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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
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The usenet grep scene. *shudder*
Burns: We're building a casino!
McAllister: Arrr. Give me 5 minutes.
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!
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".
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!
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.
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.
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.
or best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU
You forgot that she had to open a socket first.
They always had to open a socket.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
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?
"Greetings Professor Falken"
need i say more? WarGames is probably the most cheezy movie of them all.
You shut your whore mouth!
Seriously, though, Wargames was probably the most accurate cracking movie ever made. Instead of "creating a GUI in Visual Basic and tracking an IP address" a la CSI: Braindead, the main character actually spent weeks poring over information about the creator of the system to try to work out how it was designed and what the likely methods would be to gain entrance. He also used social engineering techniques to gather information about his targets.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
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 opening of a socket was implied as we all all know you can't do anything unless you do that first, I know I always open a socket before I do anything at work, even getting a coffee!
I just like how computers in general seem to be packed with either explosives or 5 megawatts of power in pretty much every sci-fi movie. Star Trek is one of the worst offenders for this. "Oh no, the computer is overloaded! *bzzzt, boom*" If I blew up a PC everytime it got stuck in a logic loop I'd be typing with hooks by now.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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...
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
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
The best part was that it was done with one of those giant acoustically coupled phone modems.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
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.
you mean like this one? (this is from Red Dwarf - Back to Earth, their "Picture Zoom" sketch).
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.
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!
Actually, that's the perfect password. Nobody would ever suspect it.
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?
What makes Sneakers enjoyable for me (other than Dan Aykroyd underplaying it this time, well done) is you have two very close buddies, one gets caught and becomes evil and rich after prison, the other hasn't changed, and the climax is all Temptation of Christ-like: Ben Kingsley asks Redford to join him.
I think it's a metaphor for our generation, given the key to the untold wealth of the global (tech) kingdom, which would you choose? Transfer funds from the budget of the Bureau of Firearms Alcohol and Tobacco (iirc) towards the Campaign for the legalization of marijuana. Heck that's MY hero. Suspend your disbelief on this one, and grab the popcorn.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Also, all modern x86 processors have a relatively-simple (RISC-like) processor sitting behind a programmable instruction decoder. x86 hasn't been implemented directly in hardware for at least a decade now... it's too complex and badly-designed.
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
They should've had some comments in the code then. "/* I know this is a kludge but a case insensitive match on SARAH is good enough for now. */"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Thorny: "Enhance."
*tickatickaticka*
Thorny: "Enhance."
*tickatickaticka*
Thorny: "Enhance."
*tickatickaticka*
Thorny: "Enhance."
*tick...tick...*
O''Hagan: "JUST PRINT THE DAMN THING!"
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...
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 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
Halle Berry, with a gun, and not much else. Makes up for a hell of a lot of plot holes.
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
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
Great point on the social engineering. In fact, there were SEVERAL different examples of social engineering, poor password security, and so on that I'm surprised more movies don't make use of it. Heck, didn't Ferris Bueller's day off have him using social engineering to get passwords in much the same manner? People don't call it a 'hacking' scene as "finding what some dumbass wrote down" or "pretending to be someone else" don't seem as magical, I guess, but we've seen countless examples of it being effective.
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.
Pre80s was the era where is something when wrong, the computer shot out sparks!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
There's no way anyone could ever use a hair dryer that big.
~X~
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.
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.
Just to pick up on the fingerprint system idea, they don't make that blip as they search through every file (and good grief am I glad about that). We can get a ping on a hit if we want, as in just about any other software for doing anything ever, but the search gets shifted to my / one of my colleagues screens then anyway, so there's not really much point unless your "afk".
Not a "CSI" btw, just a lowly fingerprint tech, £16k a year if your curious.
It's quite interesting that the blipping in films / tv programs is essentially acceptable and useful as a tool to convey an edgy tech setup. I wonder what will denote this in the future.
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!
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.
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
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.
"The Net" and IP address 23.75.345.200
That image must have been taken with the standard 400,000 x 300,000 pixel security camera frequently used in cop shows.