- a bunch of nmap appearances (notably Die Hard 4 and the Bourne Ultimatum, also one of the Matrix movies)
- some default OpenBox with XTerms in a few series
- KDE quite a number of times too
- SSH, bash and Unix FS exploration (cd, ls -l and its output, find, grep) at times
In fact it's sad that so much of the computer scenes are bad, but I've seen enough actually good attempts at being realistic that I can't remember where I saw them. What's sure is that the trend is upwards.
The Social Network was good about it. Someone online actually reedited the scene where he was grabbing images from frat sites and edited in scenes from other films, like Hacker's "virtual skyscrapers", and suddenly it was like a real Hollywood film again!
We recognize when movies dumb computer stuff down, but the truth is they do it always!
Imagine sitting beside a big horse nerd and every time a horse is on the screen and makes this typical horse noise they would comment "the horse didn't make the sound" or white walkers are killing the night watch behind the wall and "this horse is not really frightened but relaxed and listens curiously" or every time there is a mighty black Frisian horse in a movie, which believe me hey are a lot!, they would comment how wrong and stupid it is that Zorro/Prince of Persia/the Spartans are riding Frisians.
Or the "click, click" empty revolver sound on a semi-automatic pistol. This pretty much only happens if you're evil though.
The slide just never seems to lock back like it should unless the hero has two guns that need to be thrown on the ground before he/she walks forward defiantly and grabs two MORE guns.
You don't have to imagine a horse expert getting upset about unrealistic portrayals of horses. Check out this take on the Spielberg film _War Horse_ for a lack of "agricultural realism:" "Ploughing that stony virgin (never ploughed) field with a team of sturdy cobs would have been improbable; with a puny thoroughbred it was ludicrous."
They're not reporting fact. They're weaving a fantasy.
Whatever your field is, if you want to got stark raving mad, watch a movie made about it.
At the very least, the people writing, acting, and directing your world have little or no idea of what it's really like. And even if they do, they're taking deliberate liberties to embellish or interpret the realm to make it more telegenic.
An interesting exception: movies looking in on themselves -- at movies, TV, and entertainment. There's frequently embellishment, still (people and events are more glamorous / beautiful / hip than they are in reality), but there's often a lot of real insight.
There's real insight whenever movies talk about people.
Best example in a field I'm familiar with - "Strictly Ballroom". Sure, everybody was over the top, but anybody who was ever involved in competitive ballroom dancing will recognize all the archetypes and be able to relate to the various things said about dancers.
For some reason, it's easier to swallow that characters are exaggerated, instead of facts. (This being HN, I fully expect a reply within the next 15 minutes explaining the exact psychological effect, complete with links to relevant papers ;)
I paused the movie on all computer shots, and they're all legit. He's using emacs to hack Perl code in the beginning, all of the computers have Linux desktops, and most importantly, when they say things like "I need a dedicated Linux box running Apache with a MySQL back end", it sounds like something the character says all the time. Typically in movies, you can tell actors aren't familiar with the terms they're using because they emphasize them, as if they're trying them out.
Sorkin has a tendency write over-specific dialog, with lots of jargon. For this he is lauded for being accurate, but it sounds stilted. Throw in three or four overwrought soliloquies, and the man wins an Academy Award. I just don't understand his appeal.
audiobook narrators are really hit-or-miss on technical material, at least the kind that's sparsely distributed through some types of novels--i've heard them really butcher computer and military jargon quite frequently. (can't remember anything specific off the top of my head right now, but i think there was something fairly egregious in one of the Kris Longknife books.)
Forget technical terms; I once heard a particularly bad audiobook narrator refer to 'hallow-tipped bullets'. (He also mispronounced plenty of technical terms.)
Matrix 2 rather famously involved an actual ssh escalation using nmap. Takedown (aka Track Down) was another fairly accurate example of hacking (though highly inaccurate historically). One of the more famous examples of "Movie OSes", Jurassic Park (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFUlAQZB9Ng), actually was a real unix system running FSN
The overall premise was a little over the top, but WarGames (the older one) got some of the detail correct. In 1983, no less, so it's replete with dial-up sounds and everything!
WarGames was a marvelous movie! With the exception of WOPR, all of the computer usage was fairly accurate, with a few fudges such as that speech module being audible everywhere, when it clearly says that he bought it for his home computer to read terminal output. Everywhere else a computer is shown being used, it's fairly mundane, e.g., a librarian doing searches for books on Falken. There's no "computers are magic" crap-ola that goes on in later hacker-themed films.
As for WOPR, he is based on a real cold-war program called SIOP (Single Integrated Operational Plan), under which the President could tentatively select nuke targets and run computer simulations of what might happen. WOPR, unlike a lot of movie AIs, is not even particularly malicious; he is just running what he thinks is a simulation, blissfully unaware of the stakes, as any computer program without sufficient "common sense" would be.
Probably the biggest exaggeration in that movie was the shots of the NORAD command center, which NORAD officials at the time stated was what they wished they had rather than what they actually had. The filmmakers were not permitted access to the insides of NORAD so again, they had to make shit up.
you never read the book, which has named the apple notebooks and some shareware software (product placements which are almost gone by now). The main character(s) explicitly saved up for the given machine (although the movie isn't accurate down to the model)
the books all had this odd habit of being very specific about brands--Lisbeth's favorite microwave pizza, her computers, i think even the names of the ikea furniture. idk if that's normal in swedish writing or if it was just larsson....
- a bunch of nmap appearances (notably Die Hard 4 and the Bourne Ultimatum, also one of the Matrix movies)
- some default OpenBox with XTerms in a few series
- KDE quite a number of times too
- SSH, bash and Unix FS exploration (cd, ls -l and its output, find, grep) at times
In fact it's sad that so much of the computer scenes are bad, but I've seen enough actually good attempts at being realistic that I can't remember where I saw them. What's sure is that the trend is upwards.