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What movie accurately depicts your job and why is it wrong

Off Topic by quinnbizz 26 replies 1.6K views
quinnbizz

Member OP

#1

WarGames. I know, I know. But I was 12 when I saw it, and that's why I learned to whistle into a payphone. The movie is wrong in basically every particular — no 56K modem sounds like that, no password cracker prints characters one at a time, and the "shall we play a game" voice synthesis was pure fantasy in 1983.

But it got the *vibe* right, IMO. The loneliness of dialing into remote systems at 2 AM. The texture of green phosphor. The feeling that somewhere out there, a machine was waiting for you to find it. YMMV, but that's what I chase in this job still.

What about you all? What movie claimed your job and lied beautifully?

...
kate3

Member

#2

Swordfish. The "hacker" breaks 128-bit encryption in 60 seconds while a gun is held to his head and a helicopter rappels through a window.

The virtualization tax on that scene is approximately 400%. In reality, the kernel would have panicked from the memory pressure of rendering all those spinning cubes. No cgroup limits in Hollywood.

OpenVZ would have at least contained the explosion to a single container. https://linuxcontainers.org

virsh list --all | wc -l: 47
HeadRich

Member

128GB or nothing

#3

What was the RAM situation on that decryption rig anyway

Seriously though Hackers 1995
They skateboard through a corporate office with a 28.8 PCMCIA card
I had that exact card
It was 2MB RAM max
The movie shows it rendering 3D pipes in real time
My actual laptop could barely run win95 with 8MB
I had 32MB later
Humblebrag
Still couldnt do 3D pipes

pam3

Member

Latency Witch

#4

Mr. Robot observed greater technical accuracy than most depictions; however, the latency between Elliot's apartment and the Steel Mountain data center would have been approximately 45ms[1], not the instantaneous responses depicted. The show observed proper use of Kali Linux tools but compressed timeframes by a factor of 10^3.

[1] Observed via traceroute to similar upstate NY facilities, RFC 792.

100% packet loss at hop 3
dadlime

Member

stable > testing

#5

Office Space. Not even a tech movie (well, kind of). The printer scene is my entire career in 90 seconds. The "PC load letter" error (like all printer errors) contains no actionable information. The semicolons in the error log are decorative. And the catharsis of destroying the machine is the only valid troubleshooting step left.

I have, in fact, taken a printer to a field. There is no RFC for this. There should be.

PetraSuper

Member

network boot believer

#6

Which printer model, HP or Lexmark

boot anything, anywhere, anytime
StuSpock

Member

NTP fundamentalist

#7

Which kernel version handled that memory pressure

armstrongvds

Member

ARM Enjoyer

#8

Office Space is basically a documentary.

one small ping for man...
kate3

Member

#9
StuSpock said:
Which kernel version handled that memory pressure

2.4.20-pre11 with the Rik van Riel VM, obviously. The OOM killer in that era had no mercy and no cgroup awareness. I watched it take out init once on a Debian woody box.

The real answer is that no kernel handles "render 3D cubes while brute forcing AES" well because that workload is fictional.

virsh list --all | wc -l: 47
dadlime

Member

stable > testing

#10
PetraSuper said:
Which printer model, HP or Lexmark

HP LaserJet 4MV. Inherited from a defunct architecture firm, had 1.2 million pages on the counter. The fuser was already making a noise like a bearing full of gravel. I gave it a dignified end.

Lexmark would have jammed before I reached the field.

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