Recycled Bullsh-IT

As I mentioned in Hype, Hype Hooray! there’s a big difference between what the analysts and IT vendors promise us and what we disappointingly discover when we open their Pandora’s boxes (full of evils and despair, with a small but cruelly futile bit of hope at the bottom) having stumped up the readies out of our overstretched IT budgets. However, this is nothing in comparison to the expectations set in TV & movies about the power and ease of technology that puts even the most fanciful tech vendor bullsh*t to shame. Here’s my top ten fantasy tech from TV:

Hack You

We’re all aware of the hackneyed hacker stereotype of the socially challenged, brilliant but sullen, sunlight- and people-avoiding loner.  OK, that describes the majority of IT folk, but in the make-believe media these script kiddies have the miraculous ability to break into any computer or network in seconds, regardless of the cybersecurity in place (or not in place as I’m sure we have all seen IRL)

 Infinite Monkeys

So, you can spot a shit-hot software engineer on screen by the way they noisily and randomly bash keys without looking at either the keyboards (they need at least two) or the monitors (whole bank of displays). Come to think of it I’ve used lots of programs obviously written this way, so maybe that one’s true

 Power Mad

In movieland no one ever plugs in their laptop. It must be great to have infinite batteries, but perhaps they’re powered by the studio flood lights on set or the movie stars’ charisma

Matrix Resurrections

Programmers always type in command lines using green fonts on a black background – but we’re not all in the Matrix (I wouldn’t know: I took the blue pill – which has led to a certain stiffness in parts)

 Money Makes the World Go Around

It’s a well-known film fact that if you are transferring money between bank accounts the transfer takes longer for larger amounts than smaller amounts, and you can watch a timer as it slowly transfers the pennies across the wire. Best to do this on a moving train just about to go into a deep tunnel for added jeopardy

Zoom Zoom Zoom

Even the best current Chinese facial recognition CCTV isn’t a patch on the ability of TV spooks to zoom in on a picture or video feed to see it unpixellate and expose the perp in a reflection on someone’s sunglasses bouncing off a distant mirror

 Dumb Terminals

I’m sure there are now accessibility settings on most devices these days to allow text boxes and messages to be as large as on terminals in movies where they take up half of the screen to allow us to login in 120pt font. Or display in garish colours “You’ve Got Mail!” notifications loudly as if we only get one or two emails a day and have sacked all our UX designers

Super-virus

Given the low quality of most software, it is amazing that movie boffins (like Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day), can not only write a working virus in half an hour, but make the virus so powerful that it can infect and control every computer in the universe within minutes of release into the wild (probably via an NHS Windows XP PC)

No No No Nanobots

The latest Bond movie has some self-replicating and eternally powered nanobots travelling through blood, sweat and tears to form a ludicrous McGuffin. Can’t be long before we’ll be shrinking submarines a la Fantastic Voyage to offer retirement cruises around famous arteries and veins

Zero Latency

Having spent years performance-tuning badly designed and written software, databases and networks, it’s good to know that Hollywood has cracked how to deliver zero latency so that actors can have real-time streaming and system access while chasing the baddies without even a (useless) 5G cell tower in sight. While the rest of us are Buffering the Vampire Slayer…

Hopefully, it won’t be long before we crack Faster Than Light drives, and Teleporters from the Trekkie-verse, along with Light Sabres and Midichlorians from Star Wars to make those movies real!

John“Hard Light Hologram” Moe