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I have a friend who is a competitive target shooter, and he's always complaining that the shell casings are the wrong size during shootouts. Of course now he's got me doing it too...
If you think that's bad count how many gear changes happen in a car chase/street race in most big films that have manual cars. Obligatory 9gag http://9gag.com/gag/4026146
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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).
Exactly. My pet peeve is military depictions in movies. I can't recall a movie that's gotten even the basics right. I may be nitpicking, but it does detract from the viewing experience.
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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!"
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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 ;-)
FYI I'm referring to 'trying to break into a system, possibility illegally, with time pressure, hackers', rather than HackerNews hackers. Which I thought was reasonably obvious from the context.
If you're actually trying to crack a system, you're generally trying a lot of different things very rapidly. Tweaking performance and nicely formatting code you're going to immediately discard is... a misappropriation of resources.
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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 ∩ developers ≠ ∅
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…
best of all was the end of _Veronica Mars_ (yes, not a movie) which is the only even vaguely realistic decryption plot i've ever seen.
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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…
He also said he sustained an archery related injury while filming which A) shouldn't happen if he'd had the proper training and B) would also affect his ability to use proper form while shooting.
I've been working to make a conscious effort over the past decade to willingly suspend my disbelief at the movies and just enjoy the entertainment for what it is trying to be, rather than what it is failing at. I've enjoyed movies much more the times I've been successful at it. Other times, like the "I guess we'll just make the new OS free since a copy of it leaked on the internet" scene in the new Tron, I couldn't get over, and I let it completely ruin the movie for me. (I found later that if I just start about 20 minutes into the movie and enjoy it as an awesome Daft Punk music video then I really love Tron: Legacy).
The stupidest little nitpick that I have, which shows up in nearly every movie and television show, is that someone makes an outgoing call, gets hung up on, and then the foley team adds in a new dial tone. I don't know why I continue to let it bug me, but I do. Joss Whedon complained in one of his commentaries (Joss Whedon does the best commentary tracks, by the way, check them out sometimes if you care about this stuff at all) that he always has to go back and cut out about 70% of what the foley artists try to add to every scene. Sounds exhausting, for everyone.
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I paused the movie on all computer shots, and they're all legit. He's using emacs to hack Perl code in the beginning, all of the computers have Linux desktops, and most importantly, when they say things like "I need a dedicated Linux box running Apache with a MySQL back end", it sounds like something the character says all the time. Typically in movies, you can tell actors aren't familiar with the terms they're using…
The audio version of Neal Stephenson's "REAMDE" has our hero saving data in a "ee em ay see ess file." But really, nobody ever says things like "I need a dedicated Linux box running Apache with a MySQL back end" outside of an Aaron Sorkin script.