This movie introduced me to the Wipeout racing game on Playstation.
Scene from the movie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI
More info: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-a...
Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
131–140 of 147 posts
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
i grew up in university computer labs (parents were grad students then professors). all the machines in the labs were SGI Indys/Indigos running IRIX 4.x/5.x. as a 12yo, i used the 3D graphical file browser because it was fun and cool. it was installed on all the machines by default because it came bundled in a demo CD with every machine.
There's a modern clone of it now: https://fsv.sourceforge.net/
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#133Earlier 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.
Before systemd:
sudo service gates restart
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#134I liked the movie and it reminded me of when I was a kid and my dad bought me a Commodore 64 and 5 1/4 floppy drive and a 1-year subscription to Creative Computing magazine. I spent so many hours learning programming and then wasted it all by going into the military because my parents couldn't afford to send me to university. Rural community and only my dad worked since my mother was injured.
When I got out and returned back up north, I got a "job", got married, and had a neighbor who was a Unix programmer. His home office was decked out with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD servers, BSD magazines and literature everywhere. He talked me into using my GI Bill to go get a degree in CS, which is what I did. My unofficial hero since has been Theo de Raadt. Still using a *nix OS, still in IT.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#135Oh man. Legendary film. Young Angelina Jolie in her hacker outfit with her Spock haircut … am I right?
I rather like the look, even now. I also liked T'Pol in Star Trek Enterprise.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#136This movie is the reason why I became a programmer. I watched it when I was starting in high school and got inspired by it. Then, I literally googled "How to become a hacker" and found this incredible page by Eric Raymond [0], which I used as an mentor throughout my high school and college years. I ended up developing the recommended hard skills (learning programming, UNIX, open source culture...) but also the "point…
Which martial art? Also, what are your top 3-5 books? E.g. Snow Crash, Neuromancer, Diamond Age, A Fire Upon the Deep
Good old Neal Stephenson books, but I really like Cryptonomicon and Reamde. I read Cryptonomicon in one day it was that good, and years later read it again and got more from it. Neal is a great writer, and I love his "wordiness", how he dedicated pages to the experience of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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..."
Tron Legacy. Such a good film. My kids and I watch it a few times a year. I tried watching the original from 1982 and it just felt so... dated? Perhaps I'm spoiled like most people from all the great CGI and effects.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#138This 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…
Minority Report came out in 2002, and I can tell you, actually using a computer interface like that for an extended period of time would be pretty exhausting.
What it got right was swiping and pinch/zoom though; five years before the iPhone was released.
Those gestures were completely unknown in commercial UIs of the time; in fact you were lucky to find a touchscreen that didn't take three forceful stabs of your finger before it registered.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than magicians, Penn Gillette was in the jacket scene. Anyone remember existing into his bbs from the late 1980s?
He also wrote a column for PC/Computing magazine in the early '90s.
Penn and Teller's Lab Scam:
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#140This movie introduced me to the Wipeout racing game on Playstation. Scene from the movie: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ATlszssL-eI More info: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19751/whats-the-a...
And it is now possible to play it in modern computers, compiled from source, as reported 4 months ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37082304
“Rewriting wipEout”: https://phoboslab.org/log/2023/08/rewriting-wipeout
As I wrote at the time: “WOW! Just a `git clone`, download and unpack the .zip with the assets (end of the blog post), type `make` and it compiles on Linux without warnings into `wipegame`, run it and it works first time!” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37086874