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The girl with the ANSI tattoo

oracle-wtf.blogspot.co.uk

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Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#101

Post by archangel_one »

gravitronic wrote: post #31
archangel_one wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally sympathise, I have the same with archery in movies. I can normally ignore the typical Hollywood stuff in LOTR or whatever, but really can't take it when they pretend to be modern + realistic (current worst case: Blade Trinity).

Did you watch hunger games, and how did that archery look? Apparently the actress spent 6 months+ practicing but I'd be interested to hear an informed point of view.

Haven't seen it yet, sorry. I've read the book but wasn't excited enough to make a beeline for the movie. Probably will see it sometime though.

From what I've seen of various shorts about the movie, the archery looks pretty good. I don't think she spent 6 months practising but she obviously spent some time on it with a good coach (a US Olympian, so she knows her stuff). The only thing they get wrong is that longbows aren't as accurate as they're portrayed, but that happens in every movie with an archer and it's just artistic license really.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#102

Post by mikebike »

fwdbureau wrote: post #89
mibbitier wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's even worse than this. When everytime you're "good" at something, you notice movies get it wrong, after some point you start to wonder, maybe they also get it wrong for all the things you're not good at, you just don't notice it. So basically, it could be that movies get everything wrong.

Michael Crichton called this "the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect":

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/65213

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#103

Post by archangel_one »

famousactress wrote: post #64
wpietri wrote: 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.

The Jurassic Park stuff wasn't done by a "guy", it was done by a team of folks, of which my mom was a part. (Specifically she helped pull together some of the spinning 3D xray skull stuff, wrote some c-shell scripts and was part of the sales team that sold the Sun systems to the movie). Also, the UI that you're probably talking about is this thing, and it's (sadly) real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

The most unrealistic thing about that wasn't the interface itself, it was the 10-year-old girl who says "This is Unix, I know this!"

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#104

Post by pyre »

blhack wrote: post #93
adorton wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackers is funny, but I watched it recently and was surprised at the realistic touches. In one scene, a character is showing off his "hacking" books - which included the dragon book, and a Unix book I believe is real.

THANK YOU This movie gets so much completely unnecessary hatred. Yeah, it's a joke, but there is plenty of little nods to "real" culture in there. To me it has always been pretty obvious that it was supposed to be silly, but that the people making it knew what they were doing. I'm pretty sure most of the books from that scene were actually real books.

When I mentioned "Hackers," I was thinking more of the 3D UI they were navigating to search for files on the mainframe.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#105

Post by polemic »

scott_s wrote: post #36
sophacles wrote: post #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…

I think you missed the point of the article. They were mockingly critiquing it, as the people behind the movie went above-and-beyond typical Hollywood technical gobbley-gook. The point is that it was accurate enough that they could critique it.

I agree, except:

    hackers ⊈ developers
Hackers are not optimizing for performance or readability.

I've watched a few penetration testers at work - they have to have a very broad knowledge base and work at speed. They're not sitting around wondering if their query is going to work in 1s or 0.1s - it just doesn't matter.

Awesome to see 'real' sql in action though.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#106

Post by mindcrime »

Natsu wrote: post #100
Simucal wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the phone phreaking scenes in the movie were pretty real as well.

The viruses mentioned were real, too, even if their usage was silly. "Type cookie, you idiot!"

"Cancer, brain... Brain Cancer?"

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#107

Post by groby_b »

dredmorbius wrote: post #70
ralfd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mig…

Movies do things for visual impact . And audio impact. They're not reporting fact. They're weaving a fantasy. Whatever your field is, if you want to got stark raving mad, watch a movie made about it. At the very least, the people writing, acting, and directing your world have little or no idea of what it's really like. And even if they do, they're taking deliberate liberties to embellish or interpret the realm to mak…

There's real insight whenever movies talk about people.

Best example in a field I'm familiar with - "Strictly Ballroom". Sure, everybody was over the top, but anybody who was ever involved in competitive ballroom dancing will recognize all the archetypes and be able to relate to the various things said about dancers.

For some reason, it's easier to swallow that characters are exaggerated, instead of facts. (This being HN, I fully expect a reply within the next 15 minutes explaining the exact psychological effect, complete with links to relevant papers ;)

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#108

Post by pyre »

gravitronic wrote: post #34
sophacles wrote: post #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…

Even when this blog post gets into the technical inaccuracies it's just trivia, not nitpicking. Movies want to keep you in the suspension of disbelief (that the storyline is real) and as a programmer it's been hard to do that with most "hacking" scenes in movies. The only other blockbuster movie I can think of with a reasonably believable hacking scene was when Trinity used an openssl exploit in one of the Matrix seq…

Trinity used nmap to find an actual openssl exploit. Even then, people were nitpicking over whether or not the exploit was known during the time period that the world inside the Matrix is purported to be, though IIRC that was in good fun.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#109

Post by HarrisonFisk »

sp332 wrote: post #13
Morg wrote: 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? :)

The MySQL optimizer will actually notice and remove the outer join aspect automatically. So I have often done this out of pure laziness if I start with an outer join, but really end up needing an inner join.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#110

Post by rbanffy »

polemic wrote: post #105
scott_s wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the point of the article. They were mockingly critiquing it, as the people behind the movie went above-and-beyond typical Hollywood technical gobbley-gook. The point is that it was accurate enough that they could critique it.

I agree, except: hackers ⊈ developers Hackers are not optimizing for performance or readability. I've watched a few penetration testers at work - they have to have a very broad knowledge base and work at speed. They're not sitting around wondering if their query is going to work in 1s or 0.1s - it just doesn't matter. Awesome to see 'real' sql in action though.

> Hackers are not optimizing for performance or readability.

Speak for yourself ;-)

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