TV Land Doesn't Understand Technology
Friday, 17th August 2012, 17:09
From time to time I see technology in TV series that is not doing what it should do, and anyone with that technology would know straight away that attention to detail has gone awry.
I'm not talking plot holes here, like how Independence Day they manage to upload a virus to an alien ship running computers nobody on Earth has ever seen before, yet somehow manages to hack it and bring down their shields.
No, I'm talking just plain obvious things that are silly, and whenever it happens I try to get a screen grab.
Missing
This was a pretty poor series, glad it got cancelled, the ending was particularly stupid. Beyond the fact that Ashley Judd's character often decides that platform wedges are ideal for chasing and general ass kicking, other silly things also occur:
Apparently, if you want to hack a *nix system you launch a console, su to root, and then once you have complete access to the system itself, you... what do you do? Apparently you launch a telnet session to localhost.security. I'm not entirely sure what that is, I mean since when did localhost be part of a domain? And anyway if security is a resolvable domain wouldn't localhost.security just resolve to... er... localhost anyway?
Wait, aren't we already in a telnet session to the localhost? Oh never mind...
New Girl
I like this series, it makes me laugh, after the first few weeks where episodes seemed to alternate between good and bad, it was all good. Except when it came to iPhones, then it wasn't.
Oh right, that's handy, when talking on an iPhone the touch display magically appears to be on, when it should be off. And it's on the home page, when surely it would be on a call screen? And if that wasn't bad enough, this obvious iPhone has a whole magic new text message display on it too:
But don't worry show producers, nobody will notice, after all the iPhone is just a nerdy niche product isn't it.
Torchwood
It's nice to know that with all the tech available, they use Media Player Classic to stream their video data isn't it. Obviously fans of open source!
Either that or the set designers didn't realise that it has a borderless mode.
Once Upon a Time
Actually, this one isn't anything like the above, this one is a clear homage to Tron. At the end of one episode, Henry is playing with a strange handheld console unlike any anybody outside of Hack a Day would have seen the like of.
Surely he'd be using a Nintendo DS or at least a PSP of some sort? No, this is even cooler, check the close up...
Now I've seen a lot of handheld consoles in my time, I own a few and have even written software for one. But this, I've never seen anything like this before, and it's playing Space Paranoids!
See... Tron is real, the truth is out there!