Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

chiark.greenend.org.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 129 posts

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#61

Post by sneak »

jgrahamc wrote: post #2

Wonderful! At the bottom he notes: "I’m sitting in the UK as I write this. Under UK law, I believe this should constitute fair dealing: the purpose is quotation for criticism and review, and this single screen capture is in no way an alternative to paying to see the original film. The film comes from the USA, and under USA law I think it similarly constitutes fair use: it’s for non-profit educational purposes, the am…

Would you be interested in collaborating on a selfhosted CMS to aid in publishing a video series on one’s own site with syndication to rss and other platforms like youtube? I have been close to scratching this itch for most of a year.

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#62

Post by cheschire »

meatmanek wrote: post #30
Timwi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. The whole point of the post, as stated in the title, is to nitpick that one movie scene. Why does the inclusion of one specific nitpick bother you when it's completely on-topic?

it's a joke: the author of the post is literally the guy who wrote PuTTY

Thank you I KNEW I recognized that domain name

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#63

Post by niccl »

aamar wrote: post #47
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #41

One of my favorite details of this movie is that the semi-antagonistic ENCOM executive Dillinger uses emacs [0], while Flynn uses vi. Clearly, the VFX artist who made the film's UNIX shells had a preference! (Dillinger is also shown running "ENCOM Linux" -- is the VFX artist a BSD user? As he cycles through his buffers, we see a split second of `hanoi-unix`; definitely not the type to pay attention during boring boar…

The artist, JT Nimoy, was an Emacs user but still thought it would be fun to set up a dichotomy--some fun details on this blog. A few more details were shared at a talk at an HN meetup several years ago. https://jtnimoy.cc/item.php%3Fhandle=14881671-tron-legacy.ht...

and the comment there about using emacs for the different shells in different modes possibly explains the un-resolved nit in TFA about proportional and monospaced fonts in different areas

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#64

Post by niccl »

alexpotato wrote: post #26

whenever I join a new firm (usually as a DevOps or SRE) I ask the Linux team which server in the firm has the longest uptime. Invariably, I then send them this post where it shows the uptime from the host in the movie (I'll let the reader click through to see the time): https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/9041/whose-hardwar... If you're curious, the longest uptime I've had someone report back was in excess of 4…

until quite recently I dealt with a machine that had uptime in excess of 16,000 days. Before anyone panics, it was on a closed network. It was a second hand machine and we were very worried that if it was shut down the disk wouldn't recover, hence just not touching it. It was in a hut in the back of beyond so exceedingly tedious to replace if we needed to.

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#65

Post by halflife »

copypaper wrote: post #38
s_dev wrote: post #6

As an aside the Daft Punk soundtrack that accompanies this film is an absolute masterpiece. I think it's their best work. It's such a shame the film doesn't live up to it's own soundtrack.

Tron 1 for the plot, Tron 2 for daft punk, Tron 3... we don't talk about.

I think Trent reznor did a fantastic job with the soundtrack, maybe the only person that could’ve fit in daft punks shoes

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#67

Post by Izkata »

copypaper wrote: post #38
s_dev wrote: post #6

As an aside the Daft Punk soundtrack that accompanies this film is an absolute masterpiece. I think it's their best work. It's such a shame the film doesn't live up to it's own soundtrack.

Tron 1 for the plot, Tron 2 for daft punk, Tron 3... we don't talk about.

And the animated show, Tron: Uprising?

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#68

Post by rmunn »

s_dev wrote: post #6

As an aside the Daft Punk soundtrack that accompanies this film is an absolute masterpiece. I think it's their best work. It's such a shame the film doesn't live up to it's own soundtrack.

Tron Legacy was, I think, only the second film soundtrack I ever purchased (first one being Lord of the Rings). It's still among my favorite music to listen to while coding; something about it just puts me in the "flow" frame of mind right away.

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#69

Post by rmunn »

itomato wrote: post #49

Good luck finding his will in the home directory of the backdoor account.

Since logging into the backdoor account produced a `#` prompt instead of `$`, it was uid 0, so the last will and testament was either in `/root` or in `/`, depending on how the non-backdoor root account was set up.

Plus, if Flynn was running those commands while logged in as "backdoor" rather than while logged in as "root", the text displayed on-screen specifically says that the backdoor account doesn't have a home directory configured so it would treat `/` as the home directory. Which would mean the computer now has a `/last_will_and_testament.txt` file. That's pretty prominent and attention-drawing. It's going to be found by anyone who investigates that computer.

Re: Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'

#70

Post by hn92726819 »

I like the fun in this article, but some nitpicks don't seem right to me. This kinda reminds me of cinemasins.

1) I would assume his dad talked about always having a backdoor as a kid, so that's why Sam tried backdoor as the second username

2) temp.cfg isn't an unreasonable config filename. We don't know what the source code is. My guess would be that he hardcoded temp.cfg in the source because something wasn't working, and continued working on the actual bug

3) Killing processes to free memory? He reached for a kill -9 and then a regular kill. That hints to me that he recognized those two processes and knew -9 was required only for the first. He probably checked to see if he had enough memory, saw that he did, and then started cleaning up the processes.

4) Linux and SolarOS? Couldn't the other terminal just have been sshed to another box? That seems most reasonable to me.

Post reply on HN