I just saw the movie Paycheck. The main character (played by Ben Affleck) is a reverse-engineer! His profession was even referred to as such in the movie.

The movie itself wasn't too bad, except for the fact that it had Ben Affleck in it, of course.

"Reverse-engineering" is a perfectly legal profession in the sense that one seeks to understand the operation of some software and to emulate its functionality without using the actual intellectual property of that software. In this context one team can view the "target" software and figure out what the heck it is doing and another group, required to be kept in strict isolation from the first group, attempts to come up with a solution that will work with the other's software, without utilizing it's code.

It's also done in the chemical and electronic industry all the time.

Regards,

1. Movie modems seem to transfer data at Gbps rather than Mbps...wonder what ISP they use...

2. Every program *always* has an override switch and the password is *always* guessable in 3 tries...

3. If you delete an open file from one terminal (evil guy discovers hero snooping on his file by checking the machine where he is working), it gets deleted at the other terminal where the hero is viewing it...

4. All office machines have trace programs on them that enable graphical (in AutoCAD 3-D) view of the building with terminals that are on so that its convenient for the evil guy sidekick to trace the hero reading his dirty dirty files...

5. The person whom the evil guy holds hostage (generally professor or doctor) can program in assembly and binary and probably even debug CMOS with his bare eyes and fingers!!

6. Hard disks and floppies are so resilient, that they are burnt, sunk, jumped on, made dirty by the shovels...and they still run the first time without any boot sector or read errors...gotta hand it to the awesone CD/DVD drives!!!

7. Everybody who can operate on a computer can crack any cryptically protected software using just desktop computers in 15 seconds flat!! (Guess the Zimmerman was lying when he said that it will take the time till the universe implodes again Then again, all companies crypt important documents with mere XORing.)

8. Software is cracked without debuggers, disassemblers, unpackers, uncrypters, dumpers etc. etc.

9. Heros always carry bus loads of cables with them to at-an-instant connect the laptop to ATMs, Mainframes, and god bloody knows what.

10. Heros almost always connect to the LAN without the wires or patchcords!!! Guess wireless is really popular globally!!

11. Wonder where the hero recharges his laptop....

12. AAAhhhh! The Big One!!! Almost ALL machines used in movies *DO NOT* seem to be operating on any known version of Windows! *nix users can now go wild with joy!!

13. Most machines are NEVER PCs. They are almost always Macintoshes or Powerbooks. Hmmm...

Well those last items are know as "product placement" where the film maker is actually paid to have certain products displayed/used in the films. They even occasionally pay actors to smoke. Cough, cough.

Regards,

nice list


hmm.. only time i saw this was in Clear and Present Danger. has it happened in many other movies?

better is Flash-movies
here i found some movie about REngineer esther
//atomfilms.shockwave.com/afassets/downloads/exe/heros_load_ad.exe

The motion picture industry uses Macs for the majority of their graphics, etc. Seems logical that's what they would feature in the flic.

vgb

I've seen it in at least a bunch of tv series, even if I don't remember any specifics. And it does of course always come with a nice animation on the screen too btw.

My favourites (most frustrating) are the electrical fires that seem to pop out of consoles (keyboards). I'm both an electrician and electronic technician, and I've never seen the likes of that in my entire career. I've seen plenty of smoke and sparks, but never coming out of a closed cabinet, or a keyboard.

The best one I saw was a 600 volt transformer blowing up. I'm glad I wasn't in the immediate vicinity, because there was molten copper flying everywhere. It was in an electrical room in an underground parkade, and the noise was deafening. There was so much smoke, you couldn't see anywhere in the parkade. It amazes me that Hollywood effects artists make up what they think is exciting whereas the real thing is much more awesome.

I used to marvel at the original Mission Impossible, when the black guy (Gregg Morris??) would make complex electronics seem mundane. He'd access a telephone circuit, with 100 cable pairs, and zero-in to the exact one he needed, from a convenient cabinet located outside, behind some bushes, in broad daylight. None of the terminals were marked, and even if they were, I've never seen one that tells you the specific circuit you need. You'd actually have to go into the building, find the telephone set you need, and trace it back through several intermediate cabinets to the main telephone room. That does not explain why there is a convenient box sitting outside, behind a bush, with the cable pair you need.

I've always marveled at how incredibly good the picture processing software is in movies and TV-series. It seems that no matter how blurry an image is, they can always "dig deeper in the pixels" to produce a perfect image of the bad guy (typically). Having tried a few times with photoshop myself, I really have to hand it to them - marvelous.

Fake

And speaking of things going bump in the night and not accurately reflected on film, I always marvel at how shells and rockets seem to go off without actually shaking the ground on which the camera happens to be located. Although my own experience with such things was not nearly as frequent as many others, I can attest that the noise, vibration, and the shaking of terra firma from such events is quite literally "breath taking" and will, on occasion, actually bounce one out of bed, let alone a fairly sound sleep.

And while it might not be true, as the movies are fond of saying, that you never hear the shot that kills you, you certainly won't remember it afterwards.

Keep your heads down out there.

but on the otherhand:
"By reverse engineering successful movies one can discover what moves human beings."
Regards,

I thought I was the only person who noticed such things

Ever notice how :

You can get access to the room with pasword locked door with a retina scan and fingerprint id with some thing that looks like a walkman with a cable and a card attached to it ?

Every team has a guy who is a computer ace and he can brute force the combination to a safe with a bazillion dollars in...with a laptop and 7 minutes.

The good guy knows just the right command to reveal all the secret files that he couldn't find with his 3 tries at the password.

Every database can be downloaded on to a floppy in 5 seconds while the building is engulfed in flames.

The bad guy file always has his picture and all the vital information including the last place he made a phone call from and what toilet tissue he wipes his ass with.

Everytime there is a disk for money transfer, the bad guy has no idea that the good guy made a copy. The bad guy never has a comp to check the disk before he hands over the million dollars

Gun fire in a building is deafening yet people can still hear each other speak.

A long time ago there was a movie that was so horrible the trailer ran a little thing that said "keep repeating to yourself, it's only a movie"

I love the movies

Woodmann

And if that wouldn't work after all, it always works to blast away the keypad with your gun. No matter how advanced the lock system is, the door will slide right open when someone does this.

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA

You are absolutely correct

Woodmann

whenever anyone wants to destroy a computer they just shoot the screen
and all data is lost...

and the major fault in paychek: his memory gets deleted after every job,
so how the heck does he learn new techniques 8) ?

Visiting places like this on his spare time between the projects maybe?

They only deleted specific things in his memory, directly relating to the job...

Well, they rather deleted specific periods of time, i.e. the periods during which he had worked on the project, but during that period all memories were deleted, including f*****g Uma Thurman.

hey you!

don't you see, i'm little girl here.. so no bad wordz!

he said FORKING, FORKING

Don't try to pull a Michael Powell /Janeth Jackson show of indignation here

Actually he didn't say anything of the kind. It was completely left to your imagination to fill in the spaces filled with "*"s and YOUR problem if you "imagined" a "bad wordz."

Regards,

>better is Flash-movies
>here i found some movie about REngineer esther
The girl carrying a cat,so pathetic like you

thanks for solving cat

want you to find some fun movie about me?

I just saw "The Day After Tomorrow" and I think I saw them using VMware when showing a presentation to the President. If anyone wants to try to confirm/disconfirm that, it looked to me like a Windows VMware guest window on top of some other host platform.

Always amazing how people can be on a military helicopter, yet talk to each other by slightly raising their voice... If you've even been on a helicopter, you can barely hear someone shouting unless you're using the comms.

Oh, and nice how so many o/s's are represented by 3d rotating cubes (hackers, swordfish, jurassic park, the net, etc etc etc)

disavowed, here's the scene you are referring to I assume, and I don't see any particular signs making me believe it's VMWare, do you? Looks like a desktop with some icons on it and some other non-VMWare app in front of it I think, and sure, the desktop doesn't cover the whole screen, but I don't see anything resembling the typical VMWare controls above it?

Sorry about the late reply, I didn't want to spoil the movie by looking around for that scene in the copy on my HD before seeing it at the cinema.

The building outlay was used in eraser when they where trying to find arnold accessing the disk from the head guys office. He was "isolating" access on the "secure" terminals.....

Ever see the film 'Casebusters'?

It's about these kids that decypher codes.

delta: yep, that's the scene. thanks for finding it. any chance of getting a higher-res pic of it?

Well, nah, not until a dvdrip is released anyway. But I frankly don't see anything in that picture indicating that it would be VMWare, do you?

yeah, i guess it makes sense that the dvd's not out yet

i didn't see anything in particular that indicated vmware, but as you said, there is a windows-like desktop in a window on the screen. lemme know when the dvd comes out

I removed the screen distortion from the original camera angle. As you can see, it is very revealing

Hehe, cool. What software did you use to do that? Did you just skew it in different directions until it was rectangular?

Photoshop can easily correct perspective problems like that.

-nt20

That looks like a terminal services session to me....

Well, if we had the nice tools that they always have in the movies, we could simply enlarge and "enhance" the image until we could make it all out clearly

-nt20

My friend is a movie director, so he let me borrow one of the image enhancement tools that they use in the movies, and you were right, it was indeed Terminal Services:

Bwahahahahahahahahahahaaaa

Delta, lol , making that image, there's 5-10 minutes of your life you'll never get back !

Regarding that image "utility" - you should rip the code with TMG Ripper Studio, and repackage it in your own GUI, you could make millions ! *sniff* (me smells acprotect)

-nt20

Hehe, yeah, I actually thought Acprotect was some kind of joke the first time I saw it, it's such a total rip-off of Asprotect!? And then the stupid bastards even have the nerve to give it almost the same NAME! I sometimes still wonder if it's a joke, or why Alexey hasn't sued their asses off (or well, sent the KGB after them or something anyway )...

Well, I managed to snarf a copy of that special image software you used, (I got some connections too)

Wondered if anyone noticed this in the screen - image pixelated for PG rating....

No wonder there was a storm. A storm in the pants..





-nt20

i recreated the scene in a 3d environment in 3d studio max, then overlaid the videocap as a 2d mesh. after that, i applied an extrusion algorithm and rotated the screen in 3dsmax, then rendered the scene and posted the output.

seriously though, i just used photoshop's free_transform/distort


as for the paris hilton pic posted... try blurring your eyes and looking at it. it's much easier to see the original image

hahaha omg... dELTA, that had me laughing for ages nice one!

Wow that is actually pretty cool, it works..never thought of that.

-nt20

For those of us whose eyes are always "blurring," the picture was always clear.

Regards,

Hey, that's really strange. When you blur your eyes, it's like you can see more detail than is actually there... Wonder if there is a medical/scientific explanation for that...

When you "blur" your eyes, you change the focal length of the image on the retina. There is probably also a tendency of the brain to "adjust" the image to resolve it into something that appears to make sense.

Regards,

So maybe there is a future for those "special" image enhancement programs from the movies hehehe

-nt20

The 'blurring' of the eyes first came to use in the days when watching 'blurred' (unpayed for) porn channels, IIRC

/(Dude in American Pie) screaming "It's a tit - That was a tit"

It's also interesting how changing the focal point allows you to see those stereograms (the pics that turn 3d when you stare at them)...

depixelated for those who are getting tired of blurring there eyes.
nice movie software.
Regards,

the magic of voxels.... er, hm.

yep, i guess those biopsychology classes i took were useful after all

Here's a program to turn your computer into one of those cool movie computers:

http://www.nullsoft.com/free/nbeep/



And here's a higher res image of that Day After Tomorrow computer screen, as promised earlier:

We, ALL, shall be eternally grateful for both offerings.

Regards,

un-warped picture attached below

is there anything nullsoft can't do?