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What I love most is seeing how they go about thinking and producing the effects used for computers used by characters in the film! From the films that do it rea

What I love most is seeing how they go about thinking and producing the effects used for computers used by characters in the film! From the films that do it really poorly to the films that attempt something realistic, I always wonder who's in charge of it, how they think about it, what tools they use to create it, etc. For the films in which it's poorly done I always figure it's the assistant FX designer's kid who has 4 months experience in Flash. For the good movies I always wonder if they grab the DB administrator for all the film assets and ask him some nerd questions :) From the article: In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie. I actually do use emacs irl, and although I do not subscribe to alt.religion.emacs, I think that's all incredibly relevant to the world of Tron. It's utterly fascinating to me that people have jobs like this.

js2 16y ago
| grep '[o]s12' would have filtered out the grep process from the ps output. :)
- rdtsc 16y ago
  It is a futuristic, more intelligent version of grep that understands the context in which it runs, and automatically filters itself out when it processes the output of ps ;-)
  - DannoHung 16y ago
    Or maybe there was an alias to grep that was 'grep -v grep | grep $*' or something like that. And they use ack for File searching cuz it's way better.
  - js2 16y ago
    http://jtnimoy.net/178/TRON_GFX_BR_07.JPG http://jtnimoy.net/178/TRON_GFX_BR_07.JPG seems to indicate plain old grep, not futuristic intelligent grep.
    - sho_hn 16y ago
      Trivia: These /dev/.udev paths will most likely disappear from Linux systems soon due to http://lwn.net/Articles/436012/ http://lwn.net/Articles/436012/, bookending the timeframe in which that system would have been set up.
- sonnekki 16y ago
  When I saw that image, the first thing that came to mind was pgrep from the procps package. Using pkill would have crunched it all down to one line. Too bad they didn't use that. However, I must admit it did look pretty cool as-is.
necubi 16y ago
In that vein, I was way too excited to see Mark Zuckerberg hacking in Emacs in The Social Network. It's so rare that movies get this stuff right that when they do I can't help but smile.
- sho_hn 16y ago
  It was also pretty nice to see all those KDE 3 desktops in the film, especially since it were the historically correct versions for the timeframe of the story.
  - gaius 16y ago
    If you look at see what SunOS version the Grid is running, when Sam sits down at his dad's old workstation, it doesn't match up with the timeline.
    - arethuza 16y ago
      If you look really carefully you can see that it is actually running "SolarOS" not "SunOS". I paused one of the trailers at 1080p and captured the workstation desktop and I've been using it as a desktop background - quite a few people have told me that I really need to clean my monitor...
      - ndespres 16y ago
        Would you mind sharing that wallpaper?
        arethuza 16y ago
        NP I'll do it first thing tomorrow.
        thecoffman 16y ago
        Awesome, I'd also love that
pstack 16y ago
I'm a fan of computer interfaces in film across the board. From the intentionally tongue-in-cheek 'Hackers' to the downright unintentionally awful and the occasionally vaguely bordering on something close to reality. I haven't seen this movie, but I'm actually impressed by what I see in the article. It raises the question, however, whether it's something that actually pays dividends. That is, when you employ any sense of reality in this specific domain, does anyone who isn't intimately familiar actually notice? Is the subset of people like ourselves who notice even worth catering to in such small ways? I know my mother, sister, grandmother, and most of the other people in my life wouldn't recognize if it was accurate or not and I suspect 95% of the audience falls into that category. On the other hand, small things can make a big difference, when you catch them. They're like seeing a loose thread on a piece of clothing that you can't unsee again. Or a stuck pixel on your LCD. For instance, I was watching a marathon of Roswell on Netflix this week (hey, shaddup -- I've never seen it before and wanted something awful to go along with feeling under the weather!). At one point, a guy says to another who is holding a revolver "you might as well just fire every bullet in your chamber!". Of course . . . a gun only has one bullet in the chamber at an time, as far as I know. Most certainly only one in a revolver. And it has bugged me ever since.
- muyuu 16y ago
  I don't think he'd have saved any time doing a completely original interface based on nothing. Quite possibly, it would have taken him a lot more time to do something as visually compelling (for mom and pop) as that completely from scratch.
- SimonPStevens 16y ago
  "I know my mother, sister, grandmother, and most of the other people in my life wouldn't recognize if it was accurate or not" I think each knowledge domain has it's set of experts that will spot mistakes in their own areas of experience. Every mother I know, when watching an on-screen delivery, will retort "that's not a newborn" when the babies face first appears on camera.
  - pchristensen 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

js2 16y ago

| grep '[o]s12' would have filtered out the grep process from the ps output. :)

rdtsc 16y ago
It is a futuristic, more intelligent version of grep that understands the context in which it runs, and automatically filters itself out when it processes the output of ps ;-)
- DannoHung 16y ago
  Or maybe there was an alias to grep that was 'grep -v grep | grep $*' or something like that. And they use ack for File searching cuz it's way better.
- js2 16y ago
  http://jtnimoy.net/178/TRON_GFX_BR_07.JPG http://jtnimoy.net/178/TRON_GFX_BR_07.JPG seems to indicate plain old grep, not futuristic intelligent grep.
  - sho_hn 16y ago
    Trivia: These /dev/.udev paths will most likely disappear from Linux systems soon due to http://lwn.net/Articles/436012/ http://lwn.net/Articles/436012/, bookending the timeframe in which that system would have been set up.
sonnekki 16y ago
When I saw that image, the first thing that came to mind was pgrep from the procps package. Using pkill would have crunched it all down to one line. Too bad they didn't use that. However, I must admit it did look pretty cool as-is.

necubi 16y ago

In that vein, I was way too excited to see Mark Zuckerberg hacking in Emacs in The Social Network. It's so rare that movies get this stuff right that when they do I can't help but smile.

sho_hn 16y ago
It was also pretty nice to see all those KDE 3 desktops in the film, especially since it were the historically correct versions for the timeframe of the story.
- gaius 16y ago
  If you look at see what SunOS version the Grid is running, when Sam sits down at his dad's old workstation, it doesn't match up with the timeline.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    If you look really carefully you can see that it is actually running "SolarOS" not "SunOS". I paused one of the trailers at 1080p and captured the workstation desktop and I've been using it as a desktop background - quite a few people have told me that I really need to clean my monitor...
    - ndespres 16y ago
      Would you mind sharing that wallpaper?
      - arethuza 16y ago
        NP I'll do it first thing tomorrow.
        thecoffman 16y ago
        Awesome, I'd also love that

pstack 16y ago

I'm a fan of computer interfaces in film across the board. From the intentionally tongue-in-cheek 'Hackers' to the downright unintentionally awful and the occasionally vaguely bordering on something close to reality. I haven't seen this movie, but I'm actually impressed by what I see in the article. It raises the question, however, whether it's something that actually pays dividends. That is, when you employ any sense of reality in this specific domain, does anyone who isn't intimately familiar actually notice? Is the subset of people like ourselves who notice even worth catering to in such small ways? I know my mother, sister, grandmother, and most of the other people in my life wouldn't recognize if it was accurate or not and I suspect 95% of the audience falls into that category. On the other hand, small things can make a big difference, when you catch them. They're like seeing a loose thread on a piece of clothing that you can't unsee again. Or a stuck pixel on your LCD. For instance, I was watching a marathon of Roswell on Netflix this week (hey, shaddup -- I've never seen it before and wanted something awful to go along with feeling under the weather!). At one point, a guy says to another who is holding a revolver "you might as well just fire every bullet in your chamber!". Of course . . . a gun only has one bullet in the chamber at an time, as far as I know. Most certainly only one in a revolver. And it has bugged me ever since.

muyuu 16y ago
I don't think he'd have saved any time doing a completely original interface based on nothing. Quite possibly, it would have taken him a lot more time to do something as visually compelling (for mom and pop) as that completely from scratch.
SimonPStevens 16y ago
"I know my mother, sister, grandmother, and most of the other people in my life wouldn't recognize if it was accurate or not" I think each knowledge domain has it's set of experts that will spot mistakes in their own areas of experience. Every mother I know, when watching an on-screen delivery, will retort "that's not a newborn" when the babies face first appears on camera.
- pchristensen 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]