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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

#21

Post by sp332 »

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.

As mentioned before, the filesystem browser in Jurassic Park was a real program, called fsn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fsn

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#22

Post by dholowiski »

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…

Because we're nerds and it's fun.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#24

Post by waterlesscloud »

ralfd wrote: post #14
jeffool wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mig…

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...

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#25

Post by huggyface »

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? :)

Realistically that they started the query with keywords optional, then moved to them being required (which, it should be noted, a good query planner would effective make an inner join). On the scale of evils of SQL, it lies somewhere around "friendly benign".

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#26

Post by pyre »

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.

  > interfaces for Jurassic Park
Replace Jurassic Park with "Operation Swordfish" or "Hackers," and you might be on to something. Especially since the Jurassic Park interface was a real program that actually existed.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#27

Post by jwdunne »

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 don't see this as nitpicking really. I definitely don't see it as negative. Sure there is a bit of nitpicking but the author seems to have laid down some genuine comments about the movie on top of it.

To be fairly honest, if I noticed something like this I'd crack a big grin and I'd wanna share it, like I just cracked a big grin whilst reading the post.

I think, overall, this a compliment to the detail in the movie. They're using real technology and (kinda) believable commands/code. It's only after deconstructing the scene it's been found they haven't got it 100% right. Most of the time, when someone is 'hacking' at a computer it's a load of nonsense and usually makes me cringe seeing it. I remember one totally shocking clip where a guy was 'hacking' and you could plainly see it was Windows Media Player. Let's not even mention Hackers.

Things like this make me smile and I find them really, really interesting when I either notice them or they are pointed out to me. I could probably waste a whole day reading an archive of these.

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#28

Post by Create »

klez wrote: 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.

you never read the book, which has named the apple notebooks and some shareware software (product placements which are almost gone by now). The main character(s) explicitly saved up for the given machine (although the movie isn't accurate down to the model)

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#29

Post by archangel_one »

mibbitier wrote: post #20
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…

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).

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).

Re: The girl with the ANSI tattoo

#30

Post by JamisonM »

> 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, > whether MySQL has a LIKE operator, and why none > of the victims' initials are 'R L'.

For the record since you never see the entire query so it is likely that the SQL is not as wrong as the author suggests. There is an extensive use of ORs in the query so the conditions that are said to defeat the outer joins are not mandatory and the 'R' and 'L' checks are clearly not required to pass. I think it is pretty good representation of how you might build up query from scratch, piling up conditions in OR clauses to finally get what you want. Yes, provided the table that starts with V is aliased as v the v.SEX condition does defeat the outer join, but that might be exactly the sort of thing you would stick in after you had already established a working FROM clause and not bother changing the outer to an inner. Solving the case was after all by definition a one-off.

I enjoyed this article because it points out an occasion where a movie really did try to get it right. Someone who knows something about databases had to have made those screens up.

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