   What have you seen?
  I was just watching an episode of Doctor Who, the season 3 christmas special, the first with Catherine Tate. During the time where they're looking out of the tardis doors at the not-yet-formed earth, I saw some asteroids disappear like they went beyond the far plane of a rendered 3d scene.I had a good laugh at that. I guess that's how you know that I'm a nerd :DI also remember some time ago where I was watching an episode of CSI and they had one of their fancy forensic analysis computer scenes going, and at the bottom left of the screen was the watermark that you see when you're watching a powerpoint presentation :DWhat have you guys seen that made you laugh like that?   
  Hackers ... the entire movie ...   ;Quote:Original post by EndarI also remember some time ago where I was watching an episode of CSI and they had one of their fancy forensic analysis computer scenes going, and at the bottom left of the screen was the watermark that you see when you're watching a powerpoint presentation :DI can't get past what they're trying to do on those CSI forensic analysis screens to notice stuff like that. I'm too busy slapping my forehead when they get a massive blown-up image of a car's license plate from the reflection of someone's sunglasses from digital security camera footage. It makes me want to yell out in a Morbo voice "DIGITAL IMAGES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!".Watching CSI with the family is even worse for forehead slapping. I've got background in software engineering and computer vision; most of my family are in medicine, biology or genetics; and my brother and sister are actor/writers. We only need someone in the police or in law to complete the set.   ;  Oh, I also remember an episode of the UK show Spooks, where they had a satellite take a picture of the back of someone's head, and then someone said "let's try to enhance that", and they somehow got an image of their face.And to make it even worse, they didn't even try to explain it with "oh, we'll enhance the image of his reflection that's coming off of the tea set." They actually just said "let's enhance that" and somehow they got the front of his head.Have we gone so far that we don't even bother to try and explain these things anymore? I mean, not even a half-assed explanation which no one will ever believe. It's like the people who create television shows have just given up (with the exception of the writers of all the tv shows that I like :D ).   ;  I went to a seminar that was being held by a researcher from Perth who deals with image forensics for the Western Australia police force, where he gave a talk he frequently gives to police to explain just how little he can do. He showed one security image he was given by the police of a car straight on from the back where the police asked him if he could "enhance" the plate. Despite it being the perfect angle though the plate was only two pixels high. There's not a lot you can do with an image like that.He then showed some video footage of a guy walking in a building lobby from a security camera in the corner, and explained that even though the footage was extremely clear all you could really tell was that it was a roughly six foot tall Caucasian guy somewhere between 16 and 30 with short dark hair (frankly the guy looked an awful lot like me. [smile]) In that case the police got around the issue by showing the guy the footage in the interview room and asking "Is this you?", to which he sheepishly replied "Yeah."   ;  Apart from CSI's shameless product placement absolutely everywhere such as deliberately angling and focussing the camera so the HP logo on the back of the monitor was crystal clear, they did do something once when they were trying to trace somebody writing on a blog.  "I'll put together a GUI in Visual Basic to get an IP address" and rushes out the room excitedly - it's perfectly logical but I still lol'd because it's blatant product placement and hot air.  I'm willing to bet the actress didn't even know what Visual Basic was but, more to the point, why wasn't she using C#? [grin]Not to mention the other episode where they got an IP address which began "712.xxx.xxx.xxx".I remember an old episode of the British TV drama BUGS whereby these villains had a satellite uplink to steal money or something, they installed it on their Windows 95 machine and opened up Device Manager.  The words "NOT ENOUGH PROCESSING POWER" appeared in big red text, letter by letter, on the hard drive properties screen.  So naturally they broke into some big company and tried to hijack a mainframe.These shows really should employ somebody on the production team who knows a tiny little bit about computers, to those in the know it's a complete joke.   ;Quote:Original post by ukdeveloperThese shows really should employ somebody on the production team who knows a tiny little bit about computers, to those in the know it's a complete joke.If you remember they ended up fighting an AI that could infect peoples brains through a head->computer interface and killed people when they realised they had it. The AI also had a nice animated face it liked to display to talk to people... I don't really think BUGS was going for realism.