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The girl with the ANSI tattoo

oracle-wtf.blogspot.co.uk

11–20 of 155 posts

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#11
post #4

I'm happy that, finally, people are not shoving 'movie-os' in computer scenes anymore. The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron: Legacy and finally here.

I have noticed across the years since 2000:

- a bunch of nmap appearances (notably Die Hard 4 and the Bourne Ultimatum, also one of the Matrix movies)

- some default OpenBox with XTerms in a few series

- KDE quite a number of times too

- SSH, bash and Unix FS exploration (cd, ls -l and its output, find, grep) at times

In fact it's sad that so much of the computer scenes are bad, but I've seen enough actually good attempts at being realistic that I can't remember where I saw them. What's sure is that the trend is upwards.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#13
post #5

For people using mysql, that kind of query really isn't such bad SQL at all.

Shocked moviegoers will have been left wondering why a genius-level hacker would outer-join to the Victims and Keywords tables only to use literal-text filter predicates that defeat the outer joins

Any excuse for this? :)

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#14
post #6
post #4

I'm happy that, finally, people are not shoving 'movie-os' in computer scenes anymore. The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron: Legacy and finally here.

The Social Network was good about it. Someone online actually reedited the scene where he was grabbing images from frat sites and edited in scenes from other films, like Hacker's "virtual skyscrapers", and suddenly it was like a real Hollywood film again!

We recognize when movies dumb computer stuff down, but the truth is they do it always!

Imagine sitting beside a big horse nerd and every time a horse is on the screen and makes this typical horse noise they would comment "the horse didn't make the sound" or white walkers are killing the night watch behind the wall and "this horse is not really frightened but relaxed and listens curiously" or every time there is a mighty black Frisian horse in a movie, which believe me hey are a lot!, they would comment how wrong and stupid it is that Zorro/Prince of Persia/the Spartans are riding Frisians.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#15
I really don't understand why people need to nitpick stuff like this. I mean, it's a movie -- the point is to tell a story not impart technical knowledge. Yeah, the query someone came up with on the fly isn't perfect, we get it, but in reality, this happens at the sql command line all the freaking time, it's a one-off, who cares? And yeah, the returned results are a bit incorrect for the query, but given that a bunch of freeze frame work had to be done to determine this, it seems like a pointless nitpick. Why not instead applaud the film-makers for actually using shockingly (for hollywood) real stuff.

Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice.

Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across.

Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful attention to them, not nitpick.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#16
post #4

I'm happy that, finally, people are not shoving 'movie-os' in computer scenes anymore. The first time I saw real stuff in movies was in Antitrust, then in Tron: Legacy and finally here.

I noticed this in Jurassic Park - it had a sort of movie OS, sort of actual code thing in it:

https://twitter.com/hoorayimhelping/status/19888796339917619...

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#17
Please nobody let Hollywood see this blog.

Somebody's going to say, "Man, we went to all that trouble to make it look realistic. But it doesn't work. Fuck it. Bring back the guy who did the interfaces for Jurassic Park. And the guy who writes Wesley Crusher's dialog."

---

Update: I love that my comment mocking excess nitpicking now has triggered triple-redundant nitpicking.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#18
Wow! Only on HN could one expect people picking apart SQL from movie screenshots and then discussing the minutiae of that code! Not that I have any problem with it. However, it surprises me no end how inward-looking, tech-navel-gazing, nerd-o-maniac this can appear to an outsider looking this way :-)

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#19
post #17

Please nobody let Hollywood see this blog. Somebody's going to say, "Man, we went to all that trouble to make it look realistic. But it doesn't work. Fuck it. Bring back the guy who did the interfaces for Jurassic Park. And the guy who writes Wesley Crusher's dialog." --- Update: I love that my comment mocking excess nitpicking now has triggered triple-redundant nitpicking.

This one?

http://www.siliconbunny.com/fsn-the-irix-3d-file-system-tool...

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#20

I really don't understand why people need to nitpick stuff like this. I mean, it's a movie -- the point is to tell a story not impart technical knowledge. Yeah, the query someone came up with on the fly isn't perfect, we get it, but in reality, this happens at the sql command line all the freaking time, it's a one-off, who cares? And yeah, the returned results are a bit incorrect for the query, but given that a bunch…

Thing is, if you're "good" at something, and a movie gets it wrong, it can ruin the movie for you.

My pet hate is people playing the piano, but playing the wrong notes (While the soundtrack is playing something different).

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