Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

scifiinterfaces.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 147 posts

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#71

Post by sgt »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #55
pelagicAustral wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the fix was probably around the lines of: sudo systemctl restart gates But, whatever, I mean, there are literal dinosaurs going around, I guess that's the more plausible plotline.

Ah but this was pre-systemd so you would have been screwing around trying to find whatever script was being used to lock the doors after close of business.

Well it's IRIX, so you'd just create a little bourne shell script in /etc/init.d, with symlinks from e.g. /etc/rc2.d to start/kill it on the respective run levels.

This was a pretty critical system though so why not just place this particular program inside /etc/inittab ?

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#72

Post by bitshiftfaced »

dusted wrote: post #5

I wrote about hackers too, http://www.dusted.dk/pages/phlog/2023-12-02.txt the gist of that rant is that what you see in hackers is not what's not their screens, but what's in their minds, through a poetic lens.

One of my favorite scenes is when the protagonist is in the airplane looking down at the city, and the buildings warp into computer chips and circuitry. This fits well with the idea that what we're seeing is more about the feeling that the characters are experiencing rather than what's actually on their screen.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#73

Post by PrimeMcFly »

eesmith wrote: post #68
buzziebee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She was the granddaughter of a billionaire so it's not unreasonable to imagine she may indeed have had access to high end hardware. "No expense spared".

The I would expect "It's an SGI, I know how to use it." Familiarity with 4dwm doesn't really transfer to NeXTStep or SunView, which were two other Unix window managers of the time. The people she interacted with would surely distinguish between different Unix vendors - Apollo, Ridge, SGI, Sun, etc. - we certainly did.

You're being unreasonably hard on a fictional 12 year old lol. IRIX is UNIX. She said she knows UNIX. It's fine.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#74

Post by pelagicAustral »

PrimeMcFly wrote: post #49
pelagicAustral wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the fix was probably around the lines of: sudo systemctl restart gates But, whatever, I mean, there are literal dinosaurs going around, I guess that's the more plausible plotline.

What is the 'that' you are referring to as far as being the more plausible plotline? I don't think it's weird for a kid with some computing knowledge to use a filebrowser to look for where a program might be.

Well, we are talking about managing critical infrastructure on a theme park riddled with dinosaurs. Potentially the definition of working under pressure.

I wouldn't think even teenage Kevin Mitnick on Mountain Dew can himself bypass the terminal security (if any), prompt his way to the safety mechanisms, and override their behavior. All while being assailed by a velociraptor.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#75

Post by btbuildem »

Mainan_Tagonist wrote: post #6

This is a nice website, with an interesting purpose. Though i suppose reviewing sci-Fi movies notions of interfaces will soon clash with the dryness of reality. The 90's were wild in that sense, you could imagine that the internet superhighway would be a superhighway you could literally drive on with your Avatar, and countless movies and tv-series presented things thus. The noughties were way more grounded in reality…

My fave sci-fi UI review was on the "other" site -- previous HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27287912

IMO "The Expanse" got futuristic UIs extremely right.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#76

Post by chromaton »

necrotic_comp wrote: post #61
ethbr1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. It's amazing how often people dismiss computer visualization in media ( That's not the goal! It's intended to be representative of the process of interacting with a computer, not the interface itself. At a time when most viewers had little or no first-hand experience with a computer. If you showed a CLI then, maybe 1/20 people would understand it, and they'd be bored because they used it everyday at work.

That's exactly right! I didn't see hackers until I was in my mid 30s, but when they had the initial flyover of the city representing tables in a database ... I had a moment where I said "my goodness, this is the closest representation of how I think of data". It's like when you're reading a book - you don't think about the words, the concepts and people come to life in your brain. I feel like this is the only movie t…

"I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What did they look like? Ships, motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I'd never see. And then, one day, I got in..."

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#77

Post by PrimeMcFly »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #74
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the 'that' you are referring to as far as being the more plausible plotline? I don't think it's weird for a kid with some computing knowledge to use a filebrowser to look for where a program might be.

Well, we are talking about managing critical infrastructure on a theme park riddled with dinosaurs. Potentially the definition of working under pressure. I wouldn't think even teenage Kevin Mitnick on Mountain Dew can himself bypass the terminal security (if any), prompt his way to the safety mechanisms, and override their behavior. All while being assailed by a velociraptor.

You didn't answer my question; I just don't get what you are saying is more plausible. Is it that the girl knew Unix at all or something else?

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#78

Post by btbuildem »

lagrange77 wrote: post #30

I recently stumbled upon this https://usegpu.live/demo/geometry/binary and it reminded me of the city of text.

This is really neat! I wonder how they chose to represent the inner structure of these binaries visually - there seem to be some similarities between the .exes vs the other types.

Reminds me of pointing the viewport address to a block of code on the Amiga 500, and watching it run.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#79

Post by bitwize »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #2

"The scene starts with Joey sitting in front of his Macintosh personal computer" Oops. Joey's computer is an Apple IIgs.

It has a Mac interface though.

The IIGS actually had a Mac-like interface called GS/OS, but it looked real grotty compared to Mac OS, to accommodate the IIGS's lower resolution.

Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers

#80

Post by bitwize »

eesmith wrote: post #22
PrimeMcFly wrote: post #12

Not exactly related, but I'm shocked by the amount of people, older people even working in IT who mock the girl in Jurassic Park saying "it's a Unix system, I know this", when in fact what they showed was a Unix system and the 3D interface they showed was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.

Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an IRIX box, and while it was real software, it was dog-slow on low-end SGI without a graphics card, so she had to be using some pretty expensive hardware. As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had. We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.

What if she were originally baffled by the 3D display, and then saw recognizable paths like /bin and /usr and realized the system was actually familiar?
Post reply on HN