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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.
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.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
In Terminator 3, the Terminator T-X is able to take over complete control of automobiles simply by sending a virus to their onboard computers. Forget that none of these cars (most of them older ones at that) have any way for the onboard computer to access steering, acceleration or brakes; the real kicker is when the movie shows one of them actually shifting into gear on its own. And not ONE of them was even a Toyota!
And, on the opposite side, I would like to recognize the movie "Wargames." It wasn't perfect (the AI is certainly exagerrated), but it's definitely one of the most realistic computer films to ever come out of Hollywood. If they remade that today, they would probably show Joshua blowing up buildings and sending robotic minions after David. As it is, Wargames makes a simple ringing phone and a countdown clock way more suspenseful than anything ever produced with CGI special effects. Kudos to John Badham for getting away with making a movie that's pretty thoughtful and low-key--and just a year after Tron showed us how evil programs can suck you into the digital world with a laser, no less.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
In Star Trek, Kirk need only ask an alien computer to "Explain. The. Human emotion. Known. As.....Love", for it to go into a bizarre loop where its logical systems can't computer and it explodes.
I hate it when my machine can't computer.
I can't perform my daily sysadmin duties unless I'm getting fellatio from a chick under my desk at the same time as having a loaded gun pointed at my head while someone counts down from an arbitrary number.
I hate that this page splits into multiple pages. Very lame.
Then...don't reward them by linking to them?
"BAD, Johhny! Don't pull your brother's hair! Here's an ice cream sundae."
Please help metamoderate.
The article tries to assert that somehow a keyboard is not an effective way of controlling a computer in a hurry. I would like to say that they are full of shit. On any OS that is worth anything, I do more work with the keyboard than with the mouse; especially if the situation is urgent. I don't want to be inconvenienced with a mouse when something important is going down, I want all my fingers available for typing.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That's one thing that always drives me nuts when I'm watching computers being used on TV or in the movies... EVERY user interface element BEEPS. Text will scroll on the screen (no idea why it won't just show all at once) and as the computer renders each and every single character, it lets out a beep. That sort of machine would drive me nuts after about 3 minutes of use.
Scorta futuere amo!
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?
However, if DRM really gets a grip, this could become fact not fiction.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
When John Wayne fired a gun, at least two Indians dropped instantly. *At least* two. You can keep those computers, I want to better understand the technology behind The Duke's bullets...
The V'ger reference at the end annoyed me. It was given life by other beings, it didn't just become sentient!
Hollywood does not actually think computers can currently do nor do they think they ever will do these things.
Hollywood does think is that having computers do such things in a story usually (not always, but usually) makes it easier or faster to tell the story the way it is intended, rather than getting bogged down in the real life technicalities that are actually involved that would bore almost anybody.
The only real problem with this is that some people could be left thinking that computers do or can do some of these things. But that's more a case of those people not being able to tell fiction from reality, which has nothing to do with how Hollywood tells stories, it has to do with what sort of education and life experience a person has.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Anyone got a mirror?
Believe me .. in this case the slashdotting is a benefit and not a drawback
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It's just an aspect of storytelling. Most stories are about conflict and resolution between the characters, not the intellectual masturbation of what layer in the network stack is responsible for ack/response. Details like that don't matter. Struggling against time, intrigue, and moving the plot along: that's what matters.
In the movie House of Flying Daggers, there's a swordfight scene where the two rivals finally clash in an epic struggle as the seasons change from summer to fall to winter all around them. Obviously nobody can fight for nine months. Obviously the sword choreography was on a completely different time scale to the environment they were in. Details like this matter if you're a weak-minded literalist. As pretty as the visuals were, it simply communicated a story like a line in a novel. It was a powerful visual metaphor.
Next time the guys in CSI can scan a DNA sequence in a matter of minutes (or perhaps hours, as the camera briefly observes an analog clockface), don't nitpick the usual technical constraints of a process that usually takes days or weeks or months. Just insert "no technical challenge will stop this team." Even for geeks who enjoy the technical aspects, some details are like watching paint dry.
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I was using ICQ back in 1998, and it had the option of displaying each chat character as it was typed. It meant you could express more complex thoughts, without requiring the other person to sit and wait patiently for you to develop a whole paragraph. It let the other guy step in and say 'I see where you're going, but let me stop you there...'. It opened up opportunities for dramatic timing and deliberate use of backspacing for comedic effect. It was more 'live' than a one-line-at-a-time chat modality, despite its warts. While this style of online chat may not be particularly popular today, it was (and still is) readily available.
In real-life telephone conversations, you don't get to review each sentence before it goes out over the wire; if you choose the wrong word you just have to live with it.
To the other point, I just have to say -- what? People can perform tasks flawlessly in movies? It turns out that unless required for dramatic effect (as a somewhat-lazy shorthand to convey nervousness or poorly-concealed deception), characters always speak in clear, perfect setences and never use the word "um". Their shoelaces are always tied, their hair is always perfect, and they never miss the bus unless their character is required to be unlucky or miserable. People in movies seldom need to visit the washroom, and then only to have private conversations -- never to defecate, except as a route to teen-movie fart jokes.
Movies are a projection of reality, not an exact duplicate. People tend to do non-visually-arresting and plot-irrelevant things faster or behind the scenes. Watching someone make typos for two hours isn't my idea of a good time.
~Idarubicin
It let the other guy step in and say 'I see where you're going, but let me stop you there...'. It opened up opportunities for dramatic timing and deliberate use of backspacing for comedic effect.
Kanye?
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.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
It's taken on a kind of Urban Legend patina, so take it with a grain of salt, but here goes:
Seems that the Art Department and Properties guys -- the crew responsible for dressing the set -- for Star Trek IV were all HUGE Amiga fans. No real surprise there, given where Amiga was at the time the movie was shot. So... in the famous scene where Scotty, the ultimate fictional Uber Engineer, has traveled back in time and assumes all computers are voice-activated (as they are in his century), talks into a mouse, the Art guys wanted their Amiga to be the one featured in the scene. So they sent some reps just up the road apiece from where they were filming in San Francisco to meet with the Amiga honchos and get some hardware for the scene. As the story goes, the Amiga guys were initially annoyed, cuz it was all so unannounced and sudden, and then they agreed only if the crew paid for the gear. "No loaners."
"Um, but, it's the new Star Trek movie, and it's Chief Engineer Scott, and he's back in our century, and he could be using YOUR computer, and we all really love Amigas on the set, and..."
"Sorry. Sign this Purchase Order or get out."
So the crew called Apple, who "got it" in a heartbeat, sent in a Marketing SWAT team with free Macs for the scene, free Macs for everyone on the crew, and technical advisers to stand by during the filming to make sure everything went smoothly.
Amiga, the astute among you have by now noticed, is no longer with us. Apple, on the other hand...
If you watch all the scenes they cut from the movie, you learn how he was able to do this.
The aliens used a linksys router and left the login info as admin/admin.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
but the fact is, doing a scene where a sysadmin bangs around in a terminal typing commands just isn't fun for the viewer. The reason we laugh so hard at these things though is because technology is our thing. It's true for almost anything in an entertainment-oriented (as opposed to educational) movie. Try some of the following:
Watch a few cop movies with actual cops.
Watch some hospital-based TV shows with some doctors, nurses and paramedics.
Watch a couple of movies that focus on car chases/stunts with some mechanics.
The list goes on and on. What you'll see though is, those people will have the same general reaction to Hollywood depictions of their areas of expertise that we have regarding use of computers/technology. Accuracy and entertainment just don't always go well together.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
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.
Easily guessable passwords are real, as tons of other slashdot stories remind us. Of course, they often can't be quite that simple, because of password security rules. But that could lead to a new Hollywood password cracking scheme:
Geek Hero: Try "password"
Hot Girl at Keyboard: That'll never work, they've got strict password rules at EvilTech
GH: What are they?
HG: Has to be at least 8 characters including upper and lower case, at least one but not more than two numbers, and exactly one special character. Can't contain a dictionary word or abbreviation in any of 87 languages, including !Kung and Klingon, nor can the numbers be a day of the month or of special significance nor...
GH: Stop right there, there's only one password which matches those rules... try this...
HG: We're In!