...what kind of gun would he have been shot with had today's technology been around? Certainly not one that was "relatively impotent compared to the firepower now on the streets today."
The original home video game system, the Atari 2600, has an interesting feature, now known as "frying," that could cause just about any game to produce undocumented game play. Usually it was something silly like garbled graphics or messed up sound effects, but every once in a while it would produce an interesting spin on the game. For example, in Space Invaders, the player's cannon could fire only one shot at a time, but frying the game would allow two shots. Outlaw produced new game variations not mentioned in the instruction manual. Yars' Revenge made the game extra challenging by making the player black, the same color as the background. And so on.
I'll admit I haven't seen all the movies in this list, but given what I have seen, and given how he's described them, the only one I can really agree with is #1, Firewall.
WarGames is disqualified automatically by the author's own rules: it's science fiction! Joshua was supposed to be the pinnacle of AI, having learned far more than even its current maintainers have realized.
As for Jurassic Park (which, incidentally, is also science fiction, but we'll let that slide), his complaint about the 10-year-old Unix geek is really reaching. Since when have movies not been full of child prodigies? And what does that have to do with how the technology itself is being portrayed?
A good bit of the rest of the list seems to nitpick the characters' talents, which, while often implausible, are not outright impossible. There are a whole crop of much better examples out there. Here are just a few off the top of my head:
The Net: Great movie in my humble-and-not-widely-shared opinion, but the idea of Castle Wolfenstein 3D being the "latest gaming craze" in 1995 was laughable. And remember that IP address?
Enemy of the State: This movie is good enough to forgive the latitude/longitute coordinates that are not as accurate as the movie would have people believe, but the ability to make 3-D models based on a single security camera's grainy video feed had me rolling in the aisle.
Disclosure: Wow, voice recognition, virtual reality, and AI helpers have really come a long way! Wait, no they haven't, at least not when the year is still 1994. You can arguably file those away under "science fiction," but all the buzz words that were indiscriminantly thrown about didn't help matters any.
I just watched this again yesterday. This was a unique and hilarious piece of animation that George Lucas took under his wing back in the early 80s. A must-see for every animation fan. Featured the voice of Lorenzo "Garfield" Music.
Slashdot Mirror
Objects In Universe Are Closer Than They Appear
ALFVEN!!!
So what happens if the device detects so much stress that it determines the only way to make you relax is to kill you? "RUN, ATREYU! RUN!!"
Which is why I added "around these parts." ;)
Even without being a grammar nazi, "beaucoup expensive" is completely incorrect.
Yo, grammar nazi, see the quotation marks? That's not the writer's words; it's a quote from the woman the article is about.
"beaucoup" is more of a Cajun slang word than an actual French word anyway, at least around these parts.
...what kind of gun would he have been shot with had today's technology been around? Certainly not one that was "relatively impotent compared to the firepower now on the streets today."
The original home video game system, the Atari 2600, has an interesting feature, now known as "frying," that could cause just about any game to produce undocumented game play. Usually it was something silly like garbled graphics or messed up sound effects, but every once in a while it would produce an interesting spin on the game. For example, in Space Invaders, the player's cannon could fire only one shot at a time, but frying the game would allow two shots. Outlaw produced new game variations not mentioned in the instruction manual. Yars' Revenge made the game extra challenging by making the player black, the same color as the background. And so on.
I can't believe no-one has mentioned the belly-flop "bug" in Joust yet. That's my favorite bug-as-feature!
I'll admit I haven't seen all the movies in this list, but given what I have seen, and given how he's described them, the only one I can really agree with is #1, Firewall.
WarGames is disqualified automatically by the author's own rules: it's science fiction! Joshua was supposed to be the pinnacle of AI, having learned far more than even its current maintainers have realized.
As for Jurassic Park (which, incidentally, is also science fiction, but we'll let that slide), his complaint about the 10-year-old Unix geek is really reaching. Since when have movies not been full of child prodigies? And what does that have to do with how the technology itself is being portrayed?
A good bit of the rest of the list seems to nitpick the characters' talents, which, while often implausible, are not outright impossible. There are a whole crop of much better examples out there. Here are just a few off the top of my head:
The Net: Great movie in my humble-and-not-widely-shared opinion, but the idea of Castle Wolfenstein 3D being the "latest gaming craze" in 1995 was laughable. And remember that IP address?
Enemy of the State: This movie is good enough to forgive the latitude/longitute coordinates that are not as accurate as the movie would have people believe, but the ability to make 3-D models based on a single security camera's grainy video feed had me rolling in the aisle.
Disclosure: Wow, voice recognition, virtual reality, and AI helpers have really come a long way! Wait, no they haven't, at least not when the year is still 1994. You can arguably file those away under "science fiction," but all the buzz words that were indiscriminantly thrown about didn't help matters any.
I just watched this again yesterday. This was a unique and hilarious piece of animation that George Lucas took under his wing back in the early 80s. A must-see for every animation fan. Featured the voice of Lorenzo "Garfield" Music.