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Posted by prox, from Charlotte, on December 09, 2006 at 10:34 local (server) time

http://developers.slashdot.org/developers/06/12/08/2238220.shtml

A subset I thought were winners:

What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies):

1. Code does not move
In films and television code is always sailing across the screen at incredible speeds; it's presented as an indecipherable stream of letters and numbers that make perfect sense to the programmer but dumbfound everyone else.  I understand that to the non-savvy person the abilities of a programmer might seem amazingly complex, but do they honestly think we can read shit that isn't sitting still?  It'd be like trying to read six newspapers flying around in a tornado.  Sure, I can watch a kernel compile, tail a log file, or simply monitor the scrolling output of a program - but the most value I get out of those activities is when execution stops and I can actually scroll back to read what the hell happened (unless the output was going slow enough I could read it as it happened).

Top 20 Hackers in Film History:

10. Michael Bolton & Samir Nagheenanajar, Office Space (1999)
Famous Quote: Michael - “PC Load Letter? What the f*ck does that mean?” Samir - “Back up in your ass with the resurrection.”

Servers in the Movies - Our Top Ten:

8. HAL9000 - 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Hal9000 The HAL9000 or SAL9000 (the earthbound female counterpart) was responsible for making decisions and carrying out orders aboard a spaceship when humans were not willing or capable of doing so.  The break-through on this server was the AI, supposedly the most sophisticated artificial intelligence man could produce.  When the movie was released, it was believed that this level of intelligence could be created by the year 2001 - but we now understand that it's much further away than anticipated.

“I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.”

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