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I think its a bit more than that. The hacking is realistic, because its more than just Mad-Libbed in. When writing shows like Star Trek, writers often put thin
by dexwiz 10y ago
I think its a bit more than that. The hacking is realistic, because its more than just Mad-Libbed in.
When writing shows like Star Trek, writers often put things like Insert Technobabble Here into the first draft of the script, and it gets filled in with Reverse Tachyon Inductors later. This works for SciFi, since any explanation can be RetConned. But its glaringly obvious when done with real tech. The tech terms and snippets are more than just buzzwords dropped into a middle of the sentence. They are clearly defined plot devices with real world meaning.
- jonathankoren 10y agoIt's a unix system. I know this.
- dexwiz 10y agoThat particular example seems so strange. The first half of the movie seems believable: long debug/compile times, never shut down the mainframe, disgruntled employee ineptly tries corporate espionage. Then we get that atrocity of a file explorer.
- thoth 10y agoThat scene did seem out of place, and I'm not sure how useful a 3D file explorer is, but fsn was a real (experimental) product for IRIX systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn edit: fsn is lowercase
- bduerst 10y agoIt could be they were intentionally trying to make the IT look bad. From what I remember about the book, the dinosaur motion-tracking system was programmed to only find N dinosaurs each day because there was no reason for there to be more dinosaurs. It's why the dinos were able to breed undetected, because even though they were being picked up, the system only looked for N dinosaurs.
- jonathankoren 10y ago> It could be they were intentionally trying to make the IT look bad. Or... Film is a visual medium, and so things have to look gee-wizy, because light grey text on a little black window looks incredibly boring. Have you you not seen a movie featuring computers in the last 35 years? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe6gGUR3Ga4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe6gGUR3Ga4
- caf 10y agoFilmmakers can probably get away with light grey text on a black window much easier now, because it's now so far from most filmgoers' everyday experience of computing. Whereas in the time of Jurassic Park, the DOS command line was not at all exotic.
- pivo 10y agoSaw that movie with a large group of ThinkingMachines employees. We'd rented out the theater for one of the first showings, since they'd used a ThinkingMachine CM-5 supercomputer instead of a Cray because Cray wouldn't loan them one of theirs. Anyway that line got a huge reaction of cheering and applause, bigger than any other during the movie.
- orionblastar 10y agoIn Star Trek I don't know why they don't use fuses and circuit breakers so nobody dies if a panel explodes, if it overloaded it would just break the fuse or circuit breaker if the enemy fired at them causing a surge or whatever.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- krapp 10y agoWell, the real answer is because it's a cheap way to make "people sitting looking at computers" seem exciting and dangerous. I think the in universe answer is that everything uses plasma or something.
- orionblastar 10y agoIn the future with Star Trek, they should have quantum computers using fiber optic wires that are harder to hack because intercepting data changes it and the receiver will know it was tampered with. Kirk and company basically had a Siri they could talk to and it would do things. "Computer show me yesterday's video log on the bridge at 3:32 PM" or whatever.