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?"

Comments

Office Space

[CrazyJim1]

I think OfficeSpace hit computers dead on especially the printer.

Fictional stuff?

[onion2k]

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.

Well

[El Lobo]

I don't thing there is one single movie (not documentary, of course) that gots the computers 100%. That would be the most boring movie EVER and an inmediate disaster in the box office. I mean, to handle a computer is not "fun". 90% of the time you are just sitting there reading tiny screen information and entering boring input(if you are not playing, of course).

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...

Antitrust

[golgotha007]

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.

2001 : A Space Odyssey

[da5idnetlimit.com]

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

Re:the only one i can think of that i've seen

[yotto]

Yes, two AOL users who get no spam. Very realistic :D

Sneakers

[Ed Almos]

Sneakers got it pretty close and Antitrust was so realistic I'm surprised that Bill Gates didn't sue.

Ed Almos

This ironically proves the problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

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'd blame MS for many things, but not THAT

[Moraelin]

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.

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