You know, computers on TV and in movies aren’t computers. They’re magic. Your hero will always need a wizard if he/she is ever gonna get shit done.
“Two months ago, I saw a provocative movie on cable TV. It was called The Net, with that girl from the bus. I did a little reading, and I realized, it wasn’t that farfetched.”
Yea, if we’re gonna include movies, Hackers. I love Hackers, and it got some stuff right. But wow.
I am a hacker and this is my manifesto. Classic movie full of dump computer crap. Good call tromik.
I must see this scene.
CSI Miami. They have this weird 3D multiscreen wall monitor, and the keyboard is some odd supposedly futuristic thing they wave their hand over to manipulate things, and the results on the “monitor” are almost impossible to see. The entire thing looks like it would be 100 times more difficult to use than a standard keyboard and monitor.
Related to the crazy: they pop an item into a chromatograph of some time (GC, for example) and in 10 seconds it pops out a graph and text of what the identified material is. Uh - no. You typically take 30 minutes or more, and there’s no magic identification.
Also, I love how the CSIs will say something like “polypropylene. That’s used in the handles of Cessna cargo compartments.” Uh, yeah, and about 10 million other things.
AND LASTLY (cause I’m on a role) - I KNOW CSIs. And they are NOT cops. The LAST thing they want to do is interrogate a criminal suspect, or chase someone down an alley with a gun. They are science nerds who work in a lab. It drives me nuts watching some CSI as the ones conducting the criminal investigations, interrogating the criminals, etc.
The CSI VB/GUI thing is a pretty popular meme in programmer circles on sites like reddit and such.
I guess the forensic data techs who would’ve taken the hard drive out of the Xbox and copied the Excel files off were like…lunching or something.
That scene was fucking horrible.
It’s in the first season episode “Ghost in the Machine”, about a futuristic office building like the one in Gremlins 2 only without the comedy. The AI that controls the building goes crazy and starts killing everyone, even to the point of calling Scully at home while impersonating Mulder to get her back inside so it can kill her.
Though as bad as this episode is (“Data travellers. Electrowizards. Technoanarchists.”) it’s got nothing on the two episodes William Gibson wrote for true horribleness.
LOLOLOL holy shit, you have to make these links more prominent. I almost missed it.
Oh Major Winters, how you’ve fallen.
And to come full circle, my favorite CSI Miami scene was where they used a camera reflection to ID the bad guy’s vehicle by its front license plate. Unfortunately, no one told them we only have rear plates in Florida.
My second favorite scene was where the passenger passed a toll taker in a booth a “help me” note. Who has ever seen a tollbooth where you pay from the passenger side??
They have them all over Disney property to pay for parking. I guess they figure you have to be a pretty big loser to go by yourself.
I always confuse this episode with Strange Brew, or the Paul Reiser classic, The Tower, which seemed awfully similar to The Grid.
Well, the scene was supposedly on the Turnpike, and they sure as hell are not there…
Wow. Amazing. I love the girl doing shadow gamepad maneuvers in the air in front of her and how he wordlessly guides her over to start playing as if she was some kind of idiot savant. Total genius.
But Bladerunner was set in the future, so I can suspend my disbelief in that case.
That was truly cringeworthy and awesome all at the same time. I hope the actors were embarrassed as they were shooting the scene.
The first Mission: Impossible. How do you contact a supervillain? Just search for his secret code name on Usenet! Which is apparently a mail protocol with animated envelopes, by the way.
In this country they’re not even cops, as far as I know. Anyway, I used to get annoyed by this as well but I’ve learned to suspend my disbelief and roll with it (I figure it’s just to keep things tight and avoid having a huge cast). I’ve also taken to treating CSI:Wherever as speculative science fiction (particularly CSI:NY for exactly the computer thingy that you mentioned) and that makes it more enjoyable.
Anyway, my number one pet peeve when it comes to computers has already been mentioned: the magic Photoshop filter that converts a shitty, grainy low-res security camera grab into a HDR U.S. Letter at 1200 DPI-quality image. Bonus points if the software also allows them to change the angle and zoom around the scene.
As a network engineer, anything involving networks and IP addresses and so on usually bugs me a little but I tend to just grit my teeth. The most egregious abuse of networking I can think of was in “Ocean’s 11”, the Clooney remake; the computer boffin guy clips some transmitters to some CAT5 cables (presumably unshielded) so that they can intercept the data being transmitted across them. Fine in theory; I assumed that they were picking up low-powered radio waves generated by the current on the cables but I’ve no idea how you would separate out signals to/from each device on the segment.