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Comment by Andrex | Hacker News Reader

I was also impressed with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (also by TSN's David Fincher), there was Ubuntu on Lisbeth's Macbook, SQL queries for searching through a crime database, and some other small touches. Really impressed with Fincher's commitment to detail even in the world of programming.

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Ironically, Josh (the author) references The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when criticizing Hollywood's choice of using nmap almost ubiquitously.

I did see that, but like in the original Matrix, I think it was one of the few times it was appropriate.

Yeah, but he also criticized Jurassic Park despite the fact that most of Jurassic Park's OS views were genuinely Unix (SGI's IRIX, to be precise):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y12_WrlPaw

In that clip, you can see fsn, which is a genuinely real 3D file manager for IRIX:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaRHU1XxMJQ

Granted it's fair to say that the average theme park wouldn't be running IRIX, but Jurassic Park wasn't the average theme park (movie quote: "no expense spared"). So I think some of his criticisms are completely misplaced.

Did you also watched the swedish (trilogy) version of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo"? Can't remember which tools they used.

In the Swedish version, they just make up the commands.

Ebert commented in his review that the film was unique in that it just showed OSX and standard programs like mail.app and iphoto instead of having everything be obviously faked. I like that approach but for whatever reason it is pretty rare in films.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20...

I've always wondered why films and TV series (with limited budgets) don't just use off-the-shelf screens from Windows, OS X, or Linux distros. Are there some copyright/trademark issues that get in the way? It seems like a lot of work to develop your own UI that will only be on the screen for a few seconds.

I did notice that in an episode of Homeland that Saul was runing Media Player Classic on Windows to watch a video from an SD card, with the titlebar blurred out (so the name of the app wasn't visible). Later, another character watches the same video but there's a total custom UI used to bring up the video. In the same episode.

Personally I get annoyed whenever I see product placements, like Macbooks, or iPhones, or Windows screens in movies, not to mention Google/Bing searches or Xbox/Playstations in futuristic settings.

Especially when I go to a movie theater, I go there to watch a movie that I pay for. I'm not paying between $7 and $20 to watch a commercial.

Why? These are brands and products the vast majority of the public use and know. It would make a film less realistic if their products didn't appear.

I agree that blatant product placement is offensive (Bond), but just having a Macbook on a table doesn't annoy.

Actually, it's highly unrealistic to see everyone using the exact same platform or exact same software. Especially the Apple products, as their perception of ubiquity is highly inflated by their advertising.

It's also highly unrealistic to see everyone looking like actors and supermodels. Especially within the set of people who know emacs and nmap.

In The Matrix Reloaded, Trinity uses nmap and then an OpenSSH exploit that was published a couple months before the film officially opened in theaters. Contrast this with Swordfish, where you get lines like (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "We have a DS3, allowing you to access eight systems simultaneously." Ugh, just hit stop and go outside.

Back on topic, Tron: Legacy to me feels like a highly technological father/son movie, in the same way that Google is a highly technological advertising company. So it seems we're already living in the future. "The Matrix has you..."

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