What next? A GUI version of Ping? Oh wait… Never mind…

I also remember there were many completely arbitrary departures from the book in there that made no sense. The most jarring was probably swapping kids around. I think that in the book the girl was younger and the boy was the computer geek who “knew unix”. In the movie they swapped them around having an older girl and a younger boy. Why? My guess is nepothism. Someone’s daughter/son needed a role in that picture.

@Steve: Not to mention that an average pistol can usually fit 50+ rounds in it’s magazine. Or, you know - whatever number is dramatically appropriate. It may be a 100 sometimes.

I especially like when the hero loads his revolver with 8 rounds, and then shoots 16 times in a row. Fun!

I also love how in the movies you can just turn over a table and use it as cover. Somehow the 1/4″ of plywood becomes bullet proof when you hide behind it. The bullets may be smashing through door, walls and other furniture but that crappy IKEA table - perfect cover!

Then there’s cars that explode for no reason (well, Pintos did, but they were another thing all together).

Crichton collects a fair amount of background information before writing a book, even though he then exaggerates certain points which then make the plot.

If my memory serves me correctly, in the book Prey, the protagonists friend has a shirt that reads something along the lines: “Beware, as I am the root”.

@astine: OMG! That is brilliant! I’m totally migrating my data to Tetris encryption like tomorrow!

@jambarama: Heh! The GUI using Visual Basic to get an IP is actually plausible. That is to say I actually knew people like that. Seriously, I can totally picture that happening and then the girl spending next 3 weeks coding it, delivering half assed, buggy app and getting a raise and becoming the talk of the department.

Then they finally the director summons the sysadmin and tells him to deploy this ground breaking VB app on all the machines. The sysadmin tries to explain but the director insists that the VB app is better because it has a GUI and awesome splash screen and a cute 3D animation of a running dog that is displayed during the 5 minutes the app takes to “initialize”.

Yep, yep, yep. I have seen it before!

The other one is just pathetic though. I wonder if Ubisoft got paid for the product placement.

As for the professional people hating on movies that talk about their profession - I think you are onto something. This seems to be universal!

I recall reading Matthew Baldwin’s blog (defective yeti ) where he mentioned that his wife (a botanist by trade) totally hates Lost because the tropical island where the action takes place for some reason has a temperate zone vegetation all over it. Although that one I guess could be explained by hand waving and saying that the out-of-place vegetation is there because a) the island moves in time and space (and thus could have started in a different climate) and b) it could have been brought there by dharma people or something like that.

But yeah, I guess Hollywood people just don’t do research into any area as rule.

[I]f you know nothing about computers why do you think you can write and/or direct a good movie about hackers and/or programmers? When you are making a movie about police men, soldiers, firemen, lawyers or salesmen you probably bring in a specialist who explains to you and the actors how the things are done in his profession, makes sure you use an appropriate lingo, and don’t make huge blunders. No one seems to be doing that for computer related stuff though. It seems that it is easier to just make stuff up instead.

I can answer this one. Because the people writing these crap movies are crap writers & don’t do enough research. Jurassic Park surprises me a bit - Newman has some embarassing lines too - but it should be no suprise a movie banking on Hallie Berry’s rack for an audience didn’t do due diligence.

I think on another level, no one but techies care. I have a journalist friend who is always upset about the way real journalists are portrayed in movies. My chemist friend hates movies invovling any type of chemistry. My physicist uncles won’t see summer blockbusters anymore, they’re too painful. You don’t have to be a physicist to appreciate this either - speaking of bad tech, you saw Die Hard 4. I know people who thought the fighter jet hovering in a stationary position was *cool.*

So I don’t think tech is mistreated any more by careless writers than any other profession you can think of. You and I just notice more.

It’s worked flawlessly so far. There have been no exploits of which anyone knows. This may change of course when somebody decided to read the manual and figure out how to use ‘cat log.’