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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?"
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://imdb.com/title/tt0234215/trivia
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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.
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You survived watching primer? WOW.
I rented it, and there was nothing interesting at all. Over an hour in and nothing to keep my interest.
Back to the rental store it went, amazingly I got a refund since the staff knew how bad the movie was.
Except his computer has a Mac GUI but also has a C: prompt(if I remember correctly). The experience though... that is pretty accurate.
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.
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The C code shown in the movie was code from the GNOME project as well, afaik. That movie also featured cameos by Scott McNealy from Sun Microsystems, as did Miguel de Icaza (who designed a lot of the screenshots used in the movie).
;)
Ironically enough, one thing the movie does get wrong is pumping gas - by law you can't pump your own gas in Oregon, which the main characters do. I guess you can't hit all the bullseyes.
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.
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