HAL 9000, Colossus and Skynet are all eerily accurate depictions of the future of computing, each in its own way. The fact that all 3 movies seriously overestimated the rate of progress in technology can be excused by the fact that no one could have anticipated Microsoft slapping a parking brake on the industry for the past ~30 years.
Someone in Hollywood knows they'll be the death of us all - and I, for one, welcome our new silicon overlords...
Perfectly Normal Industries
Densha Otoko was a miniseries that ran in 2005 on Fuji TV in Japan, and chronicled one man's attempts to woo the woman of his dreams with the help of an internet message board. The really remarkable thing about the series (apart from being based on a true story) is that every computer-related thing in it is 100% accurate. While the series has quite a few unrealistic and silly elements, I was impressed by the technical accuracy... right down to using the real BBS that the actual "Densha Otoko" thread occurred on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nmap#Nmap_in_popular_ culture
Psychotic Computer spying on my life and discussions, programmed with secret instructions and ultimately trying to kill me as it cannot control me ...
Looks a bit like Vista 8p
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
As anyone who has had to maintain any amount of servers will know, you can never turn your back on them for a minute.
My little Linux and tech blog
Dexter isn't a movie, but they pretty much got the computer stuff right. Even the lab looked real (compared to CSI).
As already commented "Forbidden planet", 1956, was very accurate in rendering the behaviour of a robot. Obedient, firm in denying access until overridden. Better not talk about SciFi and computers until you have seen this movie :)
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Sneakers got it pretty close and Antitrust was so realistic I'm surprised that Bill Gates didn't sue.
Ed Almos
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
I can't believe nobody's mentioned "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (1999) yet ... it's most certainly about computers/computing, and most certainly portrays them accurately. It's not (all) fiction, but then again the original Q doesn't state it has to be.
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
That movie, along with the folklore.org site, gives the younger audience as much of a history lesson as can probably be conveyed, about the early history of the current mainstream OSes.
"Good news, everyone!"
Uh...don't you mean "*Which* movies got computers right?" ?
Strangely enough, this single post proves why there's never going to be a movie that gets computers right, and that's because there's always going to be someone somewhere (although most likely here on Slashdot) anal enough to find ONE SINGLE problem no matter how INSIGNIFICANT or IRRELEVENT it is, and show it as proof of an error.
[hacker typing away onscreen]
"Dude, did you see that?"
"See what? That script looks ok to me."
"Nah, not that. He TOTALLY just hit Ctrl-S."
"And...?"
"Check the window caption. That version of leetedit is 0.6.4."
"Oh snap! And everybody knows shortcut key capabilities weren't built into leetedit until 0.6.8! I can't believe it! That glaring flaw ruins this ENTIRE MOVIE!"
"Dude, I am so pissed. I left my mom's basement for this?"
I got the british tv-series the IT crowd season 1 DVD for christmas. While the series sadly diverge away from technical jokes pretty fast, the first two episodes are comedy gold for anyone who works/has worked in a support/IT-setting, and surprisingly accurate on technical details. Furthermore, the DVD has retro-looking menues and '1337 subtitles' with lots of nerd humor. This is the first time *ever* I feel DVD menus has enhanced a DVD (you have to see it to understand...) I warmly recommend this series.
Open Materials Database
You've got mail got computers quite right. They used normal everyday computers, they used the Internet and they used e-mail as they were back then. I actually liked the film lot because it had a very positive theme and it showed two people fall in love who would maybe never in daily life done the same - which was kind a good message for me, because back then I was nerd, still am but at least now I get ladies ;)
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
is when "It's not working" and they start hammering on the keyboard in intense attempt to do something. What are you doing, writing a new exploit from scratch? Or tripwire systems which seem to set off timers so we can have an intense computer vs. hacker rush. I'm sorry, but a computer can kick you out on the street so fast you don't even know what hit you.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'd blame MS for many things, but not _that_. The fact is, noone really knows how to make a computer think, and that's that.
And you don't need MS's blessing to research that. Exactly why can't you write your super-AI on Linux or Aix or Solaris anyway? It doesn't even have to be an Intel or AMD CPU. There have been clusters made of everything including PS2 consoles, custom designed FPGA chips, transputers, super-computers with thousands of CPUs, or experimental architectures involving 3D or 4D interconnect topologies.
The fact that all 3 movies seriously over-estimated it, has nothing to do with MS, and more with the fact that they wanted to play on the ignorant public's enthusiasm and millenialism. Something that happens in the year 3025 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 3000 or 40,000, because people have this fascination with 1000 year intervals. Something _has_ to happen there, good or bad. And if it's the 60's or 70's or even 80's, something that will happen in the year 3000 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 2000, because the latter is close enough to worry about.
It's, if you will, the same thing that made the Y2K scare and scam possible. While there was a real potential problem there too, the blowing out of proportion and selling so much pure snake oil (I've seen network cables, speakers, etc, sold as "Y2K compliant", ffs) was also facilitated by millenialism. It's the year 2000, something bad _has_ to happen. And this time the scamsters also had the technology explanation that went right over Joe Average's head, but was sounding just believable enough to play on that millenialism.
The signs, e.g., Moore's Law, were there all the time that nope, technology can't advance fast enough to have enough transistors to compete with a brain by 2000 or 2001. It has nothing to do with MS. Technology hasn't really evolved faster before MS's monopoly either. (Not to mention how the heck _would_ MS slap a brake on the industry 30 years ago, when the PC is only 25 years old, and Wintel becoming _the_ standard came _much_ later.)
What maybe wasn't there as a warning sign was the fact that AI research would be even slower. And that it would be so disjointed as to have half the CS guys in ivory towers busy postulating all sorts of maths theorems as fundamental conditions for an AI, while completely ignoring the neurologists, anthropologists, and even stage magicians piling up evidence that the brains just don't work that way. While the latter gang was piling up evidence that, for example, the brain completely edits out the non-interesting parts of a picture, even if it's as ludicrious as a pink gorilla doing cartwheels in the background, half the CS gang was busy postulating such BS as that just squeezing the whole picture as a stream of bits through an arithmetic compression would be necessary for AI. And generally all sorts of "look what maths I can do on a stream of bits" stuff that misses the whole point of actually extracting, indexing and processing the _meaning_ in it.
What also wasn't maybe obvious in all that enthusiasm, was that _all_ corporations (not just MS) showed a total lack of interest in funding AI research. Corporations live and die by quarterly reports, and an AI that takes 20 years to learn, and maybe then you discover that it learned wrong or you coded it wrong altogether, would be completely uninteresting in that context. And before we blame it all on greedy corporations, again, the CS gang in ivory towers was too busy with abstract unmarkettable research that just didn't appeal to potential sponsors.
What also wasn't maybe obvious was that Moore's Law wouldn't actually be translated into code actually running exponentially faster each year. Humans
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nobody's going to mention War Games??
Sure, there was some hollywood 'magic', but he used wardialers for chripesake.
First, research is rarely done by those that are scrapping by. It is always by those that believe that they are in a good economic position (wether they are or are not, is irrelevant). In fact, it is one of the reasons why USA has for 50 years been so innovative (combined with superior 2'ndary schooling). MS, like IBM before them did, has removed a large chunk of economic money from the CS field. They are becoming a monster fish in a shrinking pool. It will take a small nobody who quietly works closely (how MS took on IBM) or a great many nobodies with a universal direction to defeat this (death by a million cuts which is Linux to MS). In both cases, it tends to precludes far-reaching research.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It was either the Prophecy 2 or 3 in which Christopher Walken's character -- an archangel from Heaven -- needs information from a computer, but being from the great beyond has no idea what to do.
His solution? Resurrect one of the people he's just killed, who then delivers the best line in the series, "You brought me back from the dead because you don't know DOS?"
Despite it's age (35+): "The Andromeda Strain" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066769/
WWSJD? (What Would Samurai Jack Do?)
The first Jurassic Part (1993) has a unix network, the one Wayne Night password protect and Samuel L. Jackson decide to unlock by rebooting / turning off the power. Other interesting part was when Ariana Richers navigates the systems through a nice looking object code interface simulating a city full of buildings, near the end of the film - I think CA-Visual Objects took their repository idea from there, although CAVO was 2D.
There is a goof on Sandra Bullock's The Net (1995) where she types an IP address which starts with a number greater than 255... The movie itself is somewhat OK and reasonable enough, and an advanced plot that a nation-wide operating system (in the movie, a firewall) provided by a single company would gave too much power to its creators (any similiarities with actual companies and viral spread is only a coincidence).
2001. There were very few technical issues in it at all. Okay so didn't happen in the timeframe but apart from that.
Ask a lawyer what they think of Boston Legal or some time. They don't watch it to improve their courtroom skills.
And any computer geek will tell you that the most exciting thing you can see when you've taken over a computer is not ten seconds of swirling colors with "Access Granted" throbbing in the middle while 80s synth-pop plays in the background. No, it's a single hash mark, like this:
# _ Where's the drama in that? You and I know, but we have special expertise, and that puts us the minority.Medicine is most two minutes of questions, two minutes of poking, a minute to write the prescription, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Police work is mostly pulling over bad drivers, arresting the drunk ones, then a lifetime of paperwork.
Lawyering is a lifetime of paperwork.
Flying, even military flying, is mostly just sitting there, staring at the horizon, then checking the instruments occasionally.
Computering is mostly sitting there, staring and the screen, then typing occasionally.
None of this is worth watching. The real world is mundane. It takes a long time to happen. The most drama any of use are likely to see in IT is hoping and praying that the backup tapes are up to okay.
This is not my sandwich.
Actually, 99 percent of the movie is correct, according to the biographies and histories I've read. There were one or two minor details that were wrong, but I was surprised at how little license was taken. And folklore.org is some of the most entertaining stuff on the web. I almost died laughing when I read about the encounter between Steve Jobs and Donald Knuth.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/
US and Soviet super computers merge and form a super intelligent machine which then rules the world. Predates 'Terminator' and 'Skynet' by about 20 years. Less action, more drama and plot.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If you're willing to get into "reasonable future technology", the Minority Report user interface had a lot of thought put into it. John Underkoffler gave a presentation on it at the 2005 Game Developers Conference, discussing what thought went into the design of the interface. (Here's an article covering his lecture.)
Googling around, you can see that more than a few people have pointed out flaws with such an interface, but also that many places (including slashdot) have reported on multi-touch or gesture-based interfaces in the last few years. These start to scratch the surface of what was seen in the movie. I'd highly recommend viewing some of these movies; I was especially impressed with some of the work being with multi-touch displays.
Anyone remember this? It was an obscure 80's spy flick w/ Whoopi Goldberg as a bank employee who is randomly contacted by a British spy via her work terminal. The premise is pretty ridiculous, but its is an accurate depiction of what a chat session on a dumb terminal looked in the 80's, right down to the ugly orange-on-black VT100 graphics. Strangely, large chucks of on-screen time were spent just filming Whoopi typing and reading the screen. They dealt with the viewer's boredom by adding a fantasy voice track representing Whoopi's imaginary version of the spy she was speaking to's voice.
Handsome and plausible retro-tech on display throughout the movie. The ultimate Geek fan-boy as the villian. The Mac logo on the keyboard. What more could you ask for?
Though understated almost to the point of a 'walk on' Hanks for the most part got the computer's role in the moon launches correct in the '95 movie Apollo 13.
Of course, what is amazing is how said 'role' was upstaged by the slide rule - and how both managed for the most part to get that roman candle to the moon and back more than once; vacuum tubes and pocket protectors and all.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Venkman: "Einsten did his best work when he was working as a patent clerk"
Ray: "Do you know how much a patent clerk earns?"
Seriously, Don't take anything I say seriously.
The only movie I can think of about time travel that doesn't have gaping flaws in the plot is Twelve Monkeys. Sure, if you look for them, I'm sure they're there, but the writers seem to understand the need for logical consistency: they don't allow someone from the present to go back to the past and change said present.
This is in contrast to, say, the many trek episodes on time travel. The Voyager ones were the worst: whenever they encountered a serious temporal plot flaw, they would just say, "Yes, it's weird, don't think about it"!. This, from what was previously a pro-science show.
Doogie Howser.
This was Darren Aronofsky's classic first feature film and it depicted computers realistically. The main character operated a computer with a dumb terminal connected to a larger computer. Some of the computer hardware looked a bit "sci-fi" but feasible. (There were air vent tubes and other bric-a-brac leading to a suspended glass-box which one would imagine, held the CPU and some memory boards). The commands he typed might have seem far-fetched (they were only numbers, if I recall correctly) but still feasible.
Aronofsky simultaneously portrayed a similarly complex subject (Mathematics) in a realistic manner. He used a few well-known mathematical concepts that most movie-goers would understand after some simple introductions. (Fibonacci sequences, pi (duh), etc.). If a script writer is careful (and good enough) I believe there is really no need to dumb down technical subjects. Some well-placed explanations would do.
buff3r
Firewall did a pretty good job of getting almost exactly computers right. When a hacker is trying consecutive ports they add a rule to the fire wall. They actually invoke the right program from the command line. No uber hacker manages to hack in. And the way they secure the data center is to remove all the terminals and USB ports rather that some miracle sentry machine. The data center is just a pile of Dells in racks, no wierd high tech crap. the bad guys have to get physically inside the data center, trick someone at a remote data center to scroll the file on screen and then copy off what is on the computer screens using a jury rigged camera. Then they laboriously have to use OCR to actually read the cam-scans. It's a little hokey that they could so quickly get some software that would translate the serailezed output of a fax-scanner bar to a scan image, but not too hard to believe it possible--after all faxes do just that plus OCR to boot.
Going beyond computers, My favorite movie for getting the science right is Primer. They really capture how scientist talk about ideas as they develop them. Their initial theories are close but wrong. they use old but servicable test equipment. The time travel actually works too. Really! it's the only movie in which the Time travel does not defy the known laws of physics--they just exgaerate it a bit bit.. (in a nutshell, they borrow the only known method of time travel (which is electron positron pairs splitting from a photon then recombining--a positron can be modeled as an electron going backwards in time) and then suppose that one could do the same with macroscopic thing like a human. Thus to travel backward in time, the subject also has to travel forward in time from the past so that the two timelines can merge.)
Finally, I really like the 13th floor.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Moobynet? Movie Poop Shoot? Internet message board flaming? This movie has it all!
Jay: What the fuck is the Internet?
Holden: The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.
Jay: All you motherfuckers are gonna pay. You are the ones who are the ball-lickers. We're gonna fuck your mothers while you watch and cry like little bitches. Once we get to Hollywood and find those Miramax fucks who are making that movie, we're gonna make 'em eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat their shit which is made up of our shit that we made 'em eat. Then you're all you motherfucks are next. Love, Jay and Silent Bob.
Maybe not a good representation of *modern* computers, but it has a fair bit of gritty reality. Including the 70's programmer with long sideburns.
While not dealing with "computers" by our common conception the movie does deal with the technology of the times accurately and how this technology was exploited (as in used, not "hacked"). It's a good film if you haven't seen it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The makers of "Real Genius" has some good technical consultants. The equipment used was accurate for the era and setting. The lab computers were from HP and were showing numeric data and HPGL graphs. The crazy hacker in the sub-basement was using Symbolics equipment and some homemade stuff.
Our heroes actually had to penetrate physical security and reprogram an EPROM on the system they were trying to compromise.
Any Slashdot readers who haven't seen this movie are missing an important piece of geek culture.
What you mean you don't have an orgasm while using a computer with 9 monitors?
That's right, Dragnet. Not the movie, the original TV show in the '50s. They had an episode once where they had to check through a company's personell records and the company used a computer to do it. There were tapes rolling, blinky-lights flashing and the result came out as a small deck of punched cards. From what I gather, they'd gone to some company that was computerized and borrowed their equipment to make sure everything was right.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
I don't know. Having just recently watched the World of Warcraft South Park episode, I'd say they did a fantastic job portraying the absolute worst aspects of computer gaming.
Then again, they bent the game rules to fit their plot line. But the computer use portion was spot on (sadly).
Line my hat with tinfoil, Janet Reno is bugging my teeth!
Black helicopters in whisper mode!
I'm gonna hide under the porch with my dogs.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
The fact that all 3 movies seriously overestimated the rate of progress in technology can be excused by the fact that no one could have anticipated Microsoft slapping a parking brake on the industry for the past ~30 years.
I'd blame MS for many things, but not _that_. The fact is, noone really knows how to make a computer think, and that's that.
Microsoft has done at least a couple of things to slow progress.
1. Take the ball and run. They keep shifting the operating system behaviors and the programming interface. Everyone's playing catch-up, with no time to stabilize anything worth while.
2. Poison the well. They let text-based programming die. QBasic won't support long file names. Microsoft-sanctioned languages are generally either expensive, or they tend to induce brain damage. They've done their level best to kill off the amateur programmer.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Veronica Mars handles all things geeky way better than 24.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The Adam Sandler movie about the universal remote control, it's like any new computer/OS oh that's cool it can do these things.
Wait! Stop doing that! STOP IT! DON'T! NOOOOO! I DON'T WANT YOU TO DO IT!
When Computers stop taking orders well if anyone has seen the animatrix or iRobot you catch my drift.
-You have been modded appropriately-
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0256408/
Compared to some of the alternatives, the interface remained _remarkably_ stable. In fact, one of the criticized things even on
And even if you took a Unix command-line program (seeing that in the next point you mourn CLI programming), you can compile it in Cygwin, or it's trivial to adapt it to be a Windows program. And you can just make it a Windows command line program anyway, but even adding a simple Window for the output and/or a couple of dialogs for the input is a newbie-level exercise.
And I'm saying that as a programmer, so you can take that as first hand experience.
Heh... QBasic isn't the alpha and omega, you know.
MS still offers the command line versions of their compilers for free. For a while they disabled optimizations in the free version, but nowadays they dropped even that. So if CLI programming is your cup of tea, there you go, they give you all you'll ever need to program in C/C++ or a few other languages.
Or if MS's C gives you brain damage, you can still get Java for free (you even have a choice of Sun or IBM for free JDKs), or you can get Cygwin and run pretty much the same compilers as in Linux, or you have several other choices. I'm pretty sure you can even get a free version of Basic, or at least one game development kit (crappy, but, hey, it's free and can be used to teach a kid programming).
And several games come with either some own script interpreter (e.g., Morrowind) or with Python (e.g., The Fall: Last Days Of Gaia). So whoever wants to learn some elementary programming, can start by scripting a few quests for those. Heck, at least for The Fall, I know from first hand experience that you can even rewrite the game and combat system with nothing more than Notepad.
So while amateur programming does seem to have gone downhill, it's not really the lack of compilers that's too blame. Maybe it's the lack of awareness that those tools exist, or maybe it's the perceived gargantuan size of the challenge. (I know most games made me think "I can code this better" back on the ZX Spectrum, while nowadays I wouldn't even dream of writing my own Doom 3 from scratch, on my own.) No idea exactly what. But lack of compilers it ain't.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What are you talking about? 24 was a beacon of high-tech accuracy.
JACK: I need you to open a socket so that I can upload the data from my thumb drive!
EDGAR: Jack, I can't. The terrorists have overloaded the router with IP addresses!
JACK: Can you borrow some bandwith from Division?
EDGAR: I can try to sneak in through a subnet, but they might notice.
JACK: Do it, I need to get this data to Chloe quickly. She said it could take hours to decrypt!
As much as I loved that show, it was difficult for me to watch, as I would imagine it's difficult for a doctor to watch House or Scrubs...
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
I remember a scene from a followup season of 24 where Jack visits his friend and former collegue (who's now off the job) and they use his private cheap-looking off-the-shelf PC. It was running Linux with XFCE iirc. While the gibberish they phrase is pointless most of the time I think they do a pretty good job at emulating tech-talk. I like the KDE and Enlightenment (modified blueheart theme) Desktops they use troughout the series aswell :-) . :-) .
Even if they don't get the terms correct they are at least pro enough not to use Windows
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
PC Load Letter? What the f--k does that mean?
You are, as you say, a programmer. Probably a professional. Not an aspiring amateur.
Having a robust language built in is one thing. Downloading 150MB of Express Edition at dial-up speeds, and jumping through several procedural hoops is another thing entirely. Downloading 120MB of Java with NetBeans over dial-up is yet another experience. Installing Cygwin is no picnic over dial-up either. Then, to have any languages, you must download further modules. Not exactly straight forward. I must have missed a Cygwin module someplace, because emacs won't respond properly to a Ctl-X, Ctl-C. I have to kill the whole Cygwin process from the task manager. But yes, using vi and perl, I can whip up a file analyzer in no time.
I'm certainly not saying it is impossible. I've had good luck with ActiveState Perl. Downloads fast, installs, and runs with no hiccups. I'm the sort who can do, and has done, great things. But I have to do it in very small steps. Otherwise what I do isn't repeatable, and my experience won't transfer to other people. I've run into so many problems with tools that install (wave of the hand) real easy.
And of course I find that things work quite well under verious Linux distros. But the big box stores still don't stock PCs with Linux pre-installed. So it's hardly a right-out-of-the-box solution.
I still contend that Microsoft has deliberately made programming difficult for the novice.
As for the programming interface, they have bragged about redoing the API with every new Windows release. Are OLE and COM still relevant? How much has been deprecated with .NET? Not that I've ever been exposed to any of that under VB. But it does seem like Microsoft is trying to see what I can do with their tools, rather than me seeing how I can do what it is that I'm trying to do.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
You can't go back in time and kill your father.
One of the really delightful things about the electro-positron anihilation form of time travel is that if you assume you could really build a time machine that could do it it get's rid of the paradox that defeats all other time-travel concepts.
namely, in this form of time travel you cannot trvale back to a point in time before the machine and the traveler first existed.
The way it works is this for a positron is this.
A photon splits into an electron positron pair that propagate forward in time as matter and then anihilate creating a photon. Another way to look at this is that the positron is an electron traveling backward in time. So what you have is two electrons, one of which is traveling backward in time from the future to the moment when the photon "split", and one that is traveling forward in time to the moment then the other photon was created. Thus the backward timeline cannot go backward beyond the point where the spilt event occurred and the forward time electron can't go forward beyond the time when the reverse electron started back.
For people and a time machine the "split event" is when you turn on the time machine and get in it. As you travel forward in time your future self is traveling backward in time. You can't go forward unless you're future self goes backward. Those two events bound the interval of time so your future self can't go back and kill you before you invent the time machine. And your past self can't go forward beyond your normal life span.
It's a very clever story idea because for once the time travel does not have any inconsistencies.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Is there a website where people have discussed their ideas on Primer?
You could try here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/board/threads/
I make no guarantees about the quality of the discussion on IMDB, however.
Wikipedia has a terribly written entry that tries to break down the timeline. There's tonnes of better places on the web where people have discussed what they think happened. like here. Or just google for explanations of primer the movie. The good news is there is no official explanation so there's multiple possibilities. The thing I like about the layered hierarchy of the film is that to understand the third layer you have to watch it two or three times.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
(USS Enterprise D is on a mission to survey a newly formed star cluster somewhere in the Alpha quadrant; they had several computer problems before reaching their destination).
Picard: stand by for deploying probe class 9.
Data: Yes sir.
(Data presses some buttons. The replicators all over the ship produce giant amounts of vanilla ice cream).
Picard: Status report number 1. Why is not that probe launched?
Riker: We had a computer malfunction again sir. The driver for opening the launch doors was beta and has crushed again. The antivirus program thought it was a virus and halted execution of all non-essential services, stopping the replicators matter regulator drivers as well.
Picard: Engineering, how long to fix the problem?
La Forge: Sir, we need to restart all services. It will take about 1 hour, because the servers will need to be restarted.
Picard: Oh, not again! I thought computers would not have to be restarted in this day and age. Proceed...
(Everything goes out for 3 minutes, including lights, life support and gravity. Then slowly everything comes back).
Troi: I sense great joy onboard Captain:
Picard: (hmmm with all that ice cream...) Can we launch the probe now mr Data?
Data: I am trying sir, but a popup window with an Orion Slave Girl has come up.
Picard: what do you mean mr Data?
Crusher: wow Captain the same thing has happened in my console as well!
Data: Well, I tried to launch the probe but the trackball had a problem and I selected 'automatic updates' Sir...it seems that the 'automatic updates' subspace link has been hacked and it is downloading porn images from another station.
Picard: Lieutenant commander Data, what does that have to do with launching the probe? even if the console's screen was filled with other programs, all you have to do is select 'probes' from the relevant menu from the command control application.
Data. Sir, the window with the Orion Slave Girl is multiplying every time I click a button, and does not let me control the program.
Picard: Never mind, transfer control to that console over there.
Data. Yes sir.
(...after 20 minutes...)
Picard: mr Data, why is it taking so long?
Data: Sir, the previous shutdown caused the BIOS of the console to restore itself to default settings and therefore the operating system is reloading and reconfiguring itself. By the way, does anyone have a disk labelled 'common controls 8.0'? the console will not boot without that disk.
Crusher: Data, you are lucky today. It just happens I have the disk with me.
(Crusher opens his bag and hands out the disk to Data).
Data: Thank you Wesley. Unfortunately this console does not have a disk drive, so I need an external one to hook it in the ports at the back of the console.
Crusher: You are lucky again! I just happen to have a disk drive with me. Here.
Data: Thank you Wesley.
(Data inserts the disk in what it seems to be a port at the back of the console. Nothing happens).
Picard: mr Data! I gave an order an hour ago! what is the problem?
Data: Sir, the console does not recognize the drive.
La Forge: Data, you need to restart the console so as that the new drive is enabled from the BIOS and then recognized.
Data: thank you...I am doing just that.
(after 10 minutes, the console boots; the drive is recognized. Data inserts the disk and ...voila! the console finally works!).
Data: mr Riker, I have a question...could you come over here?
Riker: what is it, Data?
Data: if you come over here sir...
(Riker stands up and goes on the Data's console)
Riker: what is the problem?
Data: sir, the default configuration of the user interface is totally alien to me. On the bottom of the screen there is a button labeled 'start'...but the console is already started.
Riker: mr Data, you have to move the mouse pointer over it and pr
I can't believe that none of you slashnerds have mentioned Revolution OS.
One of my favourite scenes in Apollo 13 is where Hanks' character re-calculates six variables for a thrust. He does it in the same time six people in Houston do one each. Even though he was an actor in a drama, this, more than any other scene, shows so well why he was selected to be an astronaut.
Wade.
How many times to you have to watch Sandra Bullock, or Kneau Reeves, or Arnold Shwarzeneger, or the couch jumper, run as fast as they can though builiding after building, down stairwells, up fire escapes, and across parks, before you wish you saw a movie that was perhaps less "watchable" by your definition and more laconic in it's attitude. Run
A friend who is going through his residency says that Scrubs is pretty realistic. I would imagine in the way that Office Space is realistic.
Alien, and after over 25 years it still looks great. All this modern bling (mandatory dig at sniffing the Vista Aerosol ) means nothing to actually getting something done.
"...There is a goof on Sandra Bullock's The Net (1995) where she types an IP address which starts with a number greater than 255... "
Might be a deliberate goof to stop a million horny nerds trying to pwn whomever has Sandra's IP. A bit like the 555 area code used in a lot of film & tv phone numbers.
Political language
that doesn't show a guy typing stuff to ZOOM a damn face on a damn low-quality image.
As bad a movie it was, from what I do recall, the guy who made the AI controlled the core with a *nix system and logged in as root. Gave me a warm feeling.
Among my favorite moments is when Lain is browsing chatrooms, which are depicted as an endless black hallway filled with faceless babbling mouths, and how there's an entire episode devoted to PKing and why people do it. (and this was written *before* PKing was a major issue in all but a small handful of games) Oh, and its handling of the whole real person / avatar dichotomy in general. Lain keeps running into copies of herself, some with radically different personalities, coming from previous things she did online that persist. (a sensation, I think, that would be familiar to anyone who's made the mistake of using Google Groups to look up usenet posts they made a decade ago)
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
The movie that always springs to my mind is Robert Zemeckis's Contact. The movie doesn't focus on computers per se, but they accurately depict computers being used in the computer-heavy field of astronomy. (Note: I am not an astronomer, so I could be way off here...would love for a real astronomer to meta-comment.) The computers are a mish-mash of hardware from different vendors, but they all seem to be running some flavor of *NIX, and the software looks entirely plausible. In addition to getting the computers right, it's also a great movie.
Still one of the scariest films I've ever seen. Silly software glitch causes complete failure of safety system with tragic consequences? That's too real.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Might be a deliberate goof to stop a million horny nerds trying to pwn whomever has Sandra's IP. A bit like the 555 area code used in a lot of film & tv phone numbers.
Probably so. I've noticed similar gaffes in episodes of CSI. Though, it might be more accurate to say that the filmmakers are trying to avoid the liability that might come with a million horny nerds trying to pwn IP addresses.
Perhaps I'm just too old but with all this writing of good/bad portrayal of computers in the movies, I'm surprised no one has mentioned "Electric Dreams", (http://www.fast-rewind.com/). It's a fantasy/romantic comedy made in 1982. The flick stars Lenny von Dohlen, Virginia Madsen, Maxwell Cauldfield and the voice of Bud Cort. Anyone remember it?
Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted!
I would have to mention Numb3rs. Granted, they have occasional screw-ups, but 'Backscatter' was a pretty good episode for tech realism. I guess it helps having a group of guys from Caltech & Wolfram looking over your scripts :).
Anyone remember the "autodialing" acoustic coupler in war games?
Wherever you go, there you are.
mmmh Sandra Bullock.