1451: "Background Screens"

[neoliminal]

Title text: No way, we gotta rewind and cross-reference this map with the list of coordinates we saw on the other screen. This Greenland thing could be big.

This in no way validates how often I do this. I'm only posting here to show my support for looking at all the screens. Particularly in Terminator.

[ontos]

Yes!!! The aliens are attacking Australia too, we're important. Wait Why are they attacking the very centre of Australia?

[StClair]

Reminds me of a thread else-forum, which has been picking apart the science in Interstellar and ignoring, if not outright mocking, Nolan's Spielbergian* attempt(s) at emotional manipulation.

(* yes, that is totally an adjective, and a very appropriate one in this context. shut up.)

[Xantix]

"This Greenland thing could be big."

That Greenland thing is big, almost as big as Africa, just look at any Mercator Map.

[MoffKalast]

Heh I think that in Lucy there is a scene in a police station where a pc has a command prompt open with ipconfig displayed, to make it look ""hacky" i assume. I think I literally started laughing in the cinema.

[Arancaytar]

I tend to hit pause when I see random scrolling code somewhere. Apparently, the replicators in Stargate SG-1 ran on Javascript.

[rhomboidal]

The aliens can't be that intelligent: they fell for the old Greenland/Iceland naming deception.

[Keiji]

Heh I think that in Lucy there is a scene in a police station where a pc has a command prompt open with ipconfig displayed, to make it look ""hacky" i assume. I think I literally started laughing in the cinema.

Worse is when they display impossible IPs, like 192.0.2.317, not realizing the octets can't be above 255.

Or the incessant password/access-denied screens that are way more flashy than they ever would be on a real computer.

[ucim]

Worse is when they display impossible IPs, like 192.0.2.317, not realizing the octets can't be above 255.

It's to save the internet. They do this to ensure that no real IP addresses are harmed. However, if you take the parts that are out of range and apply a suitable transformation (which I will leave as an exercise to the reader), you will discover an interesting shiboleet.

Jose

[Eternal Density]

Here's some code from the Replicators from Stargate:

I guess they must use Node.js.
(They don't. Seriously that code has nothing to do with Replicators whatsoever. Someone must have said "we need some code for the screen, make it look techy." Lazy.)

[peregrine_crow]

Here's some code from the Replicators from Stargate:
I guess they must use Node.js.
(They don't. Seriously that code has nothing to do with Replicators whatsoever. Someone must have said "we need some code for the screen, make it look techy." Lazy.)

So what would you have want them to do, write a snippet of code that looks like it could plausibly come from a functioning AI? I mean, it isn't that hard, but it is still like half an hours work (or a lot more if you're not familiar with programming) for something that only a tiny percentage of your viewers will ever see and an even smaller percentage will be able to understand.

[obfpen]

The best on-screen code I can remember is from just a few weeks ago in, appropriately enough, The Code, which included examples like these:-

When opening a video:

Code: Select all

./ffmpeg -i 1134.avi

While hacking a remote system:

Code: Select all

grep -Rn "shell_exec *(" /var/www

After being discovered:

Code: Select all

/sbin/iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --destination-port ALL -s 195.51.100.* -j DROP
/sbin/service iptables save

Copying what was found:

Code: Select all

rsync -avzh root@198.51.100.1:/home /volumes

Progress indicator heading:

Code: Select all

telnet://physanto.com.au:8331

Making a local backup:

Code: Select all

cp -ar ../physanto /volumes/usb

Wiping the system:

Code: Select all

sudo mkfs -t vfat /dev/*

There's even a Sgt. L. Torvalds listed in a bit of police bodycam video. And the HTML that appears in one editor window is during a scene that involves defacing a website.

It's not perfect, and it still does the fancy graphics thing as in Every Frame A Painting's A Brief Look at Texting and the Internet in Film, but it's use hanging in the air is metaphorical; when real screens are shown, the output is a plausible, if not actual, GNOME 3 desktop.

[phlip]

I was watching a series called The Code recently... very interesting story, I recommend it. But besides that, they clearly put a lot of effort into what was on all their background screens, and all their little fancy graphical overlays and such... someone in their graphics department did their research properly.

Like, when the guy's hacking into computers, you get these fanciful representations of folders and documents flying around to make what would otherwise be just a shot of a guy typing vidually interesting, and fancy "ACCESS DENIED" messages and whatnot, but when you actually see what's on the screen, it all looks very reasonable. And the commands he runs, like when he starts getting hacked back, are all legitimate-looking. And then there's the little touches even in the fanciful shiny graphics looking Linux-like (with angular icons and fonts and whatnot) when hacker-man is working from his computer, but more OSX-like (with very smoothly-rendered typefaces) for journalist-man and his company, and very recognisable Windows XP title bars and such when they have to work from an internet cafe... someone in the graphics department for this show clearly put a lot of thought into exactly what would be actually running on each of these computers, and it's a really neat effect for people able to recognise it.

[edit] And I see that someone else pointed out the exact same show while I was running through the episodes taking screenshots (and getting distracted rewatching bits), so neat! ABC-drama high-fives all around.

But yeah, honestly, the least believable part of that whole hacking sequence is that the guy knows the exactly what parameters to pass to rsync, under pressure, without looking at the man page.

[rockym93]

There is an entire blog full of these. It's brilliant.

[Bersaelor]

As on iOS Developer I always calculate the time a movie was shot in, by the iOS version or iPad/iPhone models they use.

Oh no! He's going to kill... wait why does he still use iOS5?!

[drazen]

There is a military base in Thule, Greenland: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Air_Base

Even better, it's part of Air Force Space Command & NORAD:

"Thule Air Base is home to the 21st Space Wing's global network of sensors providing missile warning, space surveillance and space control to North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and Air Force Space Command (AFSPC)."

Guess those aliens knew more than Randall! It's quite possible a space-based invasion would attack an installation dedicated to monitoring air and space.

[SpitValve]

Here's some code from the Replicators from Stargate:

I guess they must use Node.js.
(They don't. Seriously that code has nothing to do with Replicators whatsoever. Someone must have said "we need some code for the screen, make it look techy." Lazy.)

To be more generous than it deserves; maybe this is just the code for the GUI part of the Replicator, and the back-end is hacked together with Perl?

[Quicksilver]

haha, I'm like this with whodunnits. I like to take notice of everything so I get it right.

[Xenomortis]

I guess they must use Node.js.
(They don't. Seriously that code has nothing to do with Replicators whatsoever. Someone must have said "we need some code for the screen, make it look techy." Lazy.)

To be more generous than it deserves; maybe this is just the code for the GUI part of the Replicator, and the back-end is hacked together with Perl?

Erm... I don't think that's being more generous.

[sotanaht]

Here's some code from the Replicators from Stargate:
I guess they must use Node.js.
(They don't. Seriously that code has nothing to do with Replicators whatsoever. Someone must have said "we need some code for the screen, make it look techy." Lazy.)

So what would you have want them to do, write a snippet of code that looks like it could plausibly come from a functioning AI? I mean, it isn't that hard, but it is still like half an hours work (or a lot more if you're not familiar with programming) for something that only a tiny percentage of your viewers will ever see and an even smaller percentage will be able to understand.

It should probably be an alien language and therefor not recognizable at all to viewers. Basically just a screen full of fake symbols that could plausibly be some sort of language construct. For an added bonus they could make it a simple cipher with a coded message for the audience, probably just a joke.

[HES]

It should probably be an alien language and therefor not recognizable at all to viewers. Basically just a screen full of fake symbols that could plausibly be some sort of language construct.

You mean like the part at the bottom of the image?

[cellocgw]

There is a military base in Thule, Greenland: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Air_Base

Even better, it's part of Air Force Space Command.

Guess those aliens knew more than Randall!

Little-known fact: that airbase runs a Top-Secret program to develop car-top carriers.

Lateral comment: while I do notice the absurd computer screen junk in most movies and tv shows, I have a similar problem with nature scenes. Being a long-time birder, I hate it when either images of birds or bird songs appear which are local to the actual filming location but most certainly not to the plot-line location.

haha, I'm like this with whodunnits. I like to take notice of everything so I get it right.

WhoDunnit? "Tell me more about... Trixie"
(hoping someone... anyone? gets the reference)

[Quicksilver]

There is a military base in Thule, Greenland: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thule_Air_Base

Even better, it's part of Air Force Space Command.

Guess those aliens knew more than Randall!

Little-known fact: that airbase runs a Top-Secret program to develop car-top carriers.

Lateral comment: while I do notice the absurd computer screen junk in most movies and tv shows, I have a similar problem with nature scenes. Being a long-time birder, I hate it when either images of birds or bird songs appear which are local to the actual filming location but most certainly not to the plot-line location.

haha, I'm like this with whodunnits. I like to take notice of everything so I get it right.

WhoDunnit? "Tell me more about... Trixie"
(hoping someone... anyone? gets the reference)

You're after my heart if that's a reference to the Who Dunnit pinball machine. I played it once years ago and loved the noir style, but I only really remember a few phrases and I doubt I'll ever see that pinball machine again.

[Jorpho]

I remember that pinball machine! It was pretty awesome. (I forgot about Trixie, though.)

Anyway, the example I always think of is a scene from Godzilla 2000 (i.e. the Japanese film), in which a monitor briefly but distinctly displays a list of games supported by a particular version of MAME.

[project2051]

On some older animes computer screens would sometimes have movie cast lists or script exerts on computer screens.

[KnightExemplar]

The best example of "Background Code" is when "The Matrix: Revolution" used a Zero-Day SSH Exploit to hack into a system. Yeah yeah, the 2nd movie doesn't exist. I understand. But there's this one scene that actually is pretty good.

You see, the Matrix was set in 1999. The Movie was made however, in 2003. The Matrix guys found an SSH exploit discovered in 2001 which Trinity / Neo would know about (since they're in the future), but which would work in 1999 (because the evil robots were perfectly recreating the year 1999).

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/4831

But the unexpected nod to hackerdom doesn't end there. Responding to the Nmap output , Trinity summons a program called "sshnuke" which begins "[a]ttempting to exploit SSHv1 CRC32."

Discovered in February, 2001 by security analyst Michal Zalewski, the SSH CRC-32 bug is a very real buffer overflow in a chunk of code designed to guard against cryptographic attacks on SSH version one. Properly exploited, it grants full remote access to the vulnerable machine.

So... yeah. The Matrix legitimately shows you how to hack a Unix system from 1999. Starting with NMap (to confirm the presence of the target computer), and uses a zero-day (erm... in 1999 at least) to bypass the password.

Spoiled for size:

Spoiler:

[jonawebb]

Every IT guy I know is bothered by the scene in "The Net" -- you know the one -- where Sandra Bullock types in an IP address starting with something like 378. Come on!

[Carteeg_Struve]

For additional fun, pause a movie when somebody is showing a newspaper with some big plot relevant headline... and then read the entire article beneath it.

[algorerhythms]

One of my favorites is in the movie "Office Space" where they deliberately made the screenshots make no sense. Depending on the scene, the computer was a Mac, a Windows 3.1 PC, an MS-DOS PC, or some combination of all of them.

And a Google Image search for "Office Space movie computer screen" is completely useless.

[Heimhenge]

For additional fun, pause a movie when somebody is showing a newspaper with some big plot relevant headline... and then read the entire article beneath it.

Yeah, I've paused on those frames many times, often having to move closer to the TV screen to read those other articles. Sometimes hilarious.

Used to do the same any time I saw a chess board with a game in progress, just to see if it was a legal configuration, or some classic "mate in X" setup. More times than not it's an illegal configuration, like with pawns on the first rank, or bishops on the same color squares (yes ... I know about promoting a pawn to a bishop to avoid a stalemate. But that's pretty frikkin' rare.)

[algorerhythms]

For additional fun, pause a movie when somebody is showing a newspaper with some big plot relevant headline... and then read the entire article beneath it.

Yeah, I've paused on those frames many times, often having to move closer to the TV screen to read those other articles. Sometimes hilarious.

Used to do the same any time I saw a chess board with a game in progress, just to see if it was a legal configuration, or some classic "mate in X" setup. More times than not it's an illegal configuration, like with pawns on the first rank, or bishops on the same color squares (yes ... I know about promoting a pawn to a bishop to avoid a stalemate. But that's pretty frikkin' rare.)

In the movie Canadian Bacon there's a scene where two characters are playing chess, and one of them picks up the knight and moves it one square forward like a pawn.

[rmsgrey]

Isn't this just a special case of the generic "Hollywood is full of people whose specialisations are in things like movie-making rather than the things they're making movies about, so the movies end up full of glaring inaccuracies that any expert in a vaguely related field could spot"?

What gets to me are the times when they have an expert on staff (or at least in the credits) and still screw things up...

[mathmannix]

Especially when you consider the budgets of movies like Independence Day ($75 million in 1996, about $110 million in today money)... How hard would it be to find a non-famous expert (or three for redundancy) in such things, like, say, one of the people on this forum who actually knows java from javascript (not me!) and pay them $1000 for the privilege to see their action/sci-fi/thriller/spy movie six months before almost anyone else, and find flaws in it? Throw in putting their name in the credits, and a lot of people would probably do it for free.

Rinse and repeat for each hobby or technical skill that your characters are supposed to know. Gandalf and Picard are playing chess? Bam, go on a chess forum to find a few chess nerds.

[SimonMoon5]

It should probably be an alien language and therefor not recognizable at all to viewers.

Except that after a certain point, all aliens in Stargate speak English. Sure, they have some language difficulties with the first alien races they meet, but after that, everybody speaks English. It isn't until Stargate: Universe where they start to have some difficulty communicating with aliens again, but those aliens aren't just in another galaxy, they're in a really far away galaxy.

And as far as I know (though I may have missed something), Stargate doesn't have "universal translators" (like in Star Trek) or TARDIS telepathic circuits (like in Doctor Who) for the easy translation of alien languages.

So, it's just a weird coincidence that most aliens speak English.

[SecondTalon]

Because nothing says "Waste of time for shit only 8 people will notice" more than having a slew of volunteers grind production to a halt for 6 months.

And time=money.

[Pfhorrest]

Except that after a certain point, all aliens in Stargate speak English.

As much as I loved the show, this and the change in how gate address work are two things that bugged me that could have totally been hand-waved with sufficiently advanced alien technology recovered in one of the early episodes or something.

For the language thing that you've already explained: have some aliens have invented a universal translator. SG1 comes across it on an early mission and reverse-engineers it, or establishes trade with the aliens who make them… or maybe it's Goa'uld tech and they just steal them from every Jaffa they kill. Though then you have the problem of why Ra wasn't 'speaking English' in the movie, but maybe only the Jaffa use them, since no System Lord is ever going to bother speaking to some lowly human or other alien, much less one who can't even speak proper Goa'uld. Since most humans in the galaxy are descended from Goa'uld slaves, the translators should work for their variant languages automatically or at least very quickly; for weirder aliens, you just have little while as the translators do the translation, or the more advanced aliens can have their own universal translators that already speak English (or close enough to work out a quick translation).

The gate address thing that bugs me is this: in the movie, gate addresses are six-digit spatial coordinates of another gate, relative to the dialing gate, using landmarks (constellations) that are only meaningful relative to the dialing gate… and special "enter key" (so to speak) unique to the dialing gate. Never mind that that's a pretty stupid system to begin with (why do you need more than three coordinates, why would they be specified by landmarks instead of just numbers, never mind that those constellation landmarks are not places in space at all but only look like "groups of stars" from our vantage point, and why does your "enter key" have to be different for every gate)… just to stick with the movie canon, dumb as it is, the address of any gate should vary based on what gate you're dialing from, not only a different sequence of symbols, but the symbols used themselves should be different. That was the main obstacle in the movie, figuring out how to dial back!

But in the show, instead, a gate address is like a phone number. It doesn't matter where you are, you punch in some series of constellation-as-seen-from-Earth and it connects you to another gate. In some later-season episodes it's even implied that the gate symbols have corresponding syllables, and that the gate address, pronounced out loud like that, spells the name of the planet, like some kind of Ancient DNS system.

I understand why, like language, it would be a huge pain to have to figure out new gate coordinates every time they visit another planet. But the solution is just as simple, if not simpler, because it could be implemented as a smartphone app with no alien technology necessary. If you know one planet's gate address from Earth, and the reference constellations of the different dialing gate (which you can get by looking at that gate or its DHD), and where the stars really are in 3D space (which you can bring in a database from Earth), and where the different dialing gate is in 3D space (which you can compute if you know its address from Earth, which you should, if you're there), then you can have a program that computes the true location in 3D space of the destination planet relative to Earth, what the night sky should look like from the planet of departure, what series of constellations from the departure planet would form coordinates (however that works) to that other planet, and thus what gate symbols you need to dial to get there from here. All that doesn't necessarily need to be explained to the audience: they just have a gadget that translates gate-addresses-from-Earth to gate-addresses-from-whever-else-you-find-yourself, by taking a picture of the gate or DHD and punching in the address-from-Earth of the gate you want to dial.

[Coyoty]

Here's some code from the Replicators from Stargate:

I guess they must use Node.js.
(They don't. Seriously that code has nothing to do with Replicators whatsoever. Someone must have said "we need some code for the screen, make it look techy." Lazy.)

The Replicators seem to have a thing for spoons.

[drazen]

But in the show, instead, a gate address is like a phone number. It doesn't matter where you are, you punch in some series of constellation-as-seen-from-Earth and it connects you to another gate. In some later-season episodes it's even implied that the gate symbols have corresponding syllables, and that the gate address, pronounced out loud like that, spells the name of the planet, like some kind of Ancient DNS system.

I believe The Ancients actually fled (or was it returned?) to Earth from the Pegasus Galaxy. They were the basis of the legend of the Knights of the Round Table. It's also how some humans had the ATA gene that let them activate Ancient technology via touch. So when they seeded the Milky Way Galaxy gate system, they probably just did everything from their own reference point -- constellations as seen from Earth.

With you on the language bit, though. The best I can hand-wave is that Daniel Jackson taught them all ancient Egyptian, because humans are all over the Milky Way and they got brought there when the Gou'ald were ruling ancient Egypt. So we hear English, but it's really Egyptian, unless they're dealing with The Trust or maybe the Lucian Alliance (whose origins I'm unclear on). I do remember that the Gou'ald originally used the rocky-looking Unas alien race as a host, but eventually came to prefer humans, who apparently must have made better Jaffa as well (weren't Jaffa altered humans? I think in one episode, a Gou'ald takes over SGC with some sort of sex pheromone and tries to make Col. O'Neill into a Jaffa).

Also, I really should have used those brain cells for more useful information.

[Pfhorrest]

I believe The Ancients actually fled (or was it returned?) to Earth from the Pegasus Galaxy. They were the basis of the legend of the Knights of the Round Table. It's also how some humans had the ATA gene that let them activate Ancient technology via touch.

That's all true, but…

So when they seeded the Milky Way Galaxy gate system, they probably just did everything from their own reference point -- constellations as seen from Earth.

…the Milky Way gate system existed long before that happened. The Ancients settled the Milky Way first, then mostly died or ascended when the plague wiped them out, except for Atlantis which fled to Pegasus and started over again (which is why Pegasis tech is newer and cooler than Milky Way tech). When the Wraith overran Pegasus, the last survivors at Atlantis gated back to Earth, because Earth evolution had in the interim been guided into a "second evolution" of the Ancients' form (which is to say, humans), so there were people there to live with, primitive though they were.

The Beta Gate on Earth (the one recovered from the former site of Atlantis in Antarctica) was at the time of its discovery the oldest gate known, so I think the writers had some idea in their minds at some point that Earth was the origin of the gate network somehow, except that later episodes then established that the planet Dakara was where the Ancients first settled after their original arrival in the Milky Way, so Earth was probably just an early planet in the gate network, not the first. It's still unclear why they guided evolution on Earth rather than anywhere else; maybe it was just the last Ancient world to fall to the plague, since Atlantis was apparently the last city standing, so maybe the only Ancients around to instigate that guided evolution plan were the ones living on Earth, so they just did it there when they left. It's weird though because Atlantis is also said to be the newest Ancient city, the last one built before their fall. So it's weird: Earth is not the first Ancient world in this galaxy and so probably not the first gate in the gate network, but it does have the oldest gate that we've heard of on screen, but it also was home to the newest city the Ancients ever built, and was probably the last Ancient world to fall, and it was the world where they set up their successors to evolve, and the one to which the last of them later returned to live out the rest of their lives.

But anyway, from the movie we know that not all gates have Earth constellations on them, since that was a major plot point: Daniel Jackson needed to figure out how to dial Earth from Abydos, and couldn't do that without learning some info from the locals. Mostly the problem was he needed to know the point-of-origin symbol, which isn't a constellation, but apparently he had to do something to figure out the rest of it first, even if that was comparatively easy for him.

I do remember that the Gou'ald originally used the rocky-looking Unas alien race as a host, but eventually came to prefer humans, who apparently must have made better Jaffa as well (weren't Jaffa altered humans? I think in one episode, a Gou'ald takes over SGC with some sort of sex pheromone and tries to make Col. O'Neill into a Jaffa).

That's correct. The Goa'uld evolved on the same world as the Unas (P3X-888) and initially used them as hosts, however they apparently don't heal as well, either from the Goa'uld's own innate healing abilities or especially with the sarcophagus technology, as humans do; likely because the sarcophagus was designed by Ancients for Ancients and so works better on re-evolved Ancients a.k.a. humans than some random alien lizard-men. So when Ra discovered Earth, and found humans made better hosts, he began exporting them throughout the galaxy, and pretty soon the Unas were pretty much discarded as any use to the Goa'uld. And the modern Jaffa are all modified humans, yes; it's unclear whether there were ever Unas Jaffa, or just Unas hosts and slaves.

Thinking about Ra arriving on Earth and the movie's subtle suggestion that he was a "grey alien" reminds me of another thing that bothers me about the series, as much as I love it: the Asgard. That they are named that, specifically. Asgard is a place. The only mention it in the first episode where those aliens are encountered was when Thor called himself "high commander of the Asgard fleet", which anyone with any familiarity with the Norse mythology that underlies them, or Norse languages in general, should know is something akin to "high commander of the Earth fleet". Imagine if a human introduced himself as high commander of the Earth fleet, and those aliens thereafter referred to our species, not our planet, as "the Earth"; like, four of us show up and they're like "four Earth are here to visit us". That's how stupid calling those aliens "the Asgard" are. They should be the goddamn Aesir goddamnit, and their planet or galaxy or somewhere should be called Asgard. But no, some stupid writer read Thor's lines from that first episode and thought "Asgard" was the name of their species and now we're stuck with it.

[da Doctah]

But no, some stupid writer read Thor's lines from that first episode and thought "Asgard" was the name of their species and now we're stuck with it.

They screwed up the names of things more than once. I seem to recall an episode in which they use the word "chimera" to mean "creature that sucks men's souls", when it should really be "creature made up of parts of two or more unrelated species".

(Happened a few times over on "Charmed" too. Someone read something that said "scrying" meant "divination using crystals" and decided it involved suspending a crystal over a map and letting it swing back and forth. What it really refers to is viewing remotely by gazing into a crystal ball.)