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 of freeze frame work had to be done to determine this, it seems like a pointless nitpick. Why not instead applaud the film-makers for actually using shockingly (for hollywood) real stuff.
Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice.
Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across.
Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful attention to them, not nitpick.
I think you missed the point of the article. They were mockingly critiquing it, as the people behind the movie went above-and-beyond typical Hollywood technical gobbley-gook. The point is that it was accurate enough that they could critique it.
Hackers are not optimizing for performance or readability.
I've watched a few penetration testers at work - they have to have a very broad knowledge base and work at speed. They're not sitting around wondering if their query is going to work in 1s or 0.1s - it just doesn't matter.
(The set of all hackers are not a strict subset of the set of all developers, but it's also true that some hackers - yes, in the breaking-in-to-something sense - are developers.)
FYI I'm referring to 'trying to break into a system, possibility illegally, with time pressure, hackers', rather than HackerNews hackers. Which I thought was reasonably obvious from the context.
If you're actually trying to crack a system, you're generally trying a lot of different things very rapidly. Tweaking performance and nicely formatting code you're going to immediately discard is... a misappropriation of resources.
I prefer to think of 'hack' and its variants as neutral terms that can, in context be either good ('Look what I hacked together!') or bad ('They hacked into the servers').
(Actually, the way usually explain it to non-techies: duct tape. Everyone understands what duct tape is meant for: it won't necessarily win any awards for style[1], but it's powerful, and it sure as heck gets the job done in a pinch, and quickly too! I find that analogy generally holds well enough, whether we're talking about black-hat hacking or 'real' hacking.)
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.
I really don't understand why people need to nitpick humorous little blog posts like this. I mean, it's a joke -- the point is to have some fun picking apart the technical details of a movie that clearly went above and beyond in that aspect compared to other movies. That goes without saying. It's just faux pedantry; it's all in good fun.
Even when this blog post gets into the technical inaccuracies it's just trivia, not nitpicking.
Movies want to keep you in the suspension of disbelief (that the storyline is real) and as a programmer it's been hard to do that with most "hacking" scenes in movies.
The only other blockbuster movie I can think of with a reasonably believable hacking scene was when Trinity used an openssl exploit in one of the Matrix sequels.
Trinity used nmap to find an actual openssl exploit. Even then, people were nitpicking over whether or not the exploit was known during the time period that the world inside the Matrix is purported to be, though IIRC that was in good fun.
It's even worse than this. When everytime you're "good" at something, you notice movies get it wrong, after some point you start to wonder, maybe they also get it wrong for all the things you're not good at, you just don't notice it.
So basically, it could be that movies get everything wrong.
The most annoying thing for me is hearing reporters talk about science or computers. By the time they get done "summarizing" a research result it bears only the faintest resemblance to reality, and often has been construed to mean the very opposite of the original published paper.
Then I realize that these same people report the business and political news, and realized that I probably don't have a clue what's actually going on in the world.
This is absolutely true. I had the opportunity to complain about this once to a big name Hollywood producer, and he told me that the rule of thumb that most movie makers use is, "If we don't know the difference, our audience won't either."
Occasionally they hire experts to be sure they get it right, but that is more the exception than the rule, and mostly happens when a feeling of realism is considered important for the part.
Exactly. My pet peeve is military depictions in movies. I can't recall a movie that's gotten even the basics right. I may be nitpicking, but it does detract from the viewing experience.
And I can't immerse in the Game of Thrones because Nigth's Watch members stroll around in the snow without hats. Any person who was in the cold temperature for the prolonged time would recognize it as complete nonsense. Every time I see it, I get this feeling "this looks wrong", and then, "oh, they are without hats again!"
Black Hawk Down, Jarhead come to mind as modern examples of basically correct (though the behavior of some of the Delta force in BHD is overly exaggerated).
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).
Did you watch hunger games, and how did that archery look? Apparently the actress spent 6 months+ practicing but I'd be interested to hear an informed point of view.
Actually, she just spend a few weeks practising with an Olympic competitor, i.e., nowhere near 6 months. I'm not an expert on these things, but it seemed to vary from scene to scene. Someone commented on the trailer and explained how it's very accurate, but there were a few shots in the movie where what the expert explained seemed missing (like "kissing" the string).
I practiced archery for about 5 years in my mis-spent youth, and it sure didn't seem right. If she spent 6 months on that, she didn't have good instructors, or she paid no attention at all.
(It wasn't horrible, but it was not worth 6 months of learning)
Haven't seen it yet, sorry. I've read the book but wasn't excited enough to make a beeline for the movie. Probably will see it sometime though.
From what I've seen of various shorts about the movie, the archery looks pretty good. I don't think she spent 6 months practising but she obviously spent some time on it with a good coach (a US Olympian, so she knows her stuff). The only thing they get wrong is that longbows aren't as accurate as they're portrayed, but that happens in every movie with an archer and it's just artistic license really.
Jeremy Renner, who plays Clint Barton ("Hawkeye") in the Avengers, claims he undertook extensive archery training in preparation for his role. Then, on set, they had him do things that "looked cool" rather than "were right" so it didn't really translate as he had expected.
He also said he sustained an archery related injury while filming which A) shouldn't happen if he'd had the proper training and B) would also affect his ability to use proper form while shooting.
I've been working to make a conscious effort over the past decade to willingly suspend my disbelief at the movies and just enjoy the entertainment for what it is trying to be, rather than what it is failing at. I've enjoyed movies much more the times I've been successful at it. Other times, like the "I guess we'll just make the new OS free since a copy of it leaked on the internet" scene in the new Tron, I couldn't get over, and I let it completely ruin the movie for me. (I found later that if I just start about 20 minutes into the movie and enjoy it as an awesome Daft Punk music video then I really love Tron: Legacy).
The stupidest little nitpick that I have, which shows up in nearly every movie and television show, is that someone makes an outgoing call, gets hung up on, and then the foley team adds in a new dial tone. I don't know why I continue to let it bug me, but I do. Joss Whedon complained in one of his commentaries (Joss Whedon does the best commentary tracks, by the way, check them out sometimes if you care about this stuff at all) that he always has to go back and cut out about 70% of what the foley artists try to add to every scene. Sounds exhausting, for everyone.
That scene didn't really bother me in Tron; I cut them a bit of slack for the use of a convincing Unix shell (also Emacs: http://jtnimoy.net/workviewer.php?q=178), but Tron's never been about realistic computing. And yeah, I was sold on the music + cooler lightcycles.
I have listened to some of Joss's commentary (Serenity and Firefly, unsurprisingly), although I hadn't heard that particular part. It does sound exhausting, but I guess refusing to budge on that sort of thing is what makes him a great writer/director.
Never seen the movie but my take away from the article was that I was really impressed they went as far as they did. The author of the article is just having fun, not criticizing it really.
Like I said, the point of movies is to tell a story. Sometimes this means glossing over bits, getting details wrong, or even presenting things out of order, because the important part is he plot. We all do this when we tell stories, it's human nature. We want to convey how awesome/important/sad/happy/whatever a moment was, and to do that we need to properly contextualize the emotion and key bits, not every detail. When the makers of a fictional story try to get largely unimportant details right, they are showing dedication to craft, not asking for technical advice.
Maybe it's because I'm ramping my team up for demo season, where I have to remind them and the researchers they work with that the grant reviewers haven't spend the last 6 months thinking real hard about the problem, and aren't as expert in the sub-field/topics as we are (they are pretty smart competent people, but they gave us money to do the work because presumably we know more about it than they do...). To do a demo and to make a movie are very similar. You need to convey the importance of the work, without making bogus claims (in demos about research, in movies its about plot breaking), and convey the context in which it can be understood. Sometimes this means leaving out or glossing over really cool technical stuff, because it doesn't actually matter to the bigger picture. Sometimes it means saying "this part is simulated with these assumptions because we don't know yet, or it still needs more reseach, but if true, it shows our point nicely". Sometimes it means showing things happen at 10x or .1x real time, because that is how you tell the story. It isn't lying or being stupid, it is getting points across.
Well anyway, that turned into a rant. TL;DR - Detail are not the point of movies, they are just a vehicle to help the point, we should applaud careful attention to them, not nitpick.