31–40 of 236 posts
Great movie, though. It's one of the few DVDs I've hung onto, even though I haven't watched it in years. Makes me want to skateboard in a datacenter.
I always wanted the epic boot up sequences like they had in that movie... in Windows for a bit you could change your boot image, but I could never get it to be an animation.....
This movie has everything, including Matthew Lillard!
It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists somewhere in the now-corporatized tech industry.
Hackers and Sneakers are maybe the only decent movies about so-called hackers.
Startup.com is pretty good as a movie about startups (I lived just about every minute of that movie, just at a different company) but it doesn't have any actual hackers in it.
I hear Risk and Citizenfour, both about Wikileaks, and Revolution OS, about Linux and the GNU and open-source movements, are pretty good, but I haven't seen them.
The Internet's Own Boy in particular has 8/10 on IMDB, 93% "Fresh" on Rotten Tomatoes, handily beating both Hackers and Sneakers, and is under a Creative Commons license: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro... which
I found it very hard to watch because Aaron was a friend of mine.
The Matrix is nominally about hackers (and even, like Hackers, computer security) but, as with Startup.com, hacking doesn't really enter into the movie much; instead it's all running firefights and magic disguised as computers. Like Hackers and Sneakers, it bears the same relationship to hacking as https://axecop.com/ (a comic scripted by a five-year-old) bears to law enforcement. However, it's enormously more popular than all the movies above, even if its Rotten Tomatoes ranking is lower than The Internet's Own Boy.
I hear Masters of Doom is pretty good but I haven't watched it.
I always wanted the epic boot up sequences like they had in that movie... in Windows for a bit you could change your boot image, but I could never get it to be an animation.....
I vaguely remember being able to hack it to display an animation…
I can remember as a kid downloading executables that claimed they would do this for you. In retrospect they were probably just malware…
Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. If I had a time machine I would warn young me that it's really more like a combination of Office Space and Wolf of Wall Street. It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists s…
Between Hackers, Masters of Doom, and other rad 90s hacker-coder media, software development really seemed like a much more awesome career than it turned out to be. If I had a time machine I would warn young me that it's really more like a combination of Office Space and Wolf of Wall Street. It would be awesome to listen to Prodigy or Megadeth while hackin' with the gang though. I'm still down for that if it exists s…
I think it comes down to the fact that our industry has become rigid and beholden to the university education system. John Carmack and John Romero were both college dropouts. Their stories would probably be impossible today. What we have now is a world of people coloring between the lines and going straight from one set of rules to another. There truly is no more punk rock left in tech.