Software Development

11. Any password on remote site is breaking in about one minute.

Anonymous writes: 12. Even just knowing how to use a computer means you can 'enhance' a pixelized zoom of a water drop to see the reflection in it.

Anonymous writes: 12. Even just knowing how to use a computer means you can 'enhance' a pixelized zoom of a water drop to see the reflection in it.

13. Any copying of data usually gets slower as it reaches 100%.

Mr. Fart writes: 14. You can create a 100% accurate 3D model of any area or building just by typing one or two commands into the terminal.

Mike W writes: We (programmers) are all too aware that Hollywood does a completely abysmal job of accurately depicting how computers work, but the one scene that I think tops all others in terms of absolute stupidity and in terms of blasting way past any sane limits of the whole "suspension of disbelief" thing, is the scene from Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum writes a virus to bring down an alien mothership's defenses. No manuals, no nothing, and it only takes him like 2 minutes. Presumably alien computers might have a completely different architecture, all the way down to the very lowest levels of the hardware. Do they even use transistors, or anything remotely close to a transistor? Do their computers represent numbers in binary, or some other base, or in some completely unexpected way? Wouldn't it be just as likely (if not exceedingly likely) that their computer technology might be eons more advanced and therefore completely unrecognizable to us, possibly depending on laws of physics we haven't even discovered yet? Not to mention that a "virus" depends entirely on the ability to exploit flaws in the host system. So how can you write a virus if you have ZERO clue what the host system is like. So what that in the movie, the government had been studying the crashed spaceship for the past 50 years. You telling me Jeff Goldblum's character was smart enough to absorb 50 years of research in 2 seconds, and then turn around and write a successful virus in 2 minutes? I normally have no problem with just turning on my "suspension of disbelief" filter, and just sitting back and enjoying the movie, but Independence Day not only exceeded my ability to suspend disbelief, it blew it to bits, and pissed on the ashes. Even Sandra Bullock's movie The Net did a better job of depicting how computers work than Independence Day did, and that's *really* saying something.