Posts Tagged ‘powerful computers’

Running List of Hollywood Computer Myths

Over the past few years I have seen a few of these Holly­wood Com­pu­ter myth lists.  I figu­red that why not try and collate as many as I can find and post them.  If you know of any­more, let me know and I will be more then happy to add it.

1. Hac­king is child’s play
2. Com­pu­ters will always turn bad… or go disas­trously wrong
3. User inter­fa­ces haven’t impro­ved since 1982
4. CCTV can show you what you had for breakfast
5. Pass­words are pathetic
6. Macs are everywhere… and they’re angry
7. PDAs and mobi­les are absurdly powerful
8. Robots are made in the most ridi­cu­lous form factors
9. Voice recog­ni­tion is flawless
10. Hac­king Will Let You Steal Any Dam­ned Thing You Want
11. Your Per­so­nal and Social Life Can Be Per­ma­nently Dis­mant­led By Peo­ple Who Know Stuff About Computers
12. A Com­pu­ter Might Become Self-Aware At Any Moment
13. Word pro­ces­sors never dis­play a cursor.
14. You never have to use the space-bar when typing long sentences.
15. All moni­tors dis­play inch-high letters.
16. High-tech com­pu­ters, such as those used by NASA, the CIA, or some such govern­men­tal ins­ti­tu­tion, will have easy to unders­tand graphi­cal inter­fa­ces. Those that don’t have inc­re­dibly power­ful text-bases com­mand shells that can correctly unders­tand and exe­cute com­mands typed in plain English. Coro­llary: You can gain access to any infor­ma­tion you want by simply typing “ACCESS ALL OF THE SECRET FILES” on any key­board. Like­wise, you can infect a com­pu­ter with a des­truc­tive virus by simply typing “UPLOAD VIRUS” (see “For­tress” or “Inde­pen­dence Day”).
17. All com­pu­ters are con­nec­ted. You can access the infor­ma­tion on the villain’s desk­top com­pu­ter, even if it’s tur­ned off.
18. Power­ful com­pu­ters beep whe­ne­ver you press a key or whe­ne­ver the screen chan­ges. Some com­pu­ters also slow down the out­put on the screen so that it doesn’t go fas­ter than you can read. The *really* advan­ced ones also emu­late the sound of a dot-matrix printer.
19. All com­pu­ter panels have thou­sands of volts and flash pots just under­neath the sur­face. Mal­func­tions are indi­ca­ted by a bright flash, a puff of smoke, a sho­wer of sparks, and an explo­sion that for­ces you backwards.
20. Peo­ple typing away on a com­pu­ter will turn it off without saving the data.
21. A hac­ker can get into the most sen­si­tive com­pu­ter in the world before inter­mis­sion and guess the sec­ret pass­word in two tries.
22. Any PERMISSION DENIED has an OVERRIDE func­tion (see “Demo­li­tion Man” and count­less others).
23. Com­plex cal­cu­la­tions and loa­ding of huge amounts of data will be accom­plished in under three seconds. Movie modems usually appear to trans­mit data at the speed of two gigaby­tes per second.
24. If a disk has got encryp­ted files, you are auto­ma­ti­cally asked for a pass­word when you try to access it.
25. No mat­ter what kind of com­pu­ter disk it is, it’ll be rea­da­ble by any sys­tem you put it into. All appli­ca­tion soft­ware is usa­ble by all com­pu­ter plat­forms. The more high-tech the equip­ment, the more but­tons it has (Aliens). Howe­ver, ever­yone must have been highly trai­ned, because the but­tons aren’t labelled.
26. Most com­pu­ters, no mat­ter how small, have reality-defying three– dimen­sio­nal, active ani­ma­tion, photo-realistic graphics capability.
27. Lap­tops, for some strange rea­son, always seem to have ama­zing real-time video phone capa­bi­li­ties and the per­for­mance of a CRAY Supercomputer.
28. Whe­ne­ver a cha­rac­ter looks at a VDU, the image is so bright that it pro­jects itself onto his/her face (see “Alien”, “2001”).