Considering that most things about the movie The Bourne Ultimatum and that it was well done concerning IT were already mentioned in the previous gibberish post this will rather become a short blog post and I will get straight to it.
Well, to put this down as “gibberish” would be unfair, because it’s quite reasonable information right there. It’s rather what would be called “continuity goofs” over at the IMDb. Furthermore my remarks in the introduction of the first part of the blog series still apply, that with current HD quality movies, it’s easy to pull up a still and check the information sold to us by the movie makers.
I have to admit, the people responsible for The Bourne Ultimatum have done a pretty good job, both with the movie in general and as far as IT authenticity is concerned. (As a small side-note: sorry, idealists, but I have not read the book)
However, there are a few things (to be followed), where they did sloppy work – remember when Nicky says “it’s being blocked by the firewall”?
A few days ago, Google launched their version of social networking in the shape of Google+.
Like most Google projects, this seems to be in a semi-closed beta phase allowing members to invite new people. My guess is they randomly selected Google accounts that were automatically joined into the program for trying it out. Ever since then a huge wave of asking for and giving out invites has occurred.
The blog series of computer gibberish in movies began with this post, where you can also find the introduction to the general topic.
Following part 1, where they just punched in random keys and numbers, we can see a higher level of “gibberish” in The Girl who played with Fire, because they bothered to put “real” text:
After a long history of incidents/accidents, I’ve been using my iPhone 3GS (new bootrom) with regular iOS4 for a couple of days. However, I had to do without any mobile internet – even though my contract was fine and it had been working just fine with 3.1.2.
I’ve pretty much tried every instruction that’s out there which has anything to do with enabling mobile internet. Removing SIM-card, resetting APN (even though my provider doesn’t even need any APN settings), completely resetting network settings – along with disabling+enabling mobile data connections and/+ 3G for a thousand times. The “E” or the “3G” was showing up fine (depending which one I enabled), nevertheless, no connection could be made from any app.
We all know those scenes from movies, where we see a computer screen while the NOC-list is being copied or when someone logs into a mainframe in order to disable the power of half a city (via SSH btw). Some are done well or very well (as the mentioned SSH one) others poorly researched or even plain lazy.
While watching such scenes, we usually immediately recognize whether it’s authentic or just crap. Nowadays modern high resolution+definiton movie formats make it even possible to pause the movie and verify all the text that we see on computer screens in such scenes.
Recently, when I watched the (quite brutal) movie “Unthinkable” I saw a real killer:
Recently I came across the situation where I created a webpage on which I wanted to include some raw XML data in a <textarea> so the user could see that XML data including all tags and stuff. What made the setup special was, that in this scenario I didn’t just put a predefined XML formatted data inside the textarea, but the XML data was supposed to be inserted into the webpage (into the textarea) on the client-side via Javascript.
(In order to give you a little bit more information about the whole picture: the source XML data – to be inserted on the fly – might change and should be able to be updated without reloading the whole page)
