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Top 10 Things Hollywood Thinks Computers Can Do
An anonymous reader writes "From blowing up your keyboards to developing a malignant sentience, Expert Reviews rounds up the things that movie makers believe computers can do, even though they use the same technology every day to write scripts." I like the summary of how you crack a password in movies. I hate that this page splits into multiple pages. Very lame.
My favourite take on this by far was in Super Troopers. For an instant I thought they were actually doing it seriously ;)
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
Isn't this a rip off of a Cracked.com article of the same name? http://www.cracked.com/article_15229_5-things-hollywood-thinks-computers-can-do_p3.html Oh, I'm sorry, it's 5 vs 10. That makes it okay, right?
If they remade that today, they would probably show Joshua blowing up buildings and sending robotic minions after David.
Close. Not a remake, but a "sequel" - WarGames 2: The Dead Code. And yeah, it's guilty of all that crap.
The V'ger reference at the end annoyed me. It was given life by other beings, it didn't just become sentient!
The best example of this was in Red Dwarf: Return to Earth. They zoomed in on a business card, then zoomed back out. Found a reflection behind the people in the picture, enhanced the reflection, then found a water droplet on a telephone pole, enhanced the reflection from that, and THEN they used a window seen in the reflection on the water droplet to see the back of the card. Then, they flipped the image...all so they could read the address on the back of the card.
It was fsking epic.
Very obviously done for laughs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU
Matrix Reloaded: Trinity exploits an actual vulnerability to hack into the power station.
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
I wish i could just yell "ENHANCE" at a photo on my computer to make it magically uncover detail that was never originally there. That would be awesome.
While movies typically do this in a b.s. fashion, it is possible to create an "enhanced" still image using multiple frames of a video source. It is called Super-resolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-resolution
ICQ had this ability in a realtime chat mode about 10 years ago too.
If you want to read something alot more entertaining and you're happy with it being spread across multiple pages, read the pages at TV Tropes instead: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalComputer It includes all the ten tropes in the list, plus many more, without obnoxious advertising.
It's much funnier, has exhaustive examples, and will ultimately ruin your life.
A bit more back on topic, my favourite "enhance" button was seen in some terrible movie starring Jack Black as a CIA hacker which I came across whilst, er, herbally medicated. It featured the usual "enhance" button with a (literal) twist - using "inference AI" it could turn a patchwork of images into a 3D model... including the bits that weren't filmed. The wall-banging stupidity of this was even a major plot point - the model was done so they could find out where someone had stashed the microfilm, or some such rubbish - typical modest programmers, they write their AI to infer things and it turns out to be an all-seeing eye that can observe past events witnessed by no other human. The only reason I'm sad I can't remember the name of that film is in case I accidentally start watching it again.
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Here's another one I can recommend for pseudo-realistic hacking: Sneakers
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
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I'm kind of ashamed to admit that I read the Wargames novelization back in the day (yes, I am a nerd--why do you think I'm on /.). I remember in the book (presumably based on an earlier draft of the screenplay), the password was "Joshua5" (the kid's name and age). In the movie, it was simplified to just "Joshua." "Joshua5" is still not the most secure password in the world, but at least it adds an extra numeric character.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you are given a video stream from a security camera and the subject is moving slowly relative to the frame (e.g. license plate of a car taxiing towards a gate), you may have a chance to recover more spatial resolution using temporal information. The idea is that each pixel in the camera will "scan" slightly different parts of the subject in different frames, like how a flatbed scanner works. If you can accurately track the subject in different frames, then you can stitch together a scan of the interesting pixels to uncover subtle detail. Here is a commercial product that implements this feature.
I once had a signature.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3NWKbBaaU
Red Dwarf: Return To Earth was a three part revival done for the TV channel 'Dave' last year (2009).
Seems like that's been subverted a few times. A quick check of TVTropes.org should prove whether it has or not. You go ahead and look. No really, it'll be fine. You won't get sucked in and lose the rest of your day, I promise.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
The series 24 has been consistantly bad with the whole computer thing, comments about just "opening a port" etc. I also saw the worst peice of Product Placement on the show. It was around the 5th Season CTU was under attack from a hacker and an exchange along the lines of this took place. Technician 1: They're released a virus, we better do something Technician 2: Don't worry the Cisco Self defending Network should hold them for about half an hour.
I was using ICQ back in 1998, and it had the option of displaying each chat character as it was typed.
This is called naked typing. Google wave has it by default and is very off-putting.