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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!!
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.
/Mikael
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
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
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.
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.
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Dexter isn't a movie, but they pretty much got the computer stuff right. Even the lab looked real (compared to CSI).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.
(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