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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?"
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
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!"
Sure, some stuff was inaccurate, but it was much more in the spirit of how technology was used at the time than most of the movies we get these days. Even the speech interface was entirely plausible at the time. A computer simulating wargames was plausible. It was technically possible for the computer to launch warheads, but in reality, probably would not have been allowed. But even that base was covered, by the plausible scenario set-up by the film's introduction, where human operators failed to launch a missile - and bureaucrats decided that it would be more efficient to bypass humans and give a computer the control. After all, computers never make mistakes.
The major flaw in Wargames, though, was how Matthew Broderick was some kind of local hero for being good at arcade games - like some sort of sports jock being cheered on by the townspeople, and scoring a hot chick.
... and then they built the supercollider.
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).
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.
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.
Since I have not watched the movie, I am not sure of the contents. However, from what I have read, it is a movie based on someones opinion of what happened with Mitnick. I believe it is the opinion of someone who was active in the case.
However, many other people who were active in that case can tell you that the movie is wrong on so many levels. So I would not say it is the true story about Mitnick. It is an opinion movie based on someone's version of the truth about the Mitnick case.
Now in relation to how computers were presented, once again I have not watched it, it could present how a computer is used correctly. However, this movie is about a case that no matter who you listen to, you will not get the actual events, so I choose not to watch it. There were many things done wrong in the Mitnick case, and many things done right. However, some of the due process handling of Mitnick were a vision of the future which is now the present and how some people are handled depending on what they are charged with, if they are even charged at all.
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.
This is something Microsoft got right. Bill Gates was unimpressed with traditional AI, and kept Microsoft Research mostly out of it. But he saw that Bayesian statistics actually worked, and Microsoft went heavily into that area. There's quite a bit of statistics-based AI in Microsoft products, from the grammar checker in Word (yes, it really is diagramming sentences) to the ordering of online help questions based on the likelihood of the answers. Today, most of the better work in AI is statistics-based, and the hard problems, like unstructured vision, are starting to yield to work in the field. The combination of statistical techniques and sheer compute power works better than abstraction and mathematical logic on real world problems.
Stanford AI spent two decades on the wrong track. Not until they got a new generation of faculty did the place get unstuck. I used to call the second floor of the Gates Building "the place where AI went to die", and for a decade, it was.