If you're a fan of the movie, this youtube channel has amazing interviews with cast and crew. So many great anecdotes buried within...
Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
41–50 of 147 posts
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
True enough, though if Trinity could jump between skyscrapers and run against a wall before disarming 5 machine gun totting henchmen, i imagine she could have enabled transparency in her Xterm in Enlightenment. But in more general terms, the representation of computer interfaces, with avatars walking rigidly in 3d pastel coloured surroundings (as presented in a variety of examples, my favorite being the corporate net…
~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several more years. So transparency was arguably still something a true hacker wouldn't waste cycles on. To your general point, it felt like there was a shift around 2000, when computers needed to be "serious business" and the whimsy of the 80s and 90s was scrubbed out of software. Honestly, I think we all wo…
In the 90's even hackers loved some bling-bling. Maybe not with E16, but some WMaker with a nice backdrop and a transparent UXTerm was really nice and much faster than the emerging KDE in late 90's.
Also, heck, it was cool and pretty having some city at night while you were day and night with URxvt with links or lynx on it reading media and posting to fora.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#43Not exactly related, but I'm shocked by the amount of people, older people even working in IT who mock the girl in Jurassic Park saying "it's a Unix system, I know this", when in fact what they showed was a Unix system and the 3D interface they showed was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.
Well, the fix was probably around the lines of:
sudo systemctl restart gates
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
True enough, though if Trinity could jump between skyscrapers and run against a wall before disarming 5 machine gun totting henchmen, i imagine she could have enabled transparency in her Xterm in Enlightenment. But in more general terms, the representation of computer interfaces, with avatars walking rigidly in 3d pastel coloured surroundings (as presented in a variety of examples, my favorite being the corporate net…
~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several more years. So transparency was arguably still something a true hacker wouldn't waste cycles on. To your general point, it felt like there was a shift around 2000, when computers needed to be "serious business" and the whimsy of the 80s and 90s was scrubbed out of software. Honestly, I think we all wo…
"~1999, you would have had Pentium III @ ~500 MHz max in a laptop, likely less. Pentium M wouldn't release for several more years."
and, Boy, did i waste cycles on enabling every eye candy possible on Linux/BSD on the only 150 Mhz Pentium pro with 32Mb of ram i could afford in 2001-2002...
"Instead, we built a brutalist efficient system where most expression is limited to setting your background."
Common people being creative was MySpace, remember the eyesore?
Just being sarcastic, i think the "Ugly" web of early HTML was actually wonderful, and we should encourage people to go back to it, but let's not delude ourselves too much, FaceStagram will always win the appeal of the masses.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an IRIX box, and while it was real software, it was dog-slow on low-end SGI without a graphics card, so she had to be using some pretty expensive hardware. As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had. We only used the 3D browser for our demo setup for visitors.
> Because its unlikely that the girl would have had access to an IRIX box She's related to Hammond, who owns an island. I'm sure he could get her an old box and some manuals to play with, if not outright a state of the art system. > As a filesystem browser it was not useful. Someone with Unix system experience would prefer a 2D browser, which IRIX also had. But isn't that exactly the sort of thing a clever kid with a…
Using the 3D browser would be akin to saying "That's Linux" upong seeing a Compiz cube a few years ago. I mean, yes, it would be technically correct, but not a defining term for deeply knowing Linux and its intrinsics.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#46I wrote about hackers too, http://www.dusted.dk/pages/phlog/2023-12-02.txt the gist of that rant is that what you see in hackers is not what's not their screens, but what's in their minds, through a poetic lens.
That was my interpretation, too, but this article shows me The Plauge skateboarding through physical towers, etc. Not sure such scenes can be written off as happening in Joey’s mind.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#47Oh man. Legendary film. Young Angelina Jolie in her hacker outfit with her Spock haircut … am I right?
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
She was the granddaughter of a billionaire so it's not unreasonable to imagine she may indeed have had access to high end hardware. "No expense spared".
> No expense spared but he only has one single IT guy in oncall during the emergency :-)
I think that part is actually explained:
- the storm evacuates most people, essential staff only
- Nedry deliberately creates the IT emergency situation to lock out the other IT people still on the island
- The book has more details about how the IT system was over budget/rushed/flawed as another example of the hubris of the whole endeavor.
The book has a detail I especially liked: theres an automatic dinosaur counting system but it was written such that it stops counting once it finds all of the expected dinos (because the spec said they couldn't reproduce), which delayed them realizing that the dinosaurs were actually mating and in a bunch of places they weren't supposed to be. Classic example of a bug caused by software working correctly exactly to the spec.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#49Not exactly related, but I'm shocked by the amount of people, older people even working in IT who mock the girl in Jurassic Park saying "it's a Unix system, I know this", when in fact what they showed was a Unix system and the 3D interface they showed was real software SGI shipped with IRIX.
Well, the fix was probably around the lines of: sudo systemctl restart gates But, whatever, I mean, there are literal dinosaurs going around, I guess that's the more plausible plotline.
What is the 'that' you are referring to as far as being the more plausible plotline?
I don't think it's weird for a kid with some computing knowledge to use a filebrowser to look for where a program might be.
Re: Sci-Fi Interfaces: Hackers
#50Oh man. Legendary film. Young Angelina Jolie in her hacker outfit with her Spock haircut … am I right?
You made it weird by mentioning a Spock haircut.