I think that the computer technology on South Park Bigger Longer & Uncut is impeccable in it’s depiction of computer systems. Particularly when dealing with the briefing. for the invasion of Canada. Fuck’n Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here!
You must be unfamiliar with Asdfgh’jkl, a powerful scripting language with a syntax that many people find obscure, if only for the first decade or two. Still, it ends up being more readable than Perl, I find.
To translate: the above program fragment opens a file named “lkafl” (the letter “w” usually serves as the quotation mark in this language), checks for success, searches for the first ‘[’ character, then copies every byte after that to ‘stdout’ — presumably the file to be infected, opened earlier somewhere. The text after the apostrophe is a comment, as usual.
Personally, I would have tightened this code up a bit. For example the author is using two ‘sdf’ operators where a single ‘jgdf’ operator would do. Normally not a big deal, but it’s inside the inner loop, so the extra cost multiplies. Also, as you can see, he’s overly fond of one-letter variable names. But I suppose in a fragment this simple it’s still pretty easy to follow along.
What really ruined the movie for me though was the use of the ‘kf’ declaration, a form that has been deprecated ever since Asdfgh’jkl 88 was standardized. A real Asdfgh’jkl programmer, writing at the time of this movie, would have known better.
If people had any idea how much work goes into programming they’d think we’re even weirder than they already do.
I seem to remember that the TV series Alias had some decently realistic Unix-type hacking.
Bytegeist, that’s truely awesome. Like brainfuck, but less readable!
Unfortunately, that was the output of a script run by the user. So the real WTF is that, having written what’s obviously a something-to-Asdfgh’jkl translator, failed to pipe the output anywhere. What an idiot.
It had some, but it had a whole lot more magical image enhancement and silly network plot devices.
It seems to me that Asdfgh’jkl is the perfect language for writing unspeakable code for the Old Ones, or transcribing the collected works of Abdul Alhazred.
Well it’s a virus, don’t you know, so its main activity is producing copies of itself.
Yeah, that’s it.
I think movies & TV are nearly always inaccurate in the details of almost every occupation they show. After all, accuracy takes a back seat to the plot. Whenever we are viewing a show, we are willingly suspending disbelief in order to be entertained.
It’s only if the plot requires ‘too much’ suspension of disbelief that we object, and say the story is improbable & outlandish. And that is more likely to happen whenever it’s an occupation that we know something about.
So the computer people here on SMDB object to the obvious unrealistic computer hacking seen in shows. There was a SMDB thread not long ago about a show where a person was electrocuted by a broken light bulb in an underwater swimming pool light; the electricians weighed in calling that absolutely unrealistic.
I remember years ago laying in a hospital bed and scoffing at the obvious errors in a movie about computer bank thieves when the nurse came in, and said it looked realistic to her. So I asked her if the interactions of doctors & nursed I’d just seen on General Hospital and some other soaps were realistic. She said they were so unrealistic as to be a joke to anyone who worked in a real hospital. I have a friend who works in an actual police lab; he and his peers think CSI is a comedy, because of all the mistakes. A friend who’s a railroad worker laughs about the running & jumping on top of train cars that’s in movies from Indiana Jones to Mission Impossible.
I suspect that an expert in any field would find errors in the coverage of that field in movies & TV. (Except possibly filmmaking; those errors they would notice!)
The company I worked for had photos taken for marketing. They insisted on a pretty screen on the monitor for some equipment, because the software that ran the machine wasn’t graphical. I was protesting that people in the field that looked at the monitor would ridicule us, me in particular. They went with pretty over reality. I thought I made the photo as pretty as you could get it. I also think a few of the pictures I didn’t see in the proofs ended up in the photographer’s private collection. They both seemed a little too happy to take my picture. They were like little excited puppies, and used the word fabulous a lot.
We decided that SIL was finally becoming… conscious of being a Doctor when she stopped sucking ER and similar shows through a straw and started finding mistakes. Yes! Good doctor, goooooood dooooctor.
Never seen so many colors in an offscreen Chem lab as I see on screen. You sometimes get colored stuff in analytical labs, but most of the color-based tests are being replaced by electrochemical ones that don’t make pwetty colors; we’re sooooorryyyy!
Then again - never seen such a blinding-white labcoat off screen as you see on screen! At least, not one that’s been worn for more than 15 minutes. I’ve seen people examine someone else’s pristine new coat for several minutes because “it’s impossible, you’ve worn it for two hours and it doesn’t have any spots, no way… a-ha, found one! Ok, the Earth is not leaving its orbit today after all, it seems.”
Books are generally about as bad, with an advantage: nobody tries to explain chemistry in books, whereas lots of authors think they can explain forensic anthropology, forensic pathology, quantum physics or computer science. A computer bigger than NASA’s just to hook up into a text game in the 'net, anybody? Seen quite a few of those.
There are a couple books where I’ve seen 'net-related scenes that looked good to me. IANACS, but I have a degre in Computer Chemistry and 8 years experience keeping hackers out of a 'net text game. One is Neuromancer, the other one I think is this one (no idea how “the skin on the drum” has become “the Seville Communion”, but the character’s name and the location match). It’s one of P-R’s first books (his first book published, I think), far from later heights, but he has always been very careful to get good information on his backgrounds.
I’ve never seen a working lab that was as dimly lit as the CSI headquarters, or a CSI crime scene, or CSI generally. I realize the characters are on the night shift and all, but turn on a light fer cryin’ out loud.
No kidding. That drives me batty insane. Instead of using those crappy little penlights howzabout truning on the floodlights. The switch in on the wall - right over there by the door! Look!
And they always find the smallest piece of evidence with these little flashlights as soon as they turn it on and shine it in a general direction. “Oh, look, I’ve found the hair sample we’re looking for, right here under the desk behind the chair, amidst all this build up of cat hair.”
Cite? 
Someone on another board posted a picture he had taken of a promotional H&K poster.
In the poster, the rounds were loaded into the Magazine backwards.
We proceeded to hope that someone lost their job over it.
Heh. Yeah, in popular culture you might do a lot of work planning and writing a program, then get an inspiration and fix the bug that had been worrying you (“Seeing the corkscrew made me realize I forgot we’re in the Southern Hemisphere so particles in a argon matrix will travel in a left-handed helix!”)…and you’re done. Nobody ever tests anything.
Of course, in real life, for anything complex you reach code complete about 1/4 of the way through the development life-cycle. Then testing, debugging, more testing, features get cut, features get added, testing, growing realization that the product will NEVER work as promised, testing, frantic attempts to deflate expectations, giant lists of bugs marked “postponed” in bulk, frantic attempts to extend the ship date, testing, then throwing a barely-working product out window in the hopes that maybe it can be salvaged by the service pack due out in six months.
I assume from your post and location you are a Microsoft employee?
Nah. Microsoft would never attempt to extend the ship date.
I said “attempt”.
War Games - NORAD just happens to have the same voice synthesizer as 14 year-old kid and the computer knows just the right dramatic moment to first (and only) use it.
The Net - Web pages in a hotel dial-up service load in .03 seconds.
All Evil Overlord movies forget rule #99 - Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size.