Great book, except for the bit about being able to boot an Apple ][ with a binary from a SETI download.
[I've often wondered what a computer and OS designed by an extraterrestrial civilization would look like. But it's impossible to for just us to project our own systems out any reasonable amount of time. It's unclear that we'll even have keyboards and displays 100 years from now, or that we'll have replaced C with something better <-- troll :-) ]
For all of Independence Day's faults, I couldn't forgive the fact that Will Smith flew up to the alien mother ship and plugged in a USB key (containing the virus which destroyed the ship (er, spoiler)).
> I couldn't forgive the fact that Will Smith flew up to the alien mother ship and plugged in a USB key (containing the virus which destroyed the ship (er, spoiler)).
Only that this is not what happened in the movie. Jeff Goldblum tried to get out of "his" satellite links that pirate signal (= alien communications hijacking) that distorted the TV transmissions. He found and partly reverse engineered its line coding between his arrival at the TV station and his lunch break, identifying a recurring pattern that he (correctly) identified as a countdown.
Later at Area 51 (that scene is only found in the extended edition) he's shown a piece of alien tech in the crashed ship the A51 scientists can make no sense of, but turns out to transceive (and display) the same pattern as the pirate signal used by the aliens.
Eventually he arrives at the idea of engineering a signal pattern that, when injected into the aliens' communications network will (temporarily) shut down the ships' shields, simply by glitching the responsible controllers. It's never stated how that signal pattern is generated, but if it makes you feel better, assume it was some kind of fuzzing method.
When they go up to the mothership they don't "plug in" a USB storage device. Watch that sequence again. Goldblum is first running a program on his computer that synchronizes with the aliens' communication network's signal pattern and then uses that link to inject the glitching signal.
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Yes, the timeframe is more than optimistic short. But it's not something that's logically impossible. In fact it's one of the better parts of the movie IMHO. And all the people who complain about "how did he do this without knowing their computer architecture?" definitely never looked into, or did reverse engineer a completely black box piece of computation equipment. It's definitely possible; yes it takes a lot of patience, but it can be done.
That's because all of our tech was based off the roswell crash, that's the hand wavy way of explaining the compatibility. That and a telepathic species can afford to be complacent on internal security.
The one I can't forgive is the aliens having telepathy in the first place. So much sci fi has this and it ruins the story for me as much as it would if a wizard showed up.
For one, I've never seen the telepathy be interfered with by other electromagnetic radiation or anyone build a faraday cage to limit the communication. Telepathy goes right through the deflector shield in star trek.
[I've often wondered what a computer and OS designed by an extraterrestrial civilization would look like. But it's impossible to for just us to project our own systems out any reasonable amount of time. It's unclear that we'll even have keyboards and displays 100 years from now, or that we'll have replaced C with something better <-- troll :-) ]