The Macbook Air Is Crap (Compared to the Technology in ‘Hackers’)
Last week I posted that really great quote about how 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted stupendously more impressive technology than we actually got in the year 2001, and that got me thinking about how totally lame the technology situation really is. Personally, I’m pretty bummed out that we still haven’t reached the level of technological awesomeness that was seen in the film Hackers.
Aside from teaching us that “RISC is good,” Hackers showed us a glimpse of a wondrous future where computers were even more super-neato, where a smokin’ hot broad like Angelina Jolie could be into computers and video games, and where Marc Anthony hadn’t impregnated J.Lo but had instead pursued a career as an FBI agent. That is to say, we were looking at a better world, except still stuck using dial-up modems (harsh).
Join me now as I walk through some of the great technology that was seen in Hackers and that is sadly absent from our supposedly modern world…
400 Inches of High Resolution Screen Real Estate
After begging and pleading with my old boss I got him to finally give in and give me his old 15” LCD monitor to replace the crappy 15” CRT that I used for our file server. Yeah, that’s right, recognize my badass network administration skillz.
Why does an oil company have a logo that resembles E=mc2? That’s just shoddy branding.
Sadly, in the world of Hackers my 15” of RGB goodness paled in comparison to what the sysadmins of the Ellingson Mineral Corporation had at there disposal. Oh, yeah, Mr. The Plague and his Penn Jillette-looking sidekick had what had to be at least eight 50” flat screen monitors merged together. I’m sure the expense was totally justified — I mean, why wouldn’t a “mineral” corporation need to give their system administrators 200 inches of flat screen awesomeness to work with? What, are they supposed to do whatever it is the sysadmins of a mineral corp would need to do if with only a 30” Apple Cinema Display? Or even two 30” Apple Cinema Displays? Hell, Al Gore needs three for his home office, and what the hell is that lord ass doing.
Yes, I’m sure three 30” LCD screens are necessary for Al Gore to do his Nobel Prize winning work on saving the environment. And I’m also sure he needs to have that TV on in the background, even though he’s not even pointed in it’s direction.
Douche.
Giant File Towers
In the Mac community there’s a much-loved acronym: FTFF. It stands for “fix the F*ing Finder,” because The Finder, the file navigation system for the Mac, is total crap. I’m talking real, honest-to-God poop. Every goddamn time they release a new version of OS X the Mac community asks, “Did the fix the Finder?” and every time the answer is, “No.” Damn it.
Anyway, compared to that nightmare the idea of having giant file towers sounds delightful. I’m literally talking about giant glass towers that hold all the files in them. I’m not really sure how they hold the files in there, but I’m guessing Time Machine has something to do with it. Or maybe Airport Extreme. Those were words I read on Apple’s website, so they must be important and awesome. Quicktime.
It probably takes a long time to figure out where that stupid PowerPoint presentation downloaded to, but at least geeks would get more exercise.
Imagine how great it would be to take a stroll through a labyrinth of towers to see what files you’ve got on your server. You’d be like, “Whoa, there’s the Anderson file,” or “Hey, check out that notice from facilities telling us that the red plugs in the building which are supposed to be protected by the building’s emergency power generators don’t actually work even though they’ve been telling us for four years that they do work.” Or even better, if you’ve got a file that’s really pissing you off you can bring your dog to work, take him for a walk through the file towers, and then have your dog literally piss on the tower with your file on it. Though, actually, that might not be a good idea because apparently the towers are also super-conductors of electricity. Freaky.
If I saw this happening to my Mac Pro I would cry, but in the world of Hackers this just means they’ve hacked your Gibson and saved the world. Yay!
Floppy Disks Are Technological Marvels
DVDs are pussy storage media. Yeah, that’s right, I said it. And it’s not just DVDs, all optical discs are pussy media. You have to hold them like a little girl, because god-forbid the natural oils from my skin leave an impression upon the surface of the disc, thereby preventing the damn things from working. What the dooce?! Back in the day you could be eating your Cheetos and handle a disk without worrying if it wouldn’t work, partly because the diabolical geniuses that designed floppy disc thought of safe handling when they encased the damn things in plastic and gave them a metal shield for access. Why is my optical media naked?
This image brings back a lot of fond memories of my Macintosh LC III. That baby got me through high school.
Now sure, going back to the days of having only 1.33 megabytes of space on a disk is totally ridiculous, but, as we see in Hackers, surely modernization of the floppy disc technology could allow for much larger file sizes. The disks used in Hackers could hold the entire contents of the villainous garbage file — which we discover is a powerful worm capable of shuffling money around a multinational corporations myriad accounts and transactions. You think you’re going to pull something like that off in only 1.33 megabytes of code? My ass.
Ridiculously Awesome Computer Code
Speaking of code, let us not forget that the code seen in Hackers is far more sophisticated than any of the crap we’re writing today. Just look at it:
All that crap those Rails guys say about Ruby being beautiful can shove it. This is beautiful and super-frickin’ cool. Recognize!
Seriously, what is that? It’s all algebraic and it’s moving around in a three-dimensional space and it’s purple. And what font is that? It’s some kind of weird, blocky serif font. Who programs in a serif font? Exactly.
Imagine how much cooler it would be to program in something like that versus, say, Javascript. You show your lady-friend a couple hundred lines of Javascript and she’ll probably be bored out of her might, but you show her that purple 3d moving code thing and you are definitely getting laid. Christ, Zero Cool ends up banging Angelina Jolie because of that. It’s like spanish fly, if spanish fly required a compiler and a strong foundation in functional programming.
Insanely Bright Laptop Screens
I know those new LED laptop displays are supposed to be brighter than the LCD one’s, but damn, check out how bright those freaking monitors are. It’s literally reflecting off of Zero Cool’s face. Imagine what it’s doing to his retina.
Sadly, the insanely-bright laptop screen is not bright enough to let us look down Angelina Jolie’s shirt. Damn it!.
Battery life on those laptops must be garbage, though.
Totally Newton Friendly
I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for the Newton, and the fact that Angelina Jolie and her slutty lips is also a fan of the Newton fills me with all kinds of happy thoughts.
Apple fanatics immediately zero-in on the Newton on the desk. Normal dudes immediately zero-in on Angelina Jolie’s titties at the top of the screen. Guess what I saw first. 
I miss the Newton.
Self-Aware 3D Animated Full Motion Video Viruses
We used to have a guy in the lab who’s computer I’d have to clean up every few months, as he would inevitably get a virus on it that would slow the thing down to a crawl. That’s what happens on a Windows machine, but on a Gibson, you end up getting totally badass viruses that actually tell you what the viruses diabolical demands are. Yeah, there’s embedded audio in the virus. Also, really trippy visual effects. And hippies with long hair.
The Da Vinci Virus is a hippie.
For some reason that’s how I always pictured Mac viruses, leading more credence to my theory that Gibsons and Macs are one and the same.
Double Decker Unlabeled Keyboards
The keys are conveniently orange colored, so you don’t have to worry about any residual Cheeto goop staining the keyboard. Double win!
Last year I switched from the Qwerty keyboard layout to the Dvorak, and I felt pretty badass for doing so, but when I see the keyboards they’re using to work with the Gibson I feel like a total douchebag. Check that out: it’s two tiers of at least 150 keys each, all unlabeled. What would you need that many keys for? Hell if I know, but I’m guessing a week on that thing and your wrists will be made of steel (or you’ll have carpal tunnel like a bitch).
Who do you think makes a keyboard like that? Logitech? Probably. I’ll wait for the Bluetooth version.
Geisha-Looking New Media Celebritards
Our heroes are guys like Robert Scoble and John Gruber. Hackers had Razor and Blade.
Hackers wins.
I’ve got a couple of jokes to make here, but they’re all pretty racist. Also possibly homophobic. I’ll keep them all to myself.
A More Secure Filesystem
NTFS my balls. Give me the insanely great and completely non-sensical file system that the Ellingson Mineral Corporation is using. The entire movie revolves around the fact that one of the hackers in the film retrieves a mysterious garbage file — named “Garbage” — from the depths of the monstrosity that is their file system. What is the address of that file? It is /.workspace/.garbage.. Really? The evil genius hid the insidious garbage file right off the root directory (the top-most directory of any filesystem)? And it took a team of computer genius hackers a butt-load of time — and awesome floating rotating phone booths — to find it? That must be a pretty awesome file system.
The Gibson’s System Command Shell, impervious to all forms of attack, except those coming from a bunch of high school kids using dial-up modems.
Supremely Badass Targeting Reticles
Zero Cool’s laptop screen is literally three feet away from his face, yet he augments the computer hacking with the help of a totally wicked targeting reticle. Is it a coincidence that the guy with the targeting reticle was the guy that found the super-secret location of the evil garbage file? I think not. Imagine how much less Windows Vista would suck if we the guys at Microsoft got targeting reticles. That’s what I’m saying.
Also, as an added bonus, Zero Cool can command a Jem Hadar warship. Sweeet! ((If you understand what I’m talking about then give yourself +5 geek points.))
There have been 3 comments
I think technology and its advancement are going too far. We are relying too much on computers and are becoming brainless and we are not functioning realistically with each other as a society. We are depending so much on this tech advancements, including cars. We have become so lazy that we do not know how to really use our minds or our bodies. Disease is so wide spread that come from not being active enough. We drive our cars, sit at a computer all day long, then we buy our foods, go home, eat the trash we just bought that is usually junk, processed convience foods, sit at the computer or watch the boob tube and just fatten up. We get diabetes, heart trouble, mental problems etc. We get up very early in the morning to commute to our jobs, smell our polution we make driving, smoke, drink alcohol. Then we wander why we have cancer from our smoking. We take all sorts of drugs including prescriptions that cause so many side effects that create other diseases that are very strange most likely coming from the drugs that the drug companies tell us about on our TV.
Not only that, but we have earthquakes that are caused by our desire to have fuels to run our cars that make us sick. We are now faced with scares that we will have a big one in 2012 that will distroy what ee charrish as technilogical advances we love so much tha is making us sick.
Will we survive or are we just like our dino’s that we use in our cars?
I wekcime anyone to take the challenge and stop abusing our planet. Go back to nature.
Think of that child that I see in that picture that I see. What is her future going to be?
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