Seen on more than one TV show: One episode, somebody uses a Mac. Next episode, they have a generic black PC…but it’s obviously running OS X. Bonus if they occasionally switch around to Macs running Windows.
Most hated: Computers which beep or make other annoying noises for every damn action.
One thing that has always bothered about Star Trek is how, when somebody wants to talk to the ship’s computer, he says “computer!” and the computer chirps and is awaiting orders, but when people on the ship just talk about computers, the ship computer never chirps and activates. Apparently it knows when you’re talking about it but not to it.
I hate the whole LCARS interface in Star Trek. A friend of mine has an LCARS Windowblinds theme, and it just makes my eyes bleed.
Ooo, in Generic Police Drama 4 when the computer is trying to match fingerprints, bullets, faces or anything else and it’s doing that nice here’s a photo, does it match? no it doesn’t, here’s the next photo, does it match? no it doesn’t etc. on Screen.
Die Hard 4, where the villainous plot involved downloading the entire nation’s financial data, which requires an entire facility to house underground to mask its heat signature, into a portable drive.
Also, remote exploding computers.
Also, anytime anyone has to guess passwords on computers. Seriously, Adrian Veidt is the smartest man in the world, but his password is so easy to figure out? Really?
No way, that was the most suspenseful part of the movie. What if he accidentally came across some newsgroup about computer games and spent his next ten years embroiled in flame wars? Mission: Impossible indeed.
Anytime a back door is mentioned.
“So Mr Analyst dude, our finest minds have been unable to break this super duper billion bit encryption technology”
“Ah, Frederick McStupid who designed it put in a backdoor which only I, amongst your finest minds, know about… There you go job done”.
Any ability to determine that hero/villian was the last person to look at a record without actually using a log (or more likely finding out that logging isn’t enabled) but instead making veiled references to some king of fragmented header/packer/byte/someother computery sounding term.
Another thing about the Star Trek is when they use the communicators to call to someone. “Picard to sickbay” for example, which is all well and good, except that the computer apparently knows that the message is intended for sickbay the moment Picard opens his mouth and transmits everything beginning from the first syllable.
Transmissions in Star Trek are sent via chronoton waves in subspace which are actually faster than time, so the computer actually has a record of every message that will be sent to it over the next twenty minutes or so and only parses them out when they become temporally relevant.
I love it when Law and Order has the CSI guys investigate something and then one of the L&O cops will be like ‘thanks, NERDS!’ and then kick them in the face. That’s not quite how it usually goes down, but I remember Lennie Brisco more than once expressing that he thought that the lab guys were a bunch of useless dorks. Kind of makes you wonder if Dick Wolf isn’t a big fan of the CSI phenomenon.
I just WISH some films/TV would take the tech seriously. The only show that has done so recently, that I can recall, is the wire. I got a boner when I saw them working with i2 Analyst Notebook and I loved how down and dirty their kit was (and how bad most of them were at using it).
It’s the same on Dexter where the Metro Police works from light but not futuristic office building and their two CSI’s are bot socially inept geeks (one is a serial killer and the other just acts like one).
… I love Dexter, but not the scenes where he effortlessly hacks into FBI and whatever databases. And then in season 3 it’s suddenly a plot point that the ADA can see he acessed a file (as I remeber it)
I saw a presentation where people were doing this (reconstruction the subject’s view from reflections), except with decent cameras. The reconstruction was really pretty good, but they ended up with something like a reasonable webcam shot out of something like a 20 megapixel image. Of course, that depends on how far away the subject is. They also had a lower res (but still decent) camera closer to the subject’s face and were able to do it in video.
There was a pretty cool video about a year ago someone went around to a computer vision conference and basically showed clips from movies and asked experts what was possible now, what was maybe possible and what was pure fantasy, but I can’t find it.
It’s interesting that there is a small but noticeable trend to take firearms tech more seriously in certain genres, with proper gun handling and kind of reasonable tactics. Occasionally you still have some woman on a network TV show doing a cup-and-saucer grip looking like the prop is going to bite her, but in most movies now it is a LONG way from from the computer nonsense you see. Perhaps because some of this stuff is mostly designed for gun nerds who wouldn’t show up otherwise, whereas the computer tech is an expedient to find out whether Mrs. Jenkins is sleeping with her neighbor.
Well, they can also bring in someone to just show the actors how to hold a gun. That’s pretty standard these days. I’m sure that with the contacts he’s making here, in fifteen years when MSUSteve has to retire from the FBI due to his being caught using the resources of the federal government to steal from Jensen Ackles’ trash, he’ll get a job teaching Jaden Smith how to properly hold an AK-47.
On the other hand improving the geek/computing aspect of a movie or show just means rewriting parts of the script. And that’s haaaard! D:
Maybe they bring in some NERDS to rewrite part of the script, but after given the premise of the entire situation (the files are in the Xbox), the nerds laugh and walk away.
It isn’t that impossible that he put the files on his xbox if he modded it or whatever. Not that he could have done it like in the show but he could have used a modded xbox as a file server and there would be people that wouldn’t think twice about it. /shrug
I’m afraid this conversation must begin and end with 24, which originally at least made an effort at not having a ridiculous plot but has never once avoided some of the stupidest computer bullcrap on television. Like this season, when one guy forcibly reformatted every system in the entire FBI. From a central computer in the server room. Or how it was a horrible big deal that the guy who wrote the firewall the government supposedly uses was captured by terrorists because only he knows anything about their source code, because apparently the FBI only employs network analysts in permanent positions and all the programmers are fired immediately upon completion of their project and the source code is summarily flushed down the toilet. Or remember when Chloe would “beam” things to Jack “over the infrared?” That was fun. And how come I’ve never seen one line of SQL in any show, ever?
Of course, do you REALLY want your television to be, you know, accurate about this crap? I mean, every time I do anything at work right now, all the submegulloids out there (gestures toward the rest of the building) can only explain the miracle of why they can enter time again with “A wizard did it.” That’s pretty cool, right?
I understand. It has a hard drive and everything.
But if I were given that premise I’d imagine something like seen in Life, and would run for the hills. There is probably an extra attempt needed first by Hollywood to take computer stuff seriously.
Oh come on, this isn’t the late 90s anymore. Who besides the most secluded IT hermits even thinks like that anymore?
Yeah a console or memorycard in a camera would actually be a nifty hiding place and good enough to fool 99% of people… perhaps even the police if they don’t think about asking their IT dudes.
But the whole “MUST reach lv. 10!”-crap takes the cake.
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.
Christ, that was bad. I feel like I need to take a shower now.
I dunno. I watched that show when it aired and I can never tell when they’re being serious. The whole gotta-do-a-montage scenario (which I can never think about without automatically inserting St. Elmo’s Fire for some reason) had me on the floor. I mean, they’re probably just stupid, but I like to give them the benefit of the doubt.
What was even more awesome was how he managed to install a working copy of Microsoft Excel on an Xbox. And then hack the hex code for Prince of Persia. To call Excel.