Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Worst Computer Scene In TV or Movies?
Cuban Devil writes "Yesterday I rented a copy of The Social Network. I won't comment on the story, but the Zuckerberg character's narrated performance on hacking Harvard servers made me wonder: what's the worst computer-related acting performance ever? I leave here my vote: Independence Day, when I had to see Mr. Goldblum upload a virus, using a Mac, when it did not connect even to an ethernet network, compromising the entire alien fleet. What other major technological gaffes have you seen?"
Independence Day... light years away
http://www.quasarcr.com/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The usenet grep scene. *shudder*
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
The Core "Hack the Planet" yeah whatever.
Every time they showed a screen in Hackers I cringed. Also, that "RISC is good" comment from the lead actor made my skin crawl.
hacking/coding/computing in real life is incredibly boring - reality doesn't make for a good movie.
Seriously... there are several scenes in that movie that are unbelievably bad. Pick your favorite!
Any given episode of Criminal Minds is just plain ridiculous.
I'll create a GUI interface using Visual Basic, see if I can track an IP address!
Basically the whole movie.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
"It's a P6 chip ... RISC architecture is gonna change everything".
"Greetings Professor Falken" need i say more? WarGames is probably the most cheezy movie of them all.
"Never EVER mess with a jumper you don't know about, even if it's labeled 'sex and free beer'." - Dave Haynie
aw jeez
fffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu...
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
This.
Spew forth as many technical-sounding terms as possible to confuse the average person and make them think you know what you're talking about!
Hackers and Blowfish (err, Swordfish) stand out the most as appallingly bad. Though I have to admit it's the rare TV or movie that gets computer science in even the ballpark of plausibility.
I'd go through a lot of TVs and monitors if I acted on my impulse to throw bottles at the screen every time a 3D UI or infinite-zoom-and-enhance camera or other horrible Hollywood trope involving computers is used.
I know this!
*twitch* That horrible little girl in Jurassic Park.
Macs running Unix? Yeah, like that will ever happen
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I know this! It's a UNIX system!
Sneakers. Click the button, and the screen ANSI's all over the place, revealing whatever you're hacking into. ...I can use 'ANSI' as a verb, right?
--Scatterblak (slashdot account won't werkie now for years...)
It's a Unix system, I know this!
The Core, in which a single teenager, fueled by Hot Pockets, controls worldwide access to every piece of information ever. Also, The Core is the most brilliant disaster movie ever made.
It's BS there is no way that he would have lasted 60 seconds.
I have to nominate the Sandra Bullock abortion The Net--the entire film. Compared to that movie, Goldblum's antics are totally plausible.
The Net. That entire movie. Just watch it and cringe.
Tom Cruise breaks into a vault at CIA with their most important computer, and when presented with a login screen clicks the "override" button on the computer (right next to the "ok" button), which simply logs in without having to enter a password.
Unix is a 3D operating system!
I started with nothing and have most of it left.
The scene where Chloe and Bill are trying to hack into the CTU and she says "I'll get in through the subnet"! I loved 24 but I recall I had involuntary muscle spams when I heard that line of crud.
or best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
The fakest looking keyboard skills are when Scotty inputs the formula for "transparent aluminum" into the computer in the movie Voyage Home (the one where they go back to modern day LA). He just kinda hovered his hands over the keys and randomly smacked his fingers over the buttons very fast. Will have to give props to the funny bit of talking into the mouse first, though.
That movie is a SAINT in a world of sinners.
were actually good and plausible or did I miss something?
The "login backdoor" part of Tron Legacy wasn't tho, but at least they did use linux and not some made up OS :)
"I need to power down my gear"
Uberhackers are killed by urging/social engineering them to press a certain key, which then causes explosives within the computer to detonate. And that was the best bit.
Richard Pryor breaking into a computer system. To the prompt "ENTER PASSWORD:", he types "BYPASS ALL SECURITY". Bingo!
Not just a terrible scene. A truly terrible movie.
While I wouldn't call it a gaffe, I'd call it annoying. There is the habit Hollywood has for displaying text to screens like it is being printed on a teletype machine (Alien, The Matrix, etc), complete with clicking noises. I know it is done for the slow readers in the audience but still.
Then there are the unnecessary graphics. Someone will be doing genetics research and a totally useless image of a DNA strand will appear on the screen (Jursassic Park, The Fly (remake)). "Hey look, DNA! So THAT'S what I've been working on for years!"
I'd say Independence Day is the worst offender for bad technological plot gimmicks but The Terminator is also guilty. Why would a robot need a display in its head? Wouldn't it just think the info, not display it to its own eyes? Yah, not as thrilling to the audience to show a robot standing there staring and analyzing.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
The alien ship showed up as a large wifi access point with no auth or encryption turned on.
That was the worst I've ever seen. Close 2nd: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNtcWpY4YLY
Why the hell do they do that? What self-respecting geek would use something so annoying that it bleeps every time it displays a character?
There was a scene in one episode of House where the doctors used some sort of technology to visualize their patient's dreams. That was pretty awful. Up until then, the show had been pretty good about not resorting to such ludicrous misrepresentations of present-day technology.
Yes, this movie exists. And yes, it's godawful beyond belief.
Here's a review I wrote about the movie when it came out. But, really, every detail is awful-- not just the computer scenes, but every scene is brimming from top to bottom with WTF. It also doesn't help that they couldn't get any characters from the original, except WOPR (if you count that.)
Comment of the year
The scene in Salt, with Angelina Jolie, where the russian spy forces the president to launch a nuclear strike is... RIDICULOUS. I mean, you're telling me that it takes about 5 minutes for the President to authorize a nuclear strike. Kinda unrealistic... And of course, there has to be a loading bar... that comes to a screeching halt just as the hero is there to save the day. I just thought this scene represented everything that is wrong about computer scenes in movies.
When ever I see a scene qui a computer, or a sculptor, or somebody speaking a "foreign language" that I know, I'm wondering ...
Are all the scene about things I do not know anythng about just as bad ???
Are all the docter cringing when they see Dr House ? (probably) and what do the lawers make of the "good wife" ? and new york women of "sex and the city" ?
Or are we singled out to be really interpreted badly ...
BTW I do actually laught but really hate the big bang theory ... is it really necessary for the US general public to believe that inteligent scientist are social looser to enjoy a movie ?
It's geeksplotation.. if you would stereotype any other human category as much you'd probably be sued to bankrupcy...
I guess we do have too much of a sense of humor...
Hands down, Jurassic Park. "This is Unix! I know this!"
meanwhile seeing some crazy spinny GUI, and remember this is circa 1993.
I cringe every time.
Gamecube, Wii, Playstation, PS2, PS3, PSP and Xbox 360 are RISC too.
It has to be "The Matrix" - who can believe there are that many long leather coats on the planet?
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
And trying to pinpoint the worst is a battle, as there are just so many contenders for the prize, all deserving it pretty much equally.
I just can't figure out why Hollywood can't seem to get such an everyday item right. It's not like they attribute implausible capabilities to guns, cars and motorcycles these days.
Wait...I mean...*carrier lost*
The Knight Rider remake (only saw the pilot) was just full of fail. After they get hit by a rocket and are on fire, they drive around for ages. (Granted, it's not the worst because his love interest has to strip down since they're cooking.) Then there's a car chase, and he just sits there while the car drives around for him; that's the worst car chase I've ever seen.
The worst part wasn't how dumb the writers were about technology, it was how the technology killed off any possible suspense.
Unthinkable (with Samuel L Jackson and Carrie-Ann Moss).
The bomb guy disarms the bomb with a Mac running EXCEL, randomly pressing keys in different cells.
http://i.imgur.com/8SMhl.png
This always drove me nuts. I'm glad somebody else made this montage:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
All the time, over and over again, the TV series NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service is the worst. I understand the goal is to express mood and plot and not to be technically accurate, but still, it's painful.
The delete button is supposed to magically fix my system when pressed? Didn't know that o.o
* Rattle off an IP number. More often than not it will contain numbers above 255.
23.75.345.200 I shall say no more.
How about every single scene in TNG? Here you have a presumably starship-sized computer built with technology hundreds of years ahead of our own... And you need to talk to it? It would be so much faster than a human that it would be able to anticipate everything, so shields and defenses etc. would be operating automatically, before the slow humans even know what is going on.
I stumbled across an episode of Simon & Simon (a show I didn't watch so I don't know much about it) where their computer geek analyzed a picture of a helicopter on his PC (this was the 80s) and discovered a structural flaw in its design (that the actual designers missed, natch). That was probably typical of TV computers at the time, though.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
R2D2 could understand speech but not speak.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
She plugged her laptop into the cockpit and was able to pilot the plane again, saving all on board.
Sorta like the bad guys in one of the Die Hard movies that used their computer to hack into the air traffic control system and "move the ILS down" so the incoming airliner would crash.
So the poster didn't even see the film, they used a freaking antenna on the alien space ship to wirelessly send the virus. I recall some sort of dialup/PPP interface.
And they knew they could do it because the aliens were using Earth commsats and our communications infrastructure to send out the orders for the invasion of Earth.
But still a terrible movice.
Your comment is too fuzzy, "Enhance!"..."Enhance!"..."Enhance!"..."Enhance!"..."Enhance!"..."Enhance!"... ahh yes now I see it perfectly.
Not only was it a movie that was of Gaussian proportions, but it had accuracy too. A blind man driving, looks like the driving quality around MIT.
Fight Spammers!
Justin Long hacking a security terminal for which he wrote an algorithm. Any decent cryptography wouldn't allow even the creator of the algorithm to know a password chosen by the sysadmins using it.
I think the worst computer scene in the movies is "The 'Net" shortly after opening credits right until the closing credits.
I'm a BBS orphan in a blogging world.
http://www.starringthecomputer.com/snapshots/angry_red_panet_b205_1.jpg
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
I respect you guys and gals, but you can't say you have seen the worst of all until you have seen "the card player" by Dario Argento.To make it short, the police is chasing a serial killer who likes to challenge the police to a video poker game before killing his victims. If the police loses, he kills them. The Italian policemen, superior in skill to anyone else in the world, decide to beat the killer at his own game by "hiring" a kid found in a bar who allegedly is a video-poker champion.
No need to say it, the movie is full of completely inconsequential computer jargon, the interfaces are lovely and the nerds that try to track down the killer are too good to be true. Calling it a cliché would be an understatement, you don't want to die without having seen it.
BTW, thanks for the CSI visual basic thing, I've always felt like there was something missing in my life...
some of the most disappointing 'theater' ever? 'special effects' also mimic bad sci-fi? we'll be glad when they're gone. definitely, a worst of the worst contender, plus, it's life threatening, staying with the bad/fake science (fails even simple math) theme we seem to worship?.
Don't forget, they issued an advisory about Independence Day: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/96/Jul/id42.html -Pete
There is a scene in a tamil movie which shows the protagonist hacking into another system. Using Windows Media Player. I can't think of other things topping this
! (Cryptic Seduction)
I think "War Games" had a measure of accuracy, where the cracker spent weeks researching the private life of a system developer to try to work out what he might have used as a back-door password. Compared, say, to one of the Superman films -- was it Superman IV? -- in which all the cracker had to do was type "Override all security".
And don't forget the back-handed accuracy of Airplane II:
"Have you worked out what all those flashing lights mean yet?"
"No, sir. We're working on it"
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
jurassic park: the little girl going "it's a unix system, i know this"... and then she's flying over computer files, or something. huh?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng
disclosure: that 3D file system that seemed to suggest that in the future every time someone wanted to open a file, it would be like playing an FPS against demi moore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFkyV7d5t8o
the net: you access super top secret computer systems by clicking on a tiny pi icon in the corner of a browser session. not exactly security through obscurity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYO-5Y2L0jg
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Apart from Swordfish (your friend Torvalds! how cheap is that?), for me it's Die Hard 4, when bad guy Gabriel makes a 3 dollar webcam rotate by itself remotely , and countless other ridiculous misconceptions about hacking.
Greetings, programs!
when that nutty computer called out his checkmating line, he gave a suboptimal solution... something no computer chess program would do. Deep Blue must be rolling over in its grave.
After they escape the game grid (which I'll admit was fairly realistically done), the programs get all excited about finding power. WTF? Hardware uses power; what programs want is memory. They should have been, all, "There must be forty-eight kilobytes here!! Gobble gobble, I'm gonna build another hash table!"
Or how about Ram, who I guess you're supposed to think "drank the koolaide" since he was going on about how insurance was a good investment. No insurance program would actually be able to really function, if it actually believed that. Maybe this wasn't a script error, though. Maybe Ram really believed that, and that is why he derezzed after fairly minor injuries. Or maybe he knew insurance-as-an-investment is a scam, and was trying to con Flynn into buying some insurance, so he died as a moral lesson on the importance of honesty.
Then there's Sark, getting all snippy with an underling, telling him to stop thinking because he does the thinking. That was stupid and made be guffaw at the idea that Sark was supposed to be some kind of bad-ass antagonist. Part of solving problems is break the up and get another process doing something, feeding you the answers through a pipe. Even if you don't have SMP (which was admitted pretty rare in 1982) multiprocess solutions still let you get work done while something is blocked on I/O, without all that bug-prone mucking around with threading.
Speaking of I/O.. the I/O towers! For all the praise Tron got for its graphics, you'd think they'd be able to get the color of I/O towers right.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Can't remember the exact show, think it was CSI Miami. They analyzing a photo, already infamously inaccurate on CSI, but then the main characters says "digitize it". WTF, it already on the computer and digitized man! Oh, and of course, it magically makes the photo clearer... ugh!
Haven't seen this clip from Numb3rs about IRC mentioned yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
Related, but not a 'bad' scene: Red Dwarf had a clip mocking this stuff ("Uncrop!") http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU
... the italian job. It takes a computer scientist (benny hill) to change a tape. dreadful.
Almost anytime they rattle off an IP number. More often than not it will contain numbers above 255.
Actually that is intentional and well thought out. It prevents people from typing in that IP and trying to do something. When real phone numbers appeared on TV or in songs it was quite annoying for the person whose number that was. They are just trying to avoid similar inconveniences.
Go to even earlier uses of computers and you'll find gold. Most uses of computers pre'80s, specially when they tried to do "futuristic" things, are usually ridiculous (and not just in films, in literature too). A good exception in that time zone is 2001.
Of course, with older movies you were playing with almost magical entities for most at that time. With newer ones, specially last years where most have one and know that there is no magic around (ok, there are exceptions, summoning Linux and its daemons usually solves the blue screen curse) things like those done in CSI feel worse than normal.
And probably will hit a nerve here, but Tron, if you take the same approach as with ID4, should be a major offender too.
The movie "Hackers" from the 90s...
1) Macs were far too simple to be used for hacking (especially at that time).
2) Hacking involved some form of 3d maneuvering where you fly around a file structures, back in the day when most computers wouldn't even run that as a native application.
3) Just like all hollywood movies, they get all the terms and dialogue pretty wrong
I haven't seen the movie since it came out and I was thoroughly disappointed. I do remember it had fun action scenes and a somewhat functional plot.. I just can't remember what they actually were... I told myself I would never do it again.
Swordfish's hack of DOD in 30 seconds.
Thorny: "Enhance."
*tickatickaticka*
Thorny: "Enhance."
*tickatickaticka*
Thorny: "Enhance."
*tickatickaticka*
Thorny: "Enhance."
*tick...tick...*
O''Hagan: "JUST PRINT THE DAMN THING!"
This movie really makes technology out of reality. There is a scene when a 56000 bps modem displays a holographic Image, and that just because it is a 56000 bps modem.
Never, never, NEVER watch Netforce. I didn't even finish it.
All Morse Code in movies is gibberish.
Hollywood never lets accuracy get in the way of the storytelling.
I know this show was intended to be over the top, but the whole premise is cringe-worthy.
example
IMDB
"....what's the worst computer-related acting performance ever?.."
ALL of them.
That is all....
War Games was great.
Worst scene(s) IMO is every scene from Swordfish. 2 hours of fail I can't get back. Die Hard 4 was pretty fail too, fucking fail terminology.
How are most of these cheesy CSI-type programs created? I would assume they are done in flash. Are they usually interactive, in other words if the actor presses a button it does some predefined animation, or is the whole thing one long animation that the actor needs to time against?
Somebody here has to have created one of these...
Can you zoom in on the guy with the cell phone, and read his lips, or something to that effect. All from traffic cameras.
The Peacemaker: A million people in New York City with backpacks. And they're able to figure out (through the use of satellites) which one to chase. Which is also why I can never watch Enemy of the State *rolls eyes*
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Back in the early 60's the sub in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea actually had its own mainframe computer with lots of flashing lights and tape drives. Every week without fail the computer would blow up. Flames would shoot out from it. Of course, after the next commercial it was working perfectly again.
The Recruit had a computer virus capable of spreading through the fucking electrical outlets.
What major technological gaffes have I seen?
I've seen a /. poster seemingly believe that ethernet is required to upload a virus. Does that count?
The "move the ILS down" was clever and would have crashed the plane like that.
Problem is, the ILS works off of physical ground-based transmitters, and there would be no way to "move" them with a computer.
There are a few good ones in this. My two favorites are the robot taxi.... why does the taxi need an actual robot to drive it?
And even better is the futuristic video playback device. It is more or less a briefcase painted silver that can play a prerecorded message. I mean this was made in 1990 sure there weren't smartphones but it's not as if laptops were some theoretical device that had yet to be developed. I suppose the idea of something that size that played video was fanciful at the time but at the same time Arnold was taking a vacation to mars and the best they could do was an attache for leaving messages?
well the id4 virus scene is possible. there is not need to connect to anything, it was over radio.
I think there is a difference between computer as plot device and computer as character and computer as magic. As a plot device, as it was used in Hackers it was quite inoffensive. I like the way they coupled the phones rather than using magic routing to hide the location. It was a valid plot device, like the Enterprise in ST:TOS.
Computer as magic, I really have no opinion one way or another. It is lazy writing, and has nothing to do with the computer. This is Independence day.
The computer as an integral part of the story is War Games and Jumpin Jack Flash are good examples of the form. A not so good one is Leverage. It is my opinion that they misused Data in ST:NG
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I know its a cheesy and fun show, and the computer stuff in it usually doesn't grate too much, but this one drove me nuts. Season 2 episode 8.
The good guys find an "flash drive" which is encrypted (good) and contains a secret list of bad guys that the good guys need. They take it home to their secret CIA base and plug it into a big computer so they can break the encryption, which supposedly will take "hours, maybe days". Okay, whatever, I can cope with that.
So then a bad guy kidnaps Chuck's girlfriend and demands the Chuck bring him the flash drive. Chuck unplugs it from the computer and alarms and stuff go off, and he rushes off to the rendezvous with the bad guy (his bodyguards trying to catch up). Then during this standoff, Chuck surrenders the flash drive to the bad guy and the bad guy stomps it apart, and then all of the characters act as if this matters some how. Arrrgh!
(1) The first thing you would ever do when plugging a FLASH DRIVE into a giant CIA ENCRYPTION BREAKING COMPUTER would be to COPY THE CONTENTS OF THE FLASH DRIVE SOMEWHERE. Like, to your hard drive or nas or just fucking anywhere. Fuck. Argh. The physical drive is totally irrelevant after that.
(2) Even if they hadnt copied the data off of it, who really thinks that stomping on a flash drive so that the plastic case breaks apart is going to damage the chip inside? Thats laughably unlikely. An inconvenience, but half an hour of careful soldering and they'd still be able to extract the data off that chip.
(3) The episode ends with Chuck revealing that HE used a "Q-36 game copier" to copy the contents of the flash drive. As if copying information using a computer was somehow hard and requires custom hardware. Arrggh.
Nah, 007 can't be taken seriously. Anyway, here's the scene
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I believe it was "Overide all security." See, only a truly brilliant hacker would know to misspell "override."
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
It's easy to come up with BAD examples, that's the default for movies. What's your vote for the BEST portrayal?
The computer stuff wasn't particularly great in this movie, but I thought this move captured the technology development process very nicely:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085271/
The stupidest one was the kid hacker showing the Unix system with a 3D interface for the UI. That wasn't science fiction it was pure fantasy. At the time Unix was still mostly command line.
My Mac related bonehead one in Jurassic Park was the "live" video feeds. You can clearly see the slide indicator on the bottom showing that they were actually quicktime clips playing and not live feeds.
"Refine the image"
<zzzzzzzzrrrrrrrrrtttttt bip, bip, bip, bleeeeeeeeeet>
"Oh my God! He used Allen bolts on the license plates!"
"Get the Chief in here! He's going to want to see this"
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
Rising Sun [imdb] was by far the worst. Swapping heads in video with an outline and a little drag-n-drop maneuver. Awesome.
i am a film buff. so i knew about the movie swordfish a few months before it came out (from fan sites like aintitcoolnews.com, etc.), and i knew sketchy plot points about the movie, namely that it would be about illicit transfers of illicit funds
i also used to work for a large multinational bank as a programmer. and a few months before swordfish came out, i was developing a system used by the bank for monitoring internal transfers. on a lark, i code named the system in development as "swordfish" as my own personal inside joke. it was never intended to be a more widely known nickname
but in email conversations with my boss, i, um, kept calling it swordfish. oops. my boss wound up raving about the system, to his bosses, to other middle management, to everyone. he started telling everyone who would listen about it because the basic idea behind the project was a sound one and it was important for the bank. unfortunately, he kept calling it "swordfish," and the name stuck and went into general use
awareness of the swordfish project just happened to peak when the movie came out. to widespread media coverage and exposure and advertising. and the basic details about a hacker breaking into a financial computer system to transfer funds became common knowledge, even to people who didn't see the movie. and at the same time, here was my boss making an internal push to distribute this program to wider use for testing, and trying to drum up support for it amongst the higher ranking middle management... and it was called swordfish
he stopped raving about the program, and my boss got in the habit of shaking his head and smirking every time he saw me
so the plot guys get the technical details wrong sometimes
i am living proof that sometimes the technical guys get the plot points wrong
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That scene where he use a piece off the bike to bypass the security on a door to the building (shudder). Any normal door in that reality should have said, f**k off you're a motorbike. I nearly puked as well when "vulnerability" flashed up on Arnie's HUD after he noticed that Tinman had a heart.
enough said.
"Ahhh!!! A back door!" ... and then I left the theater.
Wait. Stop scrolling for a sec. O.K. Thanks. - P
That dumb movie with Denzel and Russell - Virtuosity. That was pretty annoying.
'Cause non-realistic fits all of them. That doesn't make them bad movies necessarily. Movies are made for the simple purpose of entertaining people and not as a realistic and close replica of the real world.
To give a speaking example: Centurion. A pseudo-historical movie which is set in Britain in 117 (CE) and mentions the governor of Britain to be Julius Agricola. Well, he indeed was the governor of Britain but has been recalled in 85 (CE) and has died in 93 (CE). So yes, the movie isn't historically accurate. But then again it doesn't claim to be a documentary. It's a good movie if you're into blood, action and hot witches.
Examples don't stop here. It goes on forever, in all films and all topics. Movies aren't made for computer geeks, or historians.
But then again I guess that's why geeks are called geeks. Just take the damn movie for what it is: an average 90 minutes of brain inactivity, or, in other words, entertainment.
IMHO: Most movies and TV shows named here are having bigger issues and failing on more important issues than realism related to computer scenes.
the Pentium Pro was the first iteration of the x86 family which did not execute x86 instructions directly, but rather translated them into an internal microcode instruction set which was very much RISC indeed.
What about inexplicably good scenes? For example, why are all of the computer scenes in Brazil so excellent, even though the data entry terminals are implausibly clunky mechanical teletypes with swing-in fresnel lenses to magnify the paper?
Halle Berry, with a gun, and not much else. Makes up for a hell of a lot of plot holes.
We don't see nearly enough Super Troopers references on Slashdot. Thank you sir.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Trinity in one of the Matrix movies uploading a virus/worm into the matrix network ?
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
Ok.. I probably deserve this for watching "Date Night" ... horrible film. Why does Tina Fey act in any film she didn't write?
But anyway... not terribly unique "regular people drawn into a caper" comedy. There's a fundamental plot point that requires a USB stick being plugged into a Kindle (a little too obvious on the product placement). That can't happen.. no USB host port on a Kindle. Sorry, I'm a hardware guy, that was the final straw that made me hate the film (it had progress toward that hate by then already, even though I usually like just about anything with Fey or Steve Carell).
-Dave Haynie
From the TV show Jericho:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5XOxuZ_f0s
SUCK - Lawnmower Man, The net, The matrix, Anti-trust, Hackers 1 and 2, Die Hard live horny or Die Hard
Worth While - The Italian Job, The only one that should bare that name, you know the one with Michael Kane and Benny Hill. The scene when they shut down the city by screwing with the computers that run the traffic lights.
Has no one brought up the ridiculousness that is Battle Royale? There's not a computer-related thing in the movie that can even be remotely realistic.
A) They studied the tech for years.
B) The raise is a hive mind. As such crime wouldn't be an issue.
C) minimal to no software virus protection
D) He can write an emulator.
That movie complaint is unwarranted.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How many sentient lawnmowers can act like they are under telepathic control of a retarded noid standing on the balcony of a a Playboy Mansion ignoring the chick behind him?
Lawnmaeower mane was best lawnmower acting in the history of mankind except when the mowers came for bambehan dem pheasants an mice in that one Disney moofie.
completely egregious use of technology... to construct an endearing story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stuyz1Kkzn0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZazTtaW_ZAo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in_ZVmckrmU
completely forgotten, critically panned early 80s film called "electric dreams". complete with an unknown group called culture club on the soundtrack
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OLEAeky8is
just, you know, your typical story of a PC that goes insane and falls in love with the girl upstairs
i loved that weird freakin movie
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
GoldenEye, anyone?
Oh, come on. If we derived modern computers from the aliens' systems, then certainly the aliens had their own problems. I can just imagine those two aliens in the mothership sitting there, staring at the virus notification on the screen, going, "I TOLD you to download the latest service pack! Fscking McAlienfee!"
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Obviously, it's where hackers go when they don't wanna be heard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
One of my favorites is the "secret video", a trope device used commonly in '80s and early '90s era action TV shows to that wraps a clip show around a new plot. The way it works is that a new character is introduced, usually a future arch nemesis, who has been secretly observing the show's protagonists over at least a season. The character watches a video of the protagonists. The video also shows full clips from previous episodes. Where things get insane is that the clips always include scenes which couldn't logically have been secretly videotaped by an outside observer without that observer having been embedded within the protagonists, or because the original camerawork in the clips makes it impossible to believe there's a secret observer there.
It's always implied that high tech computer and video technology was used to make the recordings.
There is in fact a deleted scene from Independence Day that shows that they had been working on getting computers to talk to alien technology for several years. While it's still unrealistic, at least it shows they put some thought into the problem.
Somewhere across the galaxy an alien I.T. Administrator is brow beating an alien technician for not securing their wireless.
Chris Sheppard
It was entirely wrong but supper cool all at the same time- They had a that humungous MIT mechanical differential analyzer write out its answers in english cursive handwriting on an X-Y plotting table.
Almost all the movies I have seen that involve a computer get it wrong but i have narrowed it down to three key points. 1. Very few people use the keyboard as much as it is represented in the movies or TV 2. It does not take less than 30 seconds to back up huge amounts of data. 3. A computer crash or failure does not constitute a huge explosion.
Chris Sheppard
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZAoMv_QnAU
When they used an "electron microscope" to look at a "petri dish" and watch a virus grow "in real time" I was doubled over in the theater in pain trying not to cry out too loud at the absurd stupidity of that scene! I cried!!!
"DENIAL"-How an optimist keeps from becoming a pessimist- \ \
PC Zone asked a question like this in 1997. For some reason I remember it.
The answer was that Star Trek film where Scotty sings into a mouse.
Hackers getting "in" to a computer by navigating "around" the firewall. - Both of course displayed on the screen with some 3d blocks.
Close second: Searching a database. - Pictures or texts (depending whether you look for a person or a document) flash on the screen in rapid succession, till the computer than "finds" the right one. For the computer to "look" at it, it must apparently appear on the screen.
Helps humans feel like they are progressing better than a progress bar. I've not seen a fingerprint system so I can't speak to that, but for example Symantec Ghost does it when cloning a drive. It shows you the file it is on at the bottom. Well a realtime display would scroll by way too fast to be useful. So what it does is periodically (once every few seconds) display whatever it happens to be working on right then. It is just to help people feel like there is continual work and progress rather than just a ticking counter and a bar, which can move very slowly for large bars.
Remember that programs are made to make people happy, which can mean doing shit that is not useful in a functional sense.
Any film or show in which someone tells a computer to "zoom and enhance" an area of an image.
My personal favorite.
Actually, if you're looking for an accurate portrayal of medicine, watch Scrubs. And I'm not kidding about that - there's a show that was intentionally based on a lot of real-life experiences of medical interns and nurses and such, even if the show was exaggerated for comic effect.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
IN Die Hard, the BSD computer stuff was right on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"War Games had a measure of accuracy..."
Except where horny teenager David did not go to town on flirty Jennifer.
I read a book that had a dragon down a jet fighter and no one, who saw the recordings, was willing to admit it was a dragon. They "digitize it" and then told the computer operator to do about a dozen different changes to adjust the image till it looked like a jet aircraft.
Tim S.
Enhance, typing sounds, Enhance, typing sounds, Enhance.....
There's no way anyone could ever use a hair dryer that big.
~X~
I recently re-watched an episode where they concluded that the wiping of backup data on a remote colo was an inside job because "there were no traces of DDoS". I think I missed the next 30 seconds or so trying to figure out what on earth they thought they were babbling about.
I'm going to throw my vote in for Swordfish. Cool idea for a movie, but you're not going to be able to suddenly gain the magic ability to break encryption keys if someone blows you while you have a gun to your head. And the graphic "move the boxes around" thing was stupid. And the computer that the bad guy bought for the hacker with the monitors all up and down the wall was absolutely silly. Only thing that would do for you is give you an ice cream headache when you move your windows around.
And it was bogus as hell making the first hacker named Torvalds. "Hey I'm Hollywood, aren't I cute?" Yeah. Next time find a guy actually named Torvalds and hire him as a consultant for your movie. Then it won't look silly like this.
Oh, and a positive note. The Unix in Tron Legacy was actually quite nice. They actually had someone who has touched a computer consult on that movie. A nice surprise I thought. I wasn't expecting it from a Disney action movie.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
Because they could do it correctly and keep the show moving along nicely, but they choose not to, not really sure why. They do techno babble, might as well make it correct.
In some CSI type show I was watching the other day, they were able to "enhance" the footage from a security camera in order to "widen the field of view" and see someone "off camera".
I have to think writers just chuckle to themselves when they add something so silly.
3. A computer crash or failure does not constitute a huge explosion.
Back in the 80's my mom got her first accounting position that actually required her to use a computer. So she had me come in on the first day and turn it on - she was afraid to. Because she had seen Star Trek occasionally and thought "computer error = big sparky explosion".
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
They had a complete air traffic control system set up in that church. Not just "a computer".
You want bad - Die Hard 4.0.
Exploding computers (with actual explosives built into the computer) that are used to kill hackers who were unknowingly working for the badguys. Explosives activate whey you press the "Delete" key.
FBI rounding up "top hackers".
Badguys pulling off a Dr. Evil as a key part of their plan (they televise a CGI video of the Capitol exploding).
"Traced" IPs showing up with the name of the user.
Timothy Olyphant remotely moving a webcam in Kevin Smith's basement.
Everything that Justin Long does during the movie. Including something-something-satellite-something-that works during a complete power failure across the East Coast and that only the hackers use.
The grand plan:
In case of a total computer systems failure—such as the one Gabriel manufactured—every critical personal and financial record across the country is sent to servers there to create a backup. Gabriel's men take over the facility and start downloading a copy. Warlock is also able to explain Gabriel's motivation: a talented hacker, he was once a top expert for the NSA. However, he was fired and his reputation was tarnished when he tried to sound the alarm about America's vulnerability to cyber-warfare.
And they do that by downloading 500 terabytes via USB in about 2 minutes. To a portable drive.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You kids won't remember this one, but in the late 1960s Disney made a "comedy" about a college kid programmer (Kurt Russell), who somehow is electrocuted by a mainframe computer and able to recall any fact, and answer any question. I saw it in the 1970s and even then I knew it was totally imposable. Kurt Russell programming computers! Really, how dumb do they think we are?!?!
And let's not forget any of the computers in The Six Million Dollar Man, including the bionic eye.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Weird Science or Swordfish, hands down
Every last human character in the movie was continuously smoking and drinking Scotch. After subjugating the human race the damn computer criticized the heavy drinking of the main human character. The computer threatened to destroy the world with nuclear weapons, why would it care about a cocktail?
There's actually a scene in the movie when the main character, Milo, played by Ryan Phillipe is supposed to be sitting in front of his computer, which is actually a UPS (uninterruptible power supply).
Plus, the movie sucked horse.
without question The Net. I cringe when i see it on the tube. Even at the time it came out I cringed. On the OTHER hand it's the first movie I can recall seeing with Sandra Bullock in it, so not a complete failure. mmmmm Saaaandra.
No kidding. I can't believe that in this day and age when computers are ubiquitous that Hollywood is still treating them like semi-magic boxes.How many people are left in the US that still think that programmers do all their coding on multiple screes with nothing but spinning 3D graphics. This is especially prevalent when someone is "hacking" into a "secure" system. Half the time they show someone manipulating a strand of DNA and are just mashing together what a four year old kid would say that heard a parent talking about computers. Something like:
[Picture the monitor showing a fractal spinning on the screen with shiny spheres flying around and attaching to it randomly with techno music in the background]
Hacker guy: The firewall has 7337 -bit encryption. That's more options than there are atoms in a car
Hot chick: Really! So it's going to take you like two days to hack the NSA Excel 4-train database. Are you using the Bernoulli quadratic equation?
Hacker guy: No, I'm already past the firewall. I dropped in a logic bomb and spammed the secure email SQL server with a hydra worm.
Bad guy: Wow, it took Linus 14 hours on a Cray XMP Beowulf cluster linked to a direct fiber-channel modulator to do what you did in 17 seconds.
Hacker guy: Yeah, I know. Just think how much faster I could have done it if you hadn't shot my best friend five minutes ago, didn't have a knife in my back, and I didn't have to power the mainframe with this hamster wheel.
Bad guy: It'll all be over soon. Once you get the launch codes for the neutron bomb from the ZX81 RAM pack.
I can't believe no one has brought up live free, die hard.
It's a fire sale!!!
The entire movie was terrible.
Ah, computer movies. It's because of these I have machines named Gibson (AD DC), Lucy (Mac), Bishop (Linux / Apache), Hal (Origin 300 / IRIX), Joshua (Alpha 2100 / OpenVMS), and a router named Bishop (Cisco 881).
Are all the docter cringing when they see Dr House ? (probably)
Yes. Polite Dissent is written by a doctor who reviews medical issues as portrayed in House as well as other media (comics, other tv shows, etc -- today's page has him tearing into classic "train to be a nurse at home" ads from a bygone era). He rates the medicinal errors from "major" to "minor" to "nitpicking", and he explains it all in layman's terms so medically illiterate people like me can understand.
They had the ship for years looking at the systems - maybe had cracked the OS somewhat, transmission frequencies (which happened to be the same as the Airport card?). The aliens are telepaths/hive mind(?) so no need for security, ever. Compared to the rest of the movie ...
Knowing the preceding statement is flame bait I vote for Jurassic Park - the quote is the current department. Best computer scene ever: The end of Colossus(?).
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I always cringed whenever Data (ST-TNG) said that he was unable to form contractions -- such as contracting the phrase "I am" to "I'm".
First of all, it's not very hard to apply contractions. I can write a sed program to do it. Given Data's sophistication, why would he be unable to do such a relatively simple thing?
And second of all, there are certain contractions that are obligatory in English. For example, it is incorrect syntax to say "Do not you know that?" -- it must be contracted to "Don't you know that?". Data would have had to adhere to that rule, because breaking that rule is very jarring.
Numbers 6x07
Possibly the worst description of leetspeak and IRC ever. I cringed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
I nominate The Recruit with Colin Farrell and Al Pacino. The cringe inducing scene was Colin Farrell hacking into a CIA computer by typing in some C++ source code at the graphical login prompt.
Independence Day is up there. CSI, too, but in overall hilarity, nothing really beats Numb3rs explaining IRC.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119318/
The best scene was where Cleary (Lowe's character) holes up in a companion's cave in the middle of nowhere and this guy spouts off he has BONDED ISDN to his cave...which is in the middle of nowhere.
13 years later we still can't get broadband to rural nowhere, but the phone company really pulled copper to your cave?
Except where horny teenager David did not go to town on flirty Jennifer.
That was the most accurate part of the movie, if you assume he'd become the model for a /.er
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
Obviously takes the cake
I call Shenanigans
There is no -1 disagree
Goldblum's achievements in Independence Day were very believable because he was obviously writing the attack using Perl scripts. Everybody knows that Perl is the miracle of the universe. Not even alien technology can withstand attacks from Perl scripts.
This show is easily the worst I've ever seen when it comes to computers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ceaqtWhdnI
There was also a scene where Charlie was able to track someone down by their IP address down to the level of knowing where they were in a room of a house.
Why would a robot need a display in its head? Wouldn't it just think the info, not display it to its own eyes? Yah, not as thrilling to the audience to show a robot standing there staring and analyzing.
In Wall-E, the Autopilot cannot command systems directly, he has to physically work the controls on the bridge.
That exposes his actions to the audience. It catches their eye. But it is also a pointed reminder that the Captain is the one who is supposed to be the one in charge here.
In animation you need to make your story points economically, while giving your audience something interesting to look at.
Any movie where the character is talking to the computer while typing. This is normally a narrative device to let the audience know what's happening, but it's just so bizarre to see it done this way. Or cases where someone types only about 10 character to accomplish a major task, or they type 10 characters and hit enter for a case that should only involve hitting an off button (ie, reactor is overloading it needs to be shut off fast, this shouldn't require having to type in commands.
Or anything involving CSI...
No kidding. I can't believe that in this day and age when computers are ubiquitous that Hollywood is still treating them like semi-magic boxes.
C'mon.. you're talking about the exact same people who still haven't realized the entire planet WANTS digital distribution of content and hate / can't justify paying $40 for a filthy cinema seat with dust on the projector lens and sticky floors. This is actually the case BECAUSE they have no idea what a computer is. They do think it's just a magic box that does stuff that occasionally leads to free money or the end of the world.
Yeah, the supposed nerds were all way too cool to be real, the technobabble was uninspired and the representation of the virtual environment was absolutely ridiculous, but try to see it from a more open-minded point of view: once you remove all the eye candy, the characters were essentially DDoSing a server with the intention of bypassing its security and recovering important files for the benefit of themselves and everyone else, which is the closest representation of hacker ethics to reality I've ever seen in the world of movies.
It's a bit like trying to explain complicated things to non-savvy people by way of analogies and exaggerations: it's not how things REALLY work, but people get the underlying message, and with all its flaws Hackers managed to do that quite well in my opinion.
Also, HALF-SECOND SHOT OF YOUNG NOT-YET-INSANE ANGELINA JOLIE'S BOOBS WOOHOO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhZzwx0X4Ac
It's most likely Superman III, my favorite. Richard Pryor is a geek and has some sort of computer job.
I tell people we can actually do all that shit. Most of the time they don't know any better and believe me. I consider it an object lesson in learning to think for yourself...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Ever seen NCIS?
Just recently they had an episode where they had to shoot the computers because the wikileaks terrorists were trying to break in...
I can't really remember anything worse than that.
The graphics used while breaking into the Defence Dept. site were silly, But honestly, most movie depictions of computers are bad. A better poll might be what movies had depicted a computer in a manner both potentially accurate and interesting. Most accurate depictions are mundane (one of the Pink Panther movies, for instance.) Slightly inaccurate ones (Jumpin' Jack Flash) might be the best compromise.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
This massive troll of PC users by NCIS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRhGPVYRsOY
Chewy: rraaaarraar-rarraararrrr-rrrrrarrrrrrr-rrrraraaraararrararar!
Han: What's that Chewy? Twenty-two Storm Troopers are moving along North-East corridor 5 in standard flanking formation in an attempt to cut off our escape, but we can prevent them from accomplishing this if we re-route the auxilliary thrusters to bypass the hyperdrive's rear defensive shield?
Chewy: rrrrrararara-rarararrrr!
Han: Right you are!
Live Free or Die Hard, while probably not the worse ever, is the worst I recall at the moment. I felt like attempting to drive my head through a brick wall at points.
They had warp drive, transporters, phasers, food synthesizers, cloaking devices, time travel, and yet....a mechanical odometer-like clock on Sulu's console.
I chose to end my comments, not with a rim shot, but a long decaying F#7sus4
In this climatic battle between the scientist and the millions of clones created by the robot, the final victory is achieved by "Select all robots" and "delete"! http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2376096,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ziffdavis%2Fextremetech+(Extremetech)
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Yes, that will be the one -- I remember it being Richard Pryor.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
I always liked to think that because the aliens were a hive mind and/or telepathic, there was no real reason for them to need good computer security, since no alien in their population would ever try to maliciously manipulate the system. They just trusted each other. Making it a cakewalk for humans who have had practice. Imagine someone from today (ok the 90s) being asked to hack some of the first computers in the past, before hackers and crackers had started making life more interesting.
Also explains the system not changing in 50 years. Why? It's not like they've been getting repeatedly hacked for 50 years and sending patch updates out. And even our modern OSes have lots of backwards compatibility, and we are probably on a steeper part of the development curve.
Oh, and if they were going a good fraction of the speed of light to get to earth they'd have way less than 50 years.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
http://deflexion.com/2006/03/pine-in-fortune-magazine-and-on-tv :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The Core "I'm going to need an unlimited supply of hot pockets and xena tapes."
Antitrust "NURV all your base belong to us.."
Hackers "I always wanted to be zero cool."
Sneakers "The ultimate black box."
Sure no cyborgs, and we're still working on ED209, but back in 1987 Robocop had:
- computer interfaces that resembled web sites
- a device for tracking Robocop that looks suspiciously like a smartphone
- digital video recording, as well as DVDs (didn't exist until '93)
Plus:
- stupidly oversized cars that wasted gas (6000 SUX)
- ultraviolent games for the whole family (Nukem!)
- Ford Taurus police cars (back when Crown Victorias were standard issue, they looked very "futuristic")
- ads for medical services (unheard of in '87)
- privatized police, military, prisons, and spacecraft
- and autoflush urinals!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
"....bomb.....bomb....?"
Read though the whole page and no one mentioned Sneakers.
Michael Douglas needs to access some files. The only way to get them is through VIRTUAL REALITY. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFkyV7d5t8o
Stark raving naked too.
Terrible movie aside from that. They try to make a hero out of a queen bitch junkie model.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The Imsai 8080 with a voice -- that seemed to move to every machine in the movie.
Tim Robbin's character leans over Ryan Phillipe's character, points to a For loop, nods, and says "That's good!". This movie was the first movie to use only unix/linux in it. Ryan Phillipe knew how to use a Security computer system, he had never seen before. They hid surveillance video in the daycare computer system and Ryan just knew how to access it.
Just horrible, since supposedly they had a computer consultant for all of the computer scenes.
I can't believe I had to search this far down to find "The Net." Wasn't the whole premise that the bad guy somehow put a secret icon on every web page that when you clicked on it magically hacked the server for that page? And he forgot to deactivate/remove it from his own server? What a load of...bullock.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Plot complication, plot complication, plot complication, (5 minutes to end of show) trite solution involving big sciency sounding words.
One or two exceptions which I put down to outside influences.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Just when my walk was finally coming together.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
...you aren't even close. The absolute worst computer scene in history is from 60's TV show "The Prisoner".
Be warned: it will make you cringe very hard. Then maybe laugh a bit. But mostly cringe. Think twice before clicking, because there's no way to unwatch it.
Incidentally, the show itself was good. But that scene... Oh, the horror...
Knowledge is power; knowledge shared is power lost.
Hey, Farva!
What's the name of the irish place you all ways go to?
The one with all the shit on the wall.
-- Sig under construction...
Using the ipod was the best laugh!
I wish I could hack into my head. I'd totally be jacked into the internet!
"Luckily, I speak leet"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
I wanted to submit "Ask Slashdot: Best technology scene in TV or movies" As an example I suggest the scene in Contact where the alien signal is first detected. Real computers being used in realistic ways.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well, I refuse to code without multiple screens. I just need too much open at once to work effectively with one screen.
And my coworker who uses linux uses compiz effects to switch between multiple virtual desktops in addition to the multiple monitors, so he's got the spinning 3D graphics down as well.
But yeah, the techspeak can get a bit much.
The way computers were used in the 24 series made me cringe.
There was the episode where the captain, Roh, etc. got turned into children and had trouble accessing the computer with permissions problems. So apparently the computer can automagically distinguish children from adults easy enough. Not sure if that's any 'better.'
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
I like how so many modern computers (in movies) make the seek sounds of a 20 MB Seagate hard drive with a stepper motor head positioner. And let's not forget the modem handshaking noise sequence. It just seems like some of those classic sounds are mandatory, no matter how obsolete they get. Any others come to mind?
This is UNIX! I know it!
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/independence-day-interoperability-blooper.html
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/film-ui-bloopers.html
What I really want to know is what happened to sci-fi driving our desire/quest for new tech. Think the flip-up communicator from Star Trek, long before the flip phone came on the scene. When's the last time you watched a sci-fi movie and thought to yourself (about the tech), "That's a good idea. Somebody should invent that."
P.S. For similar impossibilities, check out the book Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics.
"Override all security" - Must be Forth!
In some CSI type show I was watching the other day, they were able to "enhance" the footage from a security camera in order to "widen the field of view" and see someone "off camera".
I have to think writers just chuckle to themselves when they add something so silly.
Then you may be surprised to learn that there are security cameras that actually work that way, and are available now. You can buy a camera with a 180 degree fisheye lens and high resolution sensor that records everything within sight, and then run software that lets the user virtually pan and tilt in every direction, straightening the image so that it looks like it was shot by a normal security camera. I'm not saying that the CSI camera was one of these, but they do exist. Mobotix makes one that looks like a smoke detector.
In some situations the "enhance" that lets them "zoom in" on a face is also reality. If there is motion in the scene, such as you might get with a panning view of a scene or with a moving subject, the differences between frames holds extra information. There is frame stacking software available that can interpolate the edges between pixels. (Thierry Legault used this technology to produce some amazing images of the shuttle Discovery with a ground-based telescope, as reported on /. a few days ago http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/STS-133.html .) By measuring the shift in values as those real edges approach the edge of a pixel, the software can extract enough information to figure out where the real edges are. You can kind of think of it as "ClearType in reverse" or "anti-aliasing in reverse". But of course this technique only works in certain circumstances, when the subject is moving in a fashion that is cooperative with the technology and resolution of the camera. Six frames of the back of a fleeing suspect's head is still not going to let you zoom in on the zit under his nose.
And these techniques are in use by video forensics analysts today. The lab guys I know may not be quite as sexy as the ones on TV, but they get results that yield convictions by making some pretty poor video useful in a courtroom. And I know the operators of these systems chuckle when their equipment helps bring down another bad guy.
John
What was wrong with it? IIRC, Zuckerburg's character never sat down and said "brb, hacking" or spent time typing in random characters to "crack into the system". I believe he just wrote simple scripts to get all of the pictures from the various houses without throwing in random words that make no sense like "I have to ping every computer on the network then use a floppy attached to a CD connected to an ethernet cable to quickly download all of the photos!".
Anywho, almost every technology scene is bad - it's far easier to show a computer pinging another computer with an actor sweating and everyone yelling "he'll never make it!" than it is to actually show someone exploiting a bug or programming (plus you must also take the audience into consideration).
My family's first Apple ][c did let the Magic Blue Smoke out shortly after we got it home and plugged in. No explosion, but there was a wisp of smoke rising off the thing. Of course dad took it right back to the store for a replacement.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
Hackers....mainframe hack attack....worst. computer. scene. ever....
The computer is just like a brain, and you can scan it with your brain. And blow it up and stuff.
Buck Murdock: Oh, cut the bleeding heart crap will ya? We've all got our switches, lights, and knobs to deal with, Striker. I mean, down here there are literally hundreds and thousands of blinking, beeping, and flashing lights, blinking, beeping and flashing - they're flashing and they're beeping. I can't stand it anymore! They're blinking and beeping and flashing! Why doesn't somebody pull the plug?
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
The 3D interface is called FSN, for those who want to look it up.
I think I got about 2/3 the way through that before realizing you weren't ACTUALLY quoting Swordfish. :-)
Great job. Extra points for the last line.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The worst was a very old movie, in the room-size computer days, about a new high-tech train traveling across the US with the President's wife on board. It was computer controlled from a central location, naturally, but evil forces still took over the system and demanded ransom or they would crashed the train. Back at the railroad's central control center a computer expert opened one of the cabinets of the master computer, pulled a cookie-sheet sized board completely out of the bay, glanced at it, and before reinserting the board exclaimed: "It's been reprogrammed. It took a genius to do this. We'll never be able to regain control in time."
I figured if pulling the board out didn't interrupt the computer then maybe they should try the power switch. Of course, that wouldn't have provided as much drama as the desperate measures they took which eventually resulted in the computer going up in a shower of sparks.
Synapse starts working, and busts in to every communication stream everywhere. Everyone's CDMA phones are magically high bandwidth, color screens with amazing refresh rate on the video.
Oh, and there's always Ryan Phillipe's line "When you kill people, they die." Thanks Ryan, I'll remember that.
Scotty talking to the mouse... eventually selling some guy transparent aluminum.
Hacker guy: Yeah, I know. Just think how much faster I could have done it if you hadn't shot my best friend five minutes ago, didn't have a knife in my back, and I didn't have to power the mainframe with this hamster wheel.
That, right there. Whiskey on the keyboard. Shame!
That said, you reminded me of Hackers, where they're talking about 586 RISC processors and the like. It was bad, really bad - but it was close enough in enough regards that it spurred my budding interests to figure out what the hell they were talking about. It was a "cool" film for a teen, and but between the computer mysticism and Jollie's breasts, it pretty much pushed me over the edge into geekdom.
Today, I waste most of my time delved into much of the same things - albeit at a more... realistic, and less dramatic, sure, but still - I enjoy it.
Also, I want an AMD Bobcat and a couple SSDs, man. Who's sending them to me? So sexy.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
sounds exactly like my last job.
You can't handle the truth.
Hi, this is Jerry Bruckheimer, we read your script and we'd like to hire you on as head writer for the newest show in our franchise; CSI Fuvk Ya!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
LMAO.
Yep, Swordfish was definitely one of the worst.
After Jobs is gone and Apple has fallen from glory again, a really bad actor (Mathew McConaughy or William Shatner) Will have the worst ever experience with a Mac.
Examples:
Shatner - It's a Macintosh, not a PC Doctor!
McConaughey - Maybe if I talk dirty, it will start up a little faster.
Why is it that we still get films in which the computer screen projects words and images onto the face of the user? Talk about screen burnout! You'd have the Windows/Linux/Mac desktop permanently burned into your face.
Another common theme is when there's a computer plotting to take over the world or some other dastardly plan, the hero battles incredible odds to arrive at the computer room, then takes out his biggest, baddest shotgun..... and blasts the screen, occasionally also taking out the keyboard, while the actual computer sniggers quietly under the desk.
Finally, what kind of encryption allows you to guess a password one character at a time? You always get these huge screens showing you 5 or 6 characters changing rapidly, and then the characters start falling into place one by one, usually with a cute pling! sound to tell you it's been guessed. Never mind the idea that the world's nuclear arsenal would be protected by a 6-character password.
Seriously, you'd think that film directors or script writers would familiarise themselves with the basics of computing when producing a film in which computers are a major element.
You guys haven't seen bollywood movies i guess. there is this movie called "Om Jai Jagdish" the guy literally "guesses" the password for some university gateway(online) and steals exam question papers and everybody starts calling him "greatest hacker".... later he develops an "anti-hacking" software in 1 min (yes, 1 min) in front of 1000s of people. now i cant tell on how many levels this is wrong. can you?
A computer (Majel Barrett-Roddenberry) with capabilities that varied by several orders of magnitudes from one episode to the next as required to further the plot.
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
Flooding a and unprotected wireless router with ping requests.
Example - Mike Meyers as Wayne
Wayne - "Totally gnarly and Score. Shaawing, No the babe next door will have to come over and talk to me. Sure babe, you can borrow my wireless"
Compared, say, to one of the Superman films -- was it Superman IV? -- in which all the cracker had to do was type "Override all security".
Richard Pryor is not a cracker.
i'm not sure about the worst - but the best is definitely in the South Park movie
CARTMAN
Come on, just get to the message board!
KYLE
I'm trying, I can't find a Canadian
server... I've got to break into the main
frame...
Kyle furiously hits a bunch of keys
KYLE
Damn it! They've got an access code! I'll
try to reroute the encryptions...
Kyle furiously hits a bunch more keys.
STAN
Dude, do you know what you're doing?
KYLE
No, dude, all you have to do is hit the
keys really fast and say a bunch of
stupid shit and it works.
Just then the screen pops up. Access Granted.
This is classic. I love it.
I need to see you movie! Make it, please :-)
This! This is why I decided to read the comments. I WAS pissed off at the world today. Now, not as much.
Takes his kids iPod, hooks it up to a fax machine scanner, tapes it to a screen and records every transaction going by on the screen.
I can't believe people write this drivel. I love writing fiction and all but I refuse to write anything that requires magic computers to make the plot work.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIPHWANYqUQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL4kwZkOG_I
Right one: Sup?
Left one: Fortress. Classic, triple firewall. Unbreakable.
R [this is epic]: Did you try Emacs through Sendmail?
L: Yeah but they let me into a "fake".
R: Exploits?
L: No holes... We need something else.
R: We wish you a pleasant flight.
Damn, you guessed my password!
Table-ized A.I.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2rGTXHvPCQ
I challenge anyone to beat that !
"The Net" and IP address 23.75.345.200
It was just horrible, granted we were clearly not supposed to take one second of it seriously. The hacking parts just made me ill, thevonly thing that got me through them was the promise of a gun fight.
They come in the dark, only in the darkest.
I hadn't heard of a camera like that, so that is interesting. I think if the CSI show was playing that angle, they would have explained it, though. They always like to do the smart tech explaining to the dumb boss scene.
Two people typing at the same time. And pulling the plug on a client computer doing nothing to alleviate the situation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39CRw7zH_2A This has got to be a contender for worst computer scene of all time.
OW, your sample script makes my brain hurt. I wish to option this script immediately and BURN it before Hollywood gets wind of it....
Hi, this is Jerry Bruckheimer, we read your script and we'd like to hire you on as head writer for the newest show in our franchise; CSI Fuvk Ya!
Please wire the money through several shell companies and I need an ironclad guarantee that my real name will not be attached to his project in any way, nor any information about myself, family, or (past, present, future) pets will ever be traced to this project.
In the movie Red Planet there is a an unmanned Russian probe send to explore Mars.
1. The probe has buttons and a graphical user interface, despite being an unmanned probe send to uninhabited planet.
2. The interface has an animated monkey that makes MS Clippy seem logical and useful.
You forgot "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow". The rest is pretty much accurate.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
Sorry, I'm pretty sure that's a pretty close amalgamation of at least half a dozen movies that have already been made.
The maybe most hilarious, most idiotic and most unrealistic scene of film history has to be from a German TV show called "Alert for Cobra 11 - Highway police". It's one of those action shows where the cars are made of C4 and include a built-in ramp in case they hit another car. Go figure.
And yes, I have seen Independence Day. At least ID doesn't try to show the actual attempt at hacking, making it something you could stomach and just ignore it. It goes by fast enough. Not so in Cobra 11, where they go into detail of making a fool out of themselves.
The scene, for your appreciation. For those that can't speak German (I highly doubt any TV network would go through the pain of dubbing this pile of trash), here's a little transcript so you can savour it properly.
Him: It's indeed a russian server.
Her: We could try to hack it. If that works, we get the credentials of Rasputin.
(some more meaningless chatter, then some typing, we see a browser open to "www.rus.net" and a big hand tells us in a browser page that access is denied)
Her: They won't let us in that easily, the server's damn well protected.
Him: Then... let's hack Rasputin's computer directly.
Her: With a backdoor trojan!
Him: Right. We send him a harmless email with our trojan horsie (yes, he says horsie)
Her: That opens a backdoor, and we got access to his computer (smug grin). That's really clever!
(some more typing, some meaningless lines of what could become Javascript if it was written correctly, followed by some more meaningless chatter)
(Big window opens with "you got mail")
Her: I think we got access.
(mail containing something akin to "you now have remote access to rus.net, click link to access" appears)
And so on.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Don't forget the "generic nerd" that Goldblum played. World, er, universe-class hacker, and geek of all trades. The guy could do everything.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
This is pretty fucking awful.
That is indeed the only answer. It also is true for almost any other profession in TV or Movie. Cops, doctors, lawyers, I have friends who have those professions and to each I have at least once commented about something clearly wrong in a movie about their profession and their answer was "Well it is just a movie."
They are movies, not documentaries, so please get a life and perhaps not watch any movies or at least do not moan about these little things. And I am talking about REAL documentaries, not 'based on a true story' type of thing.
And then picking ID4 as an example. There is so much unrealistic stuff going on in that movie that the computer virus is almost the most realistic thing that is going on, yet somehow it all is about the computer virus that is unrealistic.
So again: it is a movie. It is not supposed to be realistic.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Sorry about your keyboard. I just ordered Hackers on NF. I was in my late 20's when that came out and I missed it. Damn I'm feeling old.
Nah just being provocative here. This is not the worst of course - probably the best I've ever seen for showing a computer AI interacting with humans partly because it was so remarkably ahead of its time but also because of the amazing realism of many of the scenes including Dave's chess game with HAL, HAL's eery interest in viewing Dave's drawings, HAL's ability to diagnose whether an electronic circuit board was faulty, and the eventual deconstruction of HAL's brain as Dave takes revenge on the AI gone haywire. Totally brilliant. Made in 1968 this movies still blows virtually all other sci-fi competition out of the water despite the decades of CGI development that have occurred since. The only thing one might criticize in my mind were when HAL kills the hibernating astronauts on board the space ship there is a big sign that lights up saying "LIFE FUNCTIONS TERMINATED". I can understand why Kubrick would have felt the need for something like this for dramatic effect but the sign seems a little cheesy thinking about it - why would there be a big sign like this on board? Who is supposed to be viewing it? The other thing that always bugged me is when HAL boasts about his infallibility and then predicts the circuit failure in the transponder unit with 100% certainty. Instead of going out to retrieve the unit the astronauts could have simply asked HAL what was the basis for his prediction. Might have save themselves a lot of heartache :-)
I was under the age of ten when I saw this but the actors pretending to type while text scrolled up on the screen at a uniform rate is some I still remember (hopefully correctly).
People operating computers with typed commands well into the graphical OS era is a common "bad computer scene".
And people playing video games on a modern system with sound effects date from the early 80's added over the top.
They do think it's just a magic box that does stuff that occasionally leads to free money or the end of the world.
That's odd because sometimes I think of slashdot comments as magic boxes that sometimes lead to something funny or the end of the world. :D
A great movie until the very end, where a single bullet powers a PC off and according to the plot renders all data useless.
Oh yeah, and "Boiler Room" when federal agents ask their informant to back his hard drive up to a single floppy disk so they'll have enough evidence to prosecute.
Google the term "Movie OS" and you'll get a ton of references to this magic box treatment of PCs.
I wonder if House is just as bad if you have a med school diploma...
Almost everything: - Fire/Life Safety systems at the FBI hacked to sound anthrax alarms... - Controlling tollways, traffic signage, cameras, and lighting simultaneously to try to kill Bruce Willis and Justin Long. - Computers that blow up on cue, in the homes of hackers that COULDN'T see a chunk of C4 in the drive bays. All done by half a dozen "hackers" in a 60 foot-long truck meandering through the streets of Washington without any police intervention Oh, and the "LoJack" still works when the FBI agents track down the hackers, even though all of the infrastructure was allegedly destroyed.
The whole movie was pure horror. I can't even name a single scene that was not stupid. (Don't worry about spoilers, the movie is so bad, you don't lose anything) The evil computer is of course able to do all kinds of magic tricks, like severing overhead power lines which then fall down and grill a guy running beneath them. (Why he ran and didn't just walk to his car and drive away is totally beyond me, just a sidenote for those who have actually watched that crap) Of course, the computer can only be accessed with the DNA of one guy and nobody else can do anything. That guy is dead but hey, he has a twin(!) The twin then stops the computer by ramming a rod in the eagly eye, an eye shaped "monitor". (Yeah, that totally does it). He grabs a gun, runs in the White House, jumps on a desk and shoots in the air to stop the assassination of the presidend. After he has given a couple of shots, security reacts... I name this the worst KI movie ever, hell, it even stands a chance for most unrealistic movie ever...
I had to throw something new in here since all the good stuff was taken. That said... Superfriends made from the late 60s to the late 80s off and on (I could be a tad off on the years) showed us a mighty supercomputer in the Hall of Justice with a wall size flat looking screen that could video conference with World Leaders, local mayors and the Wonder Twins but when asked to help them solve a problem (voice activated by the way), it would produce answers on paper!? It had lots of glowy twinkly lights to show it was working too. Granted, this show was for younger kids...
We can also drift back to yesteryear; back to a time when computers could talk to us through voice synthesizers even over a piddly-ant analog modem and they had names...like Joshua. Back to the 1980s when War Games was the movie and the fake scene was that a top secret base administrator would allow a teenager to hack around on a system when a nuclear war was about to be initiated. That's kid's arse would be in the brig and under lock, key and armed guard. None of this "Let him try" crap. There's also that movie that parodies Microsoft and has 3 kids who started a little open source startup and their top developer gets seduced by the big bad microsoft like company before realizing at the end that he was being used. It's way too late and I can't remember the name but oh boy was that movie full of techno-crap. It was fun to see them bash "Microsoft" though.
...quicker, easier, more seductive the darkside is...but more powerful, it is not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ridiculous... though I admit, I fantasized about that computer.
The Admin and the Engineer
I once read a book, where i had to read:
then she started her pc and after a short while she saw the Unix 6 Prompt:
c:\
Cowboy Bebop who is always at his computer.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I cringe everytime I see the 'futuristic' interfaces. These interfaces usually involve huge amounts of 'visual muck', and it does not seem that they would convey any information but just are present to create the illusion of information.
The entire premise of this movie was garbage. The whole idea of a website that can't be shut down is ridiculous. If the government wanted to shut down a website right now, it would be done. Even if it was overseas, they could stop routing local traffic to it.
They could also poison routes on the off chance that they couldn't get the DNS servers, or local ISP to pull the plug on the guy.
the suspension of disbelief that is required to carry this movie is just beyond the pale.
I think that's just the prop people's idea of the Internet version of a 555 phone number. You want them to use a 192.168.0.0 instead?
Most of the postings relate to Baffle 'em with Bullshit, making the equipment or the operator seem highly advanced or skilled in order to suit the plot or story line. These are movies and are meant to be an escape, not a reflection of reality (I agree those scenes can be hard to stomach). My favorite bad computer scene comes from many years ago. Two teanagers were reading instructions, attempting to use a PC for some sort of data access. They were supposed to press the F12 key but in a very drawn-out fashion pressed f, then 1, then 2. Ouch.
Every movie when there's a scene of someone getting a giant, flashy, mind-boggling "Access Denied" alert.
Honourable mention to Independence Day, of course... (and many more when there's a "hacker" "hacking".)
But truth be told, whenever a computer screen is shown in a movie there is something to cringe at. Improbable interfaces, random jargon terms, impossible "image enhancements", there's plenty of choice.
One for connoisseurs: Battle Royale. There's a scene where a young "hacker" frantically pounds at the keyboard (on a seemingly normal text editor by the way) and you see thousands of lines of what's apparently C code scroll on the screen, being literally bornn under his fingers. Never, ever does he hit backspace, or even take a look at what he's typing. When he's finished he launches the "program" and of course it blows the entire island's security system for good. Priceless.
Mostly harmless.
I might be wrong but I think I've seen that film...
Untraceable was pretty accurate. Or, at least, not totally wrong...
Maybe you are all too young to remember this show. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automan http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ScJ9ZOQlfs
Wow. Word for word an exact rendition of the scene in swordfish...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
Were they using V5, or was it still V4.01 then?
(The Horror!!!)
If it were Forth it would be "security all Override"
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Every movie where someone interacts with a computer... ...and their face appears to be lit up with a *projection* of the screen image !!
LOL.
Now THAT is funny. Please comment more often.
In Independence Day, my common sense is always calmed by assuming that the easiest way to crash a large, complex computer network is to attempt to connect Jeff Goldblum's Mac to it. Who needs a virus?
War Games nonsense (a small sample): 1) Lightman's computer has the same speech synthesizer as NORAD's. 2) WOPR can figure out a password (launch code) one character at a time.
Superman nonsense:No computer has ever been able to understand the concept of a 2D coordinate, until Richard Pryor taught it.
In all 3 CSIs they amost never show anyone using a mouse. They also show "computerized" devices that don't exist, such as a lazer brain scan display. mass spectrometers and DNA analyzers that print out results in seconds, a computer table that can instantly connect to/analyze/scan any electronic device instantly etc...
But then TV/Movies are not reality or anything even remotley resembling it.
BTW Hackers is a good movie despite its totally unrealistic shots of what is on the computer screen when they are "hacking".
2) WOPR can figure out a password (launch code) one character at a time.
I was once responsible for acceptance testing of a particular system, and discovered that it rejected a password as soon as a single incorrect character was entered. Because the specifier (not me) hadn't specified the password behavior precisely that was compliant with the spec, and passed the official acceptance tests, so we were forced to accept it. So that bit was plausible (well, at least as far as system development and acceptance -- deployment might be a different matter.)
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
"Hot chick: Really! So it's going to take you like two days to hack the NSA Excel 4-train database. Are you using the Bernoulli quadratic equation?"
I think I've just cum.
According to Smallville, you can hack into any military computer with a click of a mouse.
Any scene with some chick balling her eyes out because we have been hood-winked into feeling sorry for her plight based on some stupid thing that she has done or some terrible injustice that has befallen her. Viz: All movies with Julia Roberts.
*** Don't be dull.***
Not TV or a movie, but nonetheless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDFXaqDf8kk
From a movie "Untraceable". The entire idea that they cannot find where the web server is located but they seem to be able to visit the website and see "live streaming" content and couldn't figure out a way to shut it down. Really? Also they "he hacked my car" really cracked me up.
As far as TV shows go "Bones" that Angela Character must have one incredibly powerful computer with some really wicked software to be able to pull off what she does in an hour or two. I mean wow recreating full rendered 3D mock-up movies and be able to flip things around on the fly I mean damn I want that computer.
Independence Day is far up on the list, but there are far too many to chose from.
Latest example: Yesterday I saw the second episode of the new Hawaii 5-0, where some guy invents a piece of software that can crack every existing encryption. That's next to impossible, but even when we take that as a given, how the hell should such a program enable you to break into every system in no time?
And what I don't understand till today: why they so often (in non-SciFi) stupidly make up a ridiculous GUI instead of using an existing one. Like when some protagonist copies files to his USB stick, why doesn't he use Windows Explorer/Nautilus/Dolphin/Finder/Midnight Commander/whatever?
In the Ironmen cave scene, the Afghan terrorists are speaking HUNGARIAN!!! (and even that with a stupid accent and grammar).
Disclaimer:
Hungary is in Central Europe, about 3000 km from Afghanistan, and we don't have anything to do with arabs terrorism. Please don't bomb us. Thanks.
The Hungarian people
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6mt5zVa-E8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqi0DwNLJdM
OMG if Cloe says socket one more time I'll scream!!!!!!!
> Lightman's computer has the same speech synthesizer as NORAD's.
Back then everyone used the same TI chip for speech synthesizers, so that's not much of a stretch. Anyway the speech synthesizer is just a useful gadget to avoid getting the actors to read the screen aloud constantly.
Yeah, that was so fail. They should've called it Swordfail. lol. Or Failfish. Or Epic Swordfailfish. Rofl. It certainly wasn't made of win. Otherwise they could call it Swordwin. But it was fail. It was the failest fail that ever failed. Like double fail to the power fail. woot. So much fail in that fail movie with a fail plot that fail fail fail fail fail epic fail epic epic fail fail fail.
Yes, I am mocking your overuse and misuse of the word. Stop it.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
We all know cats can't type.
http://superman.wikia.com/wiki/Gus_Gorman
The movie Untracable (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0880578/) is one of the worst pieces for me. I don't remember a lot, but I'll always remember the line:
"He hacked my car, I can't drive and the doors won't open!"
There's a million reasons why this can't happen (software influences hardware without a connection between them, general safety,... are the first examples that pop into my mind), I'll let you think of your own reasons why to hate this line of movie dialog. I'm sure you can come up with a couple more.
I still love watching the Movie Aliens but what I still find funny is that Mother can understand the spoken word but is unable to perform text to speech which is the trivial part of the verbal communication between man and machine.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
To be fair, CSI also does this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uoM5kfZIQ0
Which is so far absurd that it's not even fu... no, it's fucking hilarious.
A short scene where the scientist at Area 51 said our microprocessor tech largely came from examining the computers on board the crashed Alien spacecraft.
Let's not forget Jack Bauer here: Jack: Chloe, I need access.. Chloe: Okay, get to your terminal, I'll open up a socket!
If this post has multiple meanings, and one of those pisses you off, I meant the other one.
Where do we begin? Awesome despite the awful, but deserving of mention.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I think that the movie Hackers has planty of such scenes.
The color scheme that says, "I'm a cool hacker! Look at how cool I am."
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
The trailer for Transformers 3 shows the Apollo astronauts landing, then Cronkite announcing that they're going into radio silence, as though if the moon landing site had rotated away from the Earth. In reality, as we know, and as they were careful to explain at the time, the moon is tidally locked, so the astronauts, once they landed, would never go out of radio contact. The Cronkite audio refers to the orbiter going out of contact.
This pisses me off a) because it's stupid, and b) because the idea of humans landing on the moon is now so far-fetched that they can make a movie about it with total disregard for simple facts.
We used to be awesome, extending our reach into space. Now we sit back and spend millions on fake space spectacles, allow the already rich to steal billions, and spend trillions on useless wars, but we spend next to nothing on real space travel.
That image must have been taken with the standard 400,000 x 300,000 pixel security camera frequently used in cop shows.
But one of the knobs on the TI let you adjust frequency from low (male voice) to high (female voice). In War Games they were all set the same.
Hackers...all of it.
"Hack the world."
"We've got enough c4 to blow up 10 supercomputers!"
That line sums up the technical understanding of most of the terminator movies.
I never heard a Speak and Spell with a female voice :)
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/f2i7t/ive_written_for_tv_shows_like_csi_and_numbers/
here's a list of great cringeworthy scenes (top comment)
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/g041n/ncis_technical_writers_hard_at_work_trolling_pc/
I was always impressed with the way the computer blew up when things got hairy.
where the cracker spent weeks researching the private life of a system developer to try to work out what he might have used as a back-door password.
That's offensive, you can just call us white people.
Anything that started with 10. would hide better.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFFMRXGjfNI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYdpOjletnc
It's a pretty sweet film but they're running worms and virus' on ancient laptops and the screen looks like a winamp visualisation or something!
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
All of the investigation shows on TV are horrible with technology, but NCIS takes the cake.
Their answer to every thing: Hack their internets!
When stuff really hits the fan then they get their top two "hackers" Abby + McGee to type on the same keyboard at the same time (they have done this in 2 separate seasons). How does this make it past anyone? How does it make it past everyone? Apparently none of the actors or other people involved in production realize how retarded that is.
"The virus is eating through the mainframe!"
Any movie that gets Halle Berry in her underwear can't be all bad.
Tim 'n Abby's greatest hits include "IDEA" which can be cracked in mere minutes by arm-waving.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
This is a tough one for me. Usually by the time I notice the 2nd or 3rd annoying bad scene I hit the stop button on my ROKU and move onto a movie whose writers have managed to cleared up their pimples.
Trying to say that Hollyweird can't get computer scenes right in movies is like saying "No Way an alien baby comes to earth, becomes Superman from our sun rays effect on his alien DNA and flies around saving random losers and defeating even more random even more loserish bad guys". Its like saying 'No Way can Jackie Chan hang out of a bus, while running his legs along a slower bus, the punching bad guys with his free hand". And its like thinking 'That's odd, there is no way a guy can forge a bullet proof suit in a cave that is functional, AND infuse it with energy from a little disc he welded himself from munitions parts."
Sorry nerdworld, Hollywood has done to the computer what Hollywood has done to EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. And I am one nerd, with poor spelling and grammar, that is thankful for that. Imagine the lul in movie action while they try to move the plot forward using real graphics and real 3 tap point encryption logarithms being worked out by a dude with a raster for 20 minutes.
There was an early episode of SG-1 that inverted this trope.
Daniel: "Senator, we have reason to believe the Goa'uld are about to land and attack on ships."
Kinsey: "Then I think they'll regret taking on the United States military!"
O'Neill: "Oh, for God's sake..."
Daniel: "Oh, you're right. We'll just upload a virus into the mother ship."
Of course they have a magic ring that lets them travel to other planets so we have to put up from QQing from overly precious physicists instead of pompous compscis/IT professionals/etc.
So, ..., just to be clear. What's going on in my computer is a bunch of different things, including
* Groups of three security programs are competing with groups of three user-supplied programs in some sort of 2-dimensional, rectilinear motion simulator to see who gets deleted?
* A laser can either (1) freeze time so someone doesn't "melt" as you digitize them or (2) in an absurdly short amount of time observe enough state information about someone to produce an accurate mental state and body map in some "computer-scape"?
* The Medieval habit of identifying rank with hats is going on in my computer?
* Changing which programs a program interacts with is accomplished by slow processes, like walking, running, or flying about on solar sail simulations.
* Programs make programs kill programs for the amusement of other programs.
* Bits talk. But they're not great conversationalists. But they know in some detail how complex skills (e.g. Recognizer piloting) should be performed.
* Security programs fly around in big, red, stompy things (Recognizers).
* The computer-scape is rendered vector, except for the programs, which are rastered in.
* A user's avatar can take impossible actions.
* The MCP is destroyed by any program placing its definition (it's "disc") at a certain place in the MCP's avatar. Apparently this holds for my best buddy NOP as well.
* Programs must actively defend themselves from spider attacks. (Someone should warn the webservers about the search engines...)
Meh.
Sure, there are other media that mis-represent what computers do and how computers work. But TRON was guaranteed to confuse anyone who saw it.
And, sure, there are instances where anyone with half a clue would whip up a script. (Pet example: CSI: LV -- finger print databases are searched one at a time by having the user click the "check that one now" button. 'cause, you know, no one would ever make the "click each of these buttons in order" macro.)
(Of course, I have a deeper complaint about the science in CSI. Simple example: GC runs on uncharacterized samples can not take seconds.)
What movie is it where Arnold Schwarzenegger (I think) takes out CDs from 5.25" floppy drives? I watched that and didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
the feds tell the main character to back up his entire c: drive to floppy. they show him doing it and it all fits onto one 3.5" floppy. that must have been one super high density floppy disk.
lose != loose
The worst has to be hackers with Angelina Jolie where they computers and networks through sort of surfing cyberspace and the gui they used just showed random files and equations floating around.
For those that are in the UK, they may recall a few years ago now a terrible series called "Killer Net", about a game that was played online, where the user in this show was deciding how to bump off people in "the game", except it wasn't a game, they were really getting bumped off.
Not bad enough for a plot? Well, they had FULL frame FULL frame-rate video and high quality audio, all being delivered over a crappy 28k analogue modem.
Killer Net.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I wonder why it makes you wonder about the worst IT in film history. I personally really enjoyed the narrated part of the movie and what was said there sounded logical use of simple tools to data-mine a few lame-written public school pages.
To answer your question: all the graphical hacking/cracking scenes in Hackers, Swordfish, and the mentioned Independence Day are some of the lamest I seem to remember.
Even though I am a William Gibson fan, I would add Johnny Mnemonic's final hacking scene, with the digital Johnny copying himself, while swimming along the dolphin (Jones) in the matrix. While it depicted a virtual world that might exists at one point, the "hacking" would probably go a different route even in graphical/avatar UIs of the future.
When you have a crap keyboard such as a membrane or chiclet pad, that bleep replaces the usual tactile feedback you'd get from a non-crap keyboard that your keypress has registered and you can go on to the next one.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Every computer scene in chuck. Also diehard 4 (triggering c4 with a virus WTF!) and all of swordfish.
Sounds like a scene from Die Hard 4...
(the film that had people blowing up computers by sending them viruses)
It totally doesn't take that long to save a file to disk when trying to sneak out of the office....
I beleive you have my stapler.
Gotta be in the top 10 worst.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
The Net, Sandra Bullock, is a candidate, Mission Impossible, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, etc, etc ...
They all have problems, generally glaring. I still enjoy watching them. It just takes "willing suspension of disbelief".
The Andromeda Strain, 1971, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qEsqjJAY-k, has a scene where scientists are simulating the growth of a foreign living substance, the Andromeda Strain. The substance grows exponentially and the computer "blows up" trying to keep up with the high speed growth. The computer's console device was a TTY. Although most computers in those days had TTY consoles, it is funny to see scientists entering in commands on the TTY. Of course, the TTY lives on as the standard input device in Unix. etc. operating systems. We just don't have a physical TTY in front of us any more. In those days hardly anyone was exposed to computers and movies' depictions of the giant machines usually had operators wearing lab coats and carrying clipboards.
Real life example of this -
Richard Feyman. He guessed the passwords locks on the filing cabinets containing Nuclear Secrets at Los Alamos by guessing what number sequences the other Nuclear Physicists were likely to use.
Surprising he was never accused of treason. He even used to borrow the Russian spy Klaus Fuchs car at the time.
No kidding. I can't believe that in this day and age when computers are ubiquitous that Hollywood is still treating them like semi-magic boxes.How many people are left in the US that still think that programmers do all their coding on multiple screes with nothing but spinning 3D graphics. This is especially prevalent when someone is "hacking" into a "secure" system. Half the time they show someone manipulating a strand of DNA and are just mashing together what a four year old kid would say that heard a parent talking about computers. Something like:
[Picture the monitor showing a fractal spinning on the screen with shiny spheres flying around and attaching to it randomly with techno music in the background]
Hacker guy: The firewall has 7337 -bit encryption. That's more options than there are atoms in a car
Hot chick: Really! So it's going to take you like two days to hack the NSA Excel 4-train database. Are you using the Bernoulli quadratic equation?
Hacker guy: No, I'm already past the firewall. I dropped in a logic bomb and spammed the secure email SQL server with a hydra worm.
Bad guy: Wow, it took Linus 14 hours on a Cray XMP Beowulf cluster linked to a direct fiber-channel modulator to do what you did in 17 seconds.
Hacker guy: Yeah, I know. Just think how much faster I could have done it if you hadn't shot my best friend five minutes ago, didn't have a knife in my back, and I didn't have to power the mainframe with this hamster wheel.
Bad guy: It'll all be over soon. Once you get the launch codes for the neutron bomb from the ZX81 RAM pack.
That is too funny and so true at the same time! Hollywood thinks that a string of techno-babble will not be noticed!
The people that write the screenplays for early Science fiction movies had good intentions, and some good stories,and very bad special effects! :-)
Remember the rocket ships that had sparklers out the back with smoke "Rising" in a vacuum?
Not everyone has a good understanding of computers, and any old techno babble will fill in the blanks.
Is this Good? No.
Understandable? Yes.
Silly? Absolutely!
Entertaining? Depends on you!
A technically accurate movie would be tedious, some leeway should be granted for artistic license and story line and progression. The 1% of the population that really understands the workings of computers can complain all they wish about the inaccuracies, but this for the most part doesn't really matter except as a vehicle for making themselves feel superior to the other 99% of us. Reminds me of the people searching for contrails in an old John Wayne movie.
paraphrasing Michael Scott
'look, all I'm saying is that in Die Hard one Bruce Willis was just a normal guy that wandered into a bad situation....later on, he's jumping motorcycles over helicopters'
In one episode of the six million dollar man, our hero is tasked to steal software.
So he sneaks in to the machine room, reaches in to his shirt pocket, and pulls out.... ........... a screwdriver!!!
(Cut to commercial!)
There was one scene in TV show La Femme Nikita, where tech guy is talking over phone to a agent on the place where is some computer that is running some bad program that needed to be stopped. He asks for output of 'top' command and told him to type 'kill -9 ID of process that was unknown to him'. That part was really great and it was late 90's.
My personal choice might seem a bit odd, but I'm going to go with The Insider, Michael Mann's movie about the big tobacco whistleblower. For the most part, the movie is a very credible, down-to-earth drama. But midway through there's a bit where the wife goes downstairs where the computer is, and without warning (or user input) an email delivers and opens itself, playing a big red animation that goes WOMP WOMP WOMP WE'RE GONNA KILL YOU WOMP WOMP WOMP. I expect stupid shit from movies like Hackers or The Net. Ridiculous computer-magic just comes with the territory. But when it comes out of left field in a movie with plenty of verisimilitude otherwise, it's especially annoying.
Good job! LMAO! The late lamented show "VIP" (yes, Pamela Anderson's) had many such scenes.
They were uploading from a Palm to something else but it was clearly the Palm that was being downloaded to. If they had only said downloading instead.
However nothing would have saved that scene where you cannot be in contact with the ground for over x of a second. Even doing backflips you would exceed the time limits.
Almost all Hollywood's creatives use Macs it is no wonder they come up with this crap!
Every time Angela visualizes data of any kind on a computer, I black out and I see Trotsky with an icepick through his head. "But if we rearrange the bullet fragments with this slick little animation and custom UI I created while hacking the email account of the serial murder rapist grocery shopping homosexual xenophobic cannibal that I dated back in Art school where I got my bachelor's in fine art with an emphasis on kernel hacking and designing interfaces using classic mediums, you can see that the victim was actually killed by someone completely different. Hodgins, you like slime and bugs that make you such a nerd."
No kidding. I can't believe that in this day and age when computers are ubiquitous that Hollywood is still treating them like semi-magic boxes.How many people are left in the US that still think that programmers do all their coding on multiple screes with nothing but spinning 3D graphics. This is especially prevalent when someone is "hacking" into a "secure" system. Half the time they show someone manipulating a strand of DNA and are just mashing together what a four year old kid would say that heard a parent talking about computers.
This is because movies are supposed to be watched by the general public. And by that i mean people with little or no background in computers (especially security systems). Remember that in a movie you have to show something for a little period of time (3-5 seconds) that catches attention and gives a clue about what's going on (like a 3d graphic showing the security override progress).
On topic: Independence day, where they "hack" the alien ship is definitively the best!
While I loved the action and plot of Swordfish (Travolta/Jackman/Berry), I can't help but absolutely detest the stupidity of the scene where Jackman is "coding" (vomit) his Hydra virus. His over-the-top flamboyant actions and chair-spinning made me want to scream "Programming - You're not doing it right ... oh and you're making people like me look like mentally handicapped chimpanzees on speed!" :(
When a guy hacks the military's top encryption and accesses scure facilities with box with an old school display just be pressing the go button, you have to laugh. And then cry.
I am not saying I don't like the series, just that the IT in it is woeful.
When he is putting together his "worm" by assembling 3d block on a 4 monitor set up, cue montage music and Hugh Jackman sweating :D
http://xkcd.com/683/
One of my favorites. Yes I cringe when ever I watch CSI and NCIS. Worse is that the popularity of those shows has influenced other shows, older and newer to implement the same techno-magic jackassary.
I basically just grind my teeth and roll my eyes when ever I see anything now even slightly technology related.
Also while not exactly computers, the worst abuse of technology related BS I think was in Will Smiths's masterpiece "Enemy of the State". As someone who works in GIS, the whole satellite tracking stuff made me laugh.
Well I find it odd and strange that in a forum talking about worst movies and computers I have yet heard no one suggest Johnny Mnemonic, I mean it has Keanu Reeves in it! The whole VR thing, with the Nintendo power glove and all that I remember as being pretty silly. It also had Ice T and Henry Rollins in it!
Also a dolphin hacks stuff.
Anyway I don't remember it all that well, but it is just old enough that it probably had some pretty unrealistic technological screens and techobabble.
Hey that sounds pretty good. You've got a career in Hollywood. The only thing stopping you is dignity.
Does nobody else remember this from The Office:
Pam: "I’m failing my computer class."
Jim: “I thought you were good at Flash?”
Pam: “I was. But then they switched to Acrobat just as I was learning Quark. I hate computers.”
Scenes like the virus one in Independence Day are at least believable enough that my dad doesn't think twice about it. Even he knows that dialog from The Office was BS.
"Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life" [vhemt.org]
I'll nominate Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. R2D2 mistakes a power port in the flying city for a data port. Droid blows smoke, tosses a fit, then plugs into data port shortly thereafter. BS.
One of my favorite gaffes was in a TV show called "The Pretender". The geek in the story was always hacking into the Center's database to find out information about Jared, the main character. One time he exclaimed, "Woah! According to this database this building has a whole unrecorded level." When the cameras pan to the screen, it is a ls -al directory listing in a terminal window. I mean, give them props for using *nix on the show, but c'mon!
I wish I could agree, but I actually see people talking to their computer all the time. Much like the people that tell you their "computer is sick" (assuming you are an IT person, you probably hear it a lot).
Sure no cyborgs, and we're still working on ED209, but back in 1987 Robocop had:
- computer interfaces that resembled web sites
- a device for tracking Robocop that looks suspiciously like a smartphone
- digital video recording, as well as DVDs (didn't exist until '93)
seslidunya
Plus:
- stupidly oversized cars that wasted gas (6000 SUX)
sesli chat
- ultraviolent games for the whole family (Nukem!)
- Ford Taurus police cars (back when Crown Victorias were standard issue, they looked very "futuristic")
- ads for medical services (unheard of in '87)
- privatized police, military, prisons, and spacecraft
- and autoflush urinals!
I'll let Penny Arcade give you a short overview: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/7/16/
I don't understand the whole ip camera thing. Coulld'nt the police have just run a search over their wifi routers to locate a camera device and looked in the vicinity of the router?
In the Redstar mainframe, we are told that the floor of the vault will trigger the alarm if it receives more than 0.25 seconds of contact (apparently even with the security checks). What would be the point of the bosses going through all of those security measures if they would just set the alarm off anyway? Surely once the girls have faked the fingerprint and retina scans, they don't then need to flip across the floor!
The computer could not count the contact with the floor because one of them flipping across the floor and would have been in contact the requisite .25 seconds.
When they are using the Palm the Palm is being downloaded to but they say that they are uploading to the other device.