This was at the height of the RIAA stuff, Zune felt like the legacy recoding industry hired uncool parents to try and design an ipod killer that respected copyright. I belive it also came in brown. Edit: I'm right https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_30
Aww, I was having fun reading that until the forced tumblr login prompt blocked the page.
I'm sure they've done the research and run the numbers, but it surprises and saddens me that social media sites have determined they're better off halting user interaction like that than allowing someone to read and become interested in the content.
Working with different businesses I've found that spreadsheets are often used for stuff I would never have thought they would be. Mainly like having large multi paragraph text in the cells, but using the rows and columns to index it. I can see why this is preferred over a linear word style document, there's an opportunity for someone to find a better way that combines spreadsheet like visual referencing with a good UI for entering stuff in the "cells". Excel is awful for this, for example having to remember to press Alt+enter and not being able to scroll smoothly down through cells (so if one cell takes up the screen vertically all you can do is snap to the next). Anyway, drafting a message in a spreadsheet is not that unreasonable or at least not uncommon.
when I worked at $BANK most traders had reimplemented their own DB using INDEX/MATCH and honestly it is a super powerful model when you get the hang of it. Obviously insane to support "at scale" but it is what it is. #ExcelGangRiseUp
I did a little bit of this supporting when I worked at a bank. Apparently there is multicast networking that you can plug into spreadsheets, so the "output" of a spreadsheet can be used as inputs on other people's workstations and it updates in real time. (I would say this was before Google Docs was a thing, but I don't think it actually was. But Google Docs wasn't widely used anywhere at the time.)
This all blew up one day causing the bank to lose money. My team was supposed to fix it or whatever, because we were the "market data" team. I ended up writing a small program to send a multicast message and record how long it took to come back, and graphed it over time with ... rrdtool! Once the network/transport layer was ruled out as the problem, some trader came back and said it was a bug in their spreadsheet. (This was of course months of early morning conference calls. But having data about the network was a new thing.)
(Oh yeah, someone complained that the author of rrdtool's name appeared on all the charts, so I patched it to not do that. Sorry. Sometimes open source is more about the taking than the giving :( I was young and naive.)
It speaks to both the genius that exists within the design of the spreadsheet digital document format, the effectiveness of excel's implementation (and microsoft's business), and the dismal state of IT empowerment and education that there is nothing you could show me implemented on an excel spreadsheet in a business that would surprise me.
It goes from the obvious stuff like DBs to Hypercard clones to really far out stuff when you get to shared documents.
Excel gets so much wrong but having sampled some of the competition and being proficient in programming at this point of my life I can only admire it and people who go deep.
I continue to maintain that Excel is the single most important piece of software created in the history of humanity by sheer virtue of how much of the world runs on it, whether via intended use case or not.
The "sheet" file could have been acting as the datastore for a text messaging program, Kelly being so distraught over having not receiving a response in a timely manner from Nelly lead her to check the datastore to make sure that the program wasn't malfunctioning by not showing new messages.
"a Jabber based, interoperatable client, is enabled with group conferencing abilities, third party gateway functionality (chatting with users from AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, and more!), and unlimited contact storage."
Decades of use and improvements have made Excel a surprisingly good app for this. Even as recently as 5 years ago I would paste outputs from databases in there to do quick cleanups of data for small scale analysis
Of course. All you need to do is link their minds together like in Pacific Rim. So then it's like one person using four hands on a keyboard to type twice as fast.
At the video cable, no. Both sides assume the other side can short to ground or spike or whatever. This is basic circuit protection that you don’t trust the other side.
At the power though, I guess if you shorted the high voltage long enough to pop the breaker and the computer was on the same breaker sure. But this would be tough to do for enough time to pop the breaker I think.
> At the video cable, no. Both sides assume the other side can short to ground or spike or whatever. This is basic circuit protection that you don’t trust the other side.
Unfortunately, this still leaves the software side. I've had computers freeze or crash on me when plugging / unplugging an external monitor, and even one recent case of the EMI generated by the gas piston in my office chair regularly causing my work laptop to bluescreen when there was an external monitor plugged in (with HDMI cable acting as an antenna). This tells me that it's quite possible thar shooting a monitor would cause the computer to freeze or reboot itself.
My headcanon for that scene is that the two of them were letting a program run in the background, and at the same time were just fucking with the rest of the team. The rest of the NCIS team was remarkably tech illiterate, while Abby and Tim were definitely the type to joke around. It was just two geeks trolling their coworkers.
It's ridiculous as portrayed, and doesn't match the visuals, but one could write a combined netstat and top that allowed simultaneous navigation of net connections and process tree with wasd and hjkl respectively. If one were a super hacker.
They were using a keyboard driver that treats each half of the keyboard as it's own separate chorded keyboard allowing parallel use. Pretty standard I think you'll find.
You know what we don't talk enough about about this movie? Angela was a Mac user -- and not a Mac user when it was cool to be a Mac user, a Mac user when it was extremely not cool to be a Mac user and a Mac would be the worst machine you could use circa 1994/1995 to hack into anything. (Mission: Impossible used a Mac too, but they didn't use the Mac OS 7 UI, meaning Ethan used a command line, which was wrong but "felt" more hackery.) They even shot the final sequence at a Macworld or something if my Mac-trivia-adled brain is remembering correctly.
Anyway, in 5th grade or whatever, we totally used to use the same names and icons that they had in "The Net" when chatting with one another using AppleTalk or whatever the networked chat system was that you could use in the Mac lab.
But we don't talk enough about how improbable it would be that this elite hacker circa 1994/1995 would be using a Mac in those cursed Michael Spindler times.
I wonder if that was paid placement, or was there some Hollywood types who liked Macs back then. For writing, perhaps?? Certainly no feature film editing was going on with PCs or Macs, that's for sure!
Apple did (and still does) a lot of paid placement. For the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible film around that same era, they even did an ad-spot tie in[0], which makes it pretty obvious that the usage of Macs in that movie was paid placement.
I also remember in Under Siege II: Dark Territory, where the hero uses his Apple Newton with a modem to send a FAX on a moving train to save the day.
To anyone under 30 reading this: Yes, a fax. Yes, to a kid in the 90s this seemed like the kind of cool-ass tricks that were state of the art then and that I hoped one day would be accessible to me.
Oh, it was definitely paid! As another mentioned, a year later they spent $16 million on an ad campaign for Mission: Impossible, a movie they got the PowerBook to too late and that didn’t have any of the Mac UI in the film.
But the best part was that Gil Amelio, the CEO at the time (and the third in like 36 months or something) ignored all of his lieutenants and shipped that PowerBook, even tho it had massive problems (and later, I think exploding batteries) but it shipped late so they couldn’t get it out on shelves to take advantage of the commercials and product placement.
But Amelio did get one to Whoopi Goldberg, who called about one for her nephew or something. Almost all of them were recalled, however. Amelio shared this story in his book as if he should be proud he got Whoopi Goldberg a broken computer.
Apple still does product placement in certain films and TV shows (not just Apple TV stuff) but tried to keep it on the downlow.
Mentioned therein: Apple won't allow their products to be used by bad guys. Hence the number of movies and TV shows where you can always tell the bad guy because they're the only person not using an Apple product.
> But we don't talk enough about how improbable it would be that this elite hacker circa 1994/1995 would be using a Mac in those cursed Michael Spindler times.
Fast forward to 2011 where The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also uses a Mac for hacking, a bit cringe but not as impossible like Mission Impossible, then in the same movie she uses Nokia 770 and that thing had some genuine superpowers compared to Nokia 9210
> First, some words on Macintoshes. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the originators of the Apple and the Macintosh were busted for phreaking in college. The Apple IIe was used almost universally by hackers. So why has the Mac fallen out of favor for hacking? Simple. Because it fell out of favor for everything else.
before listing some of the few hacking resources available for Mac.
I think you need to take a closer look at the list. ;)
For 1995 there's 9 or so Macs but there's also: Amstrad PCW 9512, Apple IIGS, Apple Newton MessagePad 100, Commodore 64, 4 Compaqs, DEC VAX 11/780, IBM AN/FSQ-7, 6 IBM PCs, two SGIs, a few Toshiba laptops, and a Zenith Supersport.
That's nearly twice as many PCs as Macs in the list.
Could be apocryphal, but I swear I read something from the writers on the show saying that they would take turns coming up with the most ridiculous computer interaction they could think of.
Even at that time: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/274444.274447 and others. I worked in this area a bit, too, around the same time. It was really interesting stuff then, even if it's rote now.
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hah nvm. i didn't think they actually typed on the same keyboard. that's the future, for sure.
Anyone who has ever had to produce some sort of on-screen demo like this knows how miserable, tedious and thankless a task this can be. There was probably a better justification for their choice to use a spreadsheet than we are all imagining!
I once had to do something very quickly on set to get something "interesting" on the screen. It was a macbookpro available, so I opened up Terminal, set it to the green on black Homebrew color scheme, created a while [ 1 -eq 1 ] type loop that did a find . -name * -print type of command. they were supper happy with it since the characters were meant to be trying to find a file. I just said, this is basically how I'd find a file, so they really like the authenticity.
I really enjoed the stories from the advisor for Silicon Valley that went so authentic that the world now has the Not A Hotdog app.
Thank you for these blogs! Huge, huge fan of your work on all of this stuff -- and as a Kelly Rowland fan (Beyonce is still better, but Kelly > Michelle), thank you for this as well!
congrats! regarding this particular post, you may want to revisit the primary source material, the secondary source tik tok, and ultimately the relevance of the post
EDIT: i don’t mean to take anything away from your blog, and thank you for posting these links! the theme is super interesting and 100% deserving of attention and analysis. thank you for putting it together, i’m enjoying reading through the posts :)
I work at Cloudflare. I have a strong belief in "skin in the game" so I switched all my videos away from YouTube and onto Cloudflare Stream. I use as many Cloudflare products as I can as a paying customer so I understand the customer experience.
The fun thing is when you get your system correctly setup and the mail daemon runs up and delivers your email to you in nethack.
I always thought it would be fun if more games would include thematically correct in universe utilities like this. On second thought I would probably hate it, but it is fun to think about.
MUDs had/have them. LPMuds in particular had ftp and later http servers built in and pioneered intermud which supported instant messaging, as well as in game mail accross servers. at least for messaging clients existed that also allowed communication with players from outside the game. message boards existed too, not sure if there were any shared across serders. i also don't know if there were bridges to smtp or irc too, would not have been hard to build though (there was apparently at least one MUD that forwarded messages from in game message boards to mailing lists, and oh, PSYCH is a messaging platform written in LPC that supports XMPP and i believe IRC too)
it is no surprise that LPC, the language LPMuds are written in served as a basis for the general purpose language Pike. there is a server written in Pike with an internal design similar to MUDs that supports not only http and ftp but also smtp, irc, xmpp and other protocols. i use that for my own websites.
I have written software for the Nokia 9110 (the predecessor of the 9210) and not being able to find any documentation was par for the course. There was only a forum where sometimes, with a delay of a couple of days, questions would be answered by Nokia engineers.
Yeah, this is definitely possible today. A couple of us did it when we were working at Zapier - you could set up a Zap to watch columns of a sheet to act as an inbox and outbox, then hook it up to Twilio to text a pre-determined person.
>You can use Word to write new and edit existing text documents. You can insert
and view images and other files in the documents. You can also send and receive
documents as fax, SMS, mail, PC mail, or via infrared.
So, you can embed, well insert, "other files" in a Word document. You can send and receive a Word document as an SMS ... it seems like Kelly and Nelly might be sending a Sheet inserted in a Word "as" an SMS!??
Another page [1] says you can send "Microsoft Excel 2/3/4/5/7/97/98/2000 XLS, XLC" as an attachment. So, perhaps it's an Excel doc as an attachment to an email? Here's a guy sending a Word doc as an SMS [2], at 7m37 [3] you see the option to attach a "Sheet".
FWIW I suspect this video shot was reached by something along the lines of a director saying "who can make some text show large enough on here for us to read on the video playback?" or an assistant saying "out the box the only way I can enter that text that doesn't show as a Word doc is like this!".
There used to be a website with tons of examples of this type of “nonsensical” use of computers on TV and in movies. Does anyone know if its still around?
337 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadThis was at the height of the RIAA stuff, Zune felt like the legacy recoding industry hired uncool parents to try and design an ipod killer that respected copyright. I belive it also came in brown. Edit: I'm right https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune_30
I'm sure they've done the research and run the numbers, but it surprises and saddens me that social media sites have determined they're better off halting user interaction like that than allowing someone to read and become interested in the content.
This all blew up one day causing the bank to lose money. My team was supposed to fix it or whatever, because we were the "market data" team. I ended up writing a small program to send a multicast message and record how long it took to come back, and graphed it over time with ... rrdtool! Once the network/transport layer was ruled out as the problem, some trader came back and said it was a bug in their spreadsheet. (This was of course months of early morning conference calls. But having data about the network was a new thing.)
(Oh yeah, someone complained that the author of rrdtool's name appeared on all the charts, so I patched it to not do that. Sorry. Sometimes open source is more about the taking than the giving :( I was young and naive.)
It goes from the obvious stuff like DBs to Hypercard clones to really far out stuff when you get to shared documents.
Excel gets so much wrong but having sampled some of the competition and being proficient in programming at this point of my life I can only admire it and people who go deep.
"An accompanying music video was directed by Benny Boom and released in September 2002."
Apps like that weren't available then.
"a Jabber based, interoperatable client, is enabled with group conferencing abilities, third party gateway functionality (chatting with users from AOL, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, and more!), and unlimited contact storage."
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/Mercury_Instant_Mes...
"Managing all these spreadsheets is so cumbersome! Surely, there must be a better way..." - John Messages
Clearly, I'm missing your point.
At the power though, I guess if you shorted the high voltage long enough to pop the breaker and the computer was on the same breaker sure. But this would be tough to do for enough time to pop the breaker I think.
Unfortunately, this still leaves the software side. I've had computers freeze or crash on me when plugging / unplugging an external monitor, and even one recent case of the EMI generated by the gas piston in my office chair regularly causing my work laptop to bluescreen when there was an external monitor plugged in (with HDMI cable acting as an antenna). This tells me that it's quite possible thar shooting a monitor would cause the computer to freeze or reboot itself.
and were the Switch Mail Center settings correct? https://youtu.be/6ya9GVSPiXs?t=13
Anyway, in 5th grade or whatever, we totally used to use the same names and icons that they had in "The Net" when chatting with one another using AppleTalk or whatever the networked chat system was that you could use in the Mac lab.
But we don't talk enough about how improbable it would be that this elite hacker circa 1994/1995 would be using a Mac in those cursed Michael Spindler times.
[0] https://youtu.be/c2J4Zuiakhk
To anyone under 30 reading this: Yes, a fax. Yes, to a kid in the 90s this seemed like the kind of cool-ass tricks that were state of the art then and that I hoped one day would be accessible to me.
But the best part was that Gil Amelio, the CEO at the time (and the third in like 36 months or something) ignored all of his lieutenants and shipped that PowerBook, even tho it had massive problems (and later, I think exploding batteries) but it shipped late so they couldn’t get it out on shelves to take advantage of the commercials and product placement.
But Amelio did get one to Whoopi Goldberg, who called about one for her nephew or something. Almost all of them were recalled, however. Amelio shared this story in his book as if he should be proud he got Whoopi Goldberg a broken computer.
Apple still does product placement in certain films and TV shows (not just Apple TV stuff) but tried to keep it on the downlow.
Mentioned therein: Apple won't allow their products to be used by bad guys. Hence the number of movies and TV shows where you can always tell the bad guy because they're the only person not using an Apple product.
> But we don't talk enough about how improbable it would be that this elite hacker circa 1994/1995 would be using a Mac in those cursed Michael Spindler times.
Fast forward to 2011 where The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo also uses a Mac for hacking, a bit cringe but not as impossible like Mission Impossible, then in the same movie she uses Nokia 770 and that thing had some genuine superpowers compared to Nokia 9210
> First, some words on Macintoshes. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the originators of the Apple and the Macintosh were busted for phreaking in college. The Apple IIe was used almost universally by hackers. So why has the Mac fallen out of favor for hacking? Simple. Because it fell out of favor for everything else.
before listing some of the few hacking resources available for Mac.
Still, if you go by movies, Hackers, also from 1995, has Macs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IESEcsjDcmM
A year or so later (1996), our hero used a PowerBook 5300 to help save the Earth in Independence Day.
Brought to you by Apple marketing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEMJzSVpdJM and https://web.archive.org/web/20080927051545/http://www.inform... .
FWIW, http://www.starringthecomputer.com/computers.html lists computers used in films.
For 1995 there's 9 or so Macs but there's also: Amstrad PCW 9512, Apple IIGS, Apple Newton MessagePad 100, Commodore 64, 4 Compaqs, DEC VAX 11/780, IBM AN/FSQ-7, 6 IBM PCs, two SGIs, a few Toshiba laptops, and a Zenith Supersport.
That's nearly twice as many PCs as Macs in the list.
The comments were better than I could have hoped for.
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hah nvm. i didn't think they actually typed on the same keyboard. that's the future, for sure.
Welcome to HN!
I really enjoed the stories from the advisor for Silicon Valley that went so authentic that the world now has the Not A Hotdog app.
If you like this sort of thing: https://www.tumblr.com/moviecode and https://behind-the-screens.tv/
I mean, you did file it under "well, actually..." - that's canonical for HN. ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36689930
EDIT: i don’t mean to take anything away from your blog, and thank you for posting these links! the theme is super interesting and 100% deserving of attention and analysis. thank you for putting it together, i’m enjoying reading through the posts :)
I’m on board with it, but this is the reason.
If you take, for example, the average...
Sadly I can’t seem to find any documentation on the nokia spreadsheet program to see what we could with it.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read [or send] mail. [or SMS/text messages]
(additions in [] are mine)
I always thought it would be fun if more games would include thematically correct in universe utilities like this. On second thought I would probably hate it, but it is fun to think about.
it is no surprise that LPC, the language LPMuds are written in served as a basis for the general purpose language Pike. there is a server written in Pike with an internal design similar to MUDs that supports not only http and ftp but also smtp, irc, xmpp and other protocols. i use that for my own websites.
The manual [0] at p.187 says:
>You can use Word to write new and edit existing text documents. You can insert and view images and other files in the documents. You can also send and receive documents as fax, SMS, mail, PC mail, or via infrared.
So, you can embed, well insert, "other files" in a Word document. You can send and receive a Word document as an SMS ... it seems like Kelly and Nelly might be sending a Sheet inserted in a Word "as" an SMS!??
Another page [1] says you can send "Microsoft Excel 2/3/4/5/7/97/98/2000 XLS, XLC" as an attachment. So, perhaps it's an Excel doc as an attachment to an email? Here's a guy sending a Word doc as an SMS [2], at 7m37 [3] you see the option to attach a "Sheet".
FWIW I suspect this video shot was reached by something along the lines of a director saying "who can make some text show large enough on here for us to read on the video playback?" or an assistant saying "out the box the only way I can enter that text that doesn't show as a Word doc is like this!".
E&OE, apologies ... we need to go deeper!
[0] https://www.tech-insider.org/mobile/research/acrobat/010625.... [1] http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/devices/nokia9210/9210specs.p... [2] https://youtu.be/tr9vqLs5XpI?t=315 [3] https://youtu.be/tr9vqLs5XpI?t=457
For completeness, the "Dilemma" (by Nelly, ft. Kelly Rowland) music video that someone else linked is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WYHDfJDPDc&t=190s.
The point of the article is that it wasn't running Office, but a less featured clone.
Check out the video I linked of the guy sending a [Nokia 9210] Word document as an SMS.
PS I’m autistic too, no offence intended! :-)
https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36687656
> You can also send and receive documents as fax, SMS, mail, PC mail, or via infrared.
Honestly I would have been much more impressed with the video if she was sending him a fax
If there's one thing iPhone figured out, it was getting actually useful apps on phones instead of imitation desktops.