First things first — anybody remember when winter in Alaska meant snow? Not that I’m really complaining, I figure this is just training for when I move to Seattle…but it’s sure wierd as all getouts.
I went out to see Hackers 2000…er…sorry, make that Antitrust tonight. Not a bad little flick…nothing that’s really going to tax your brain, but an enjoyable way to spend a couple of hours. I do have to give them some props, though — this is one of the first movies since WarGames that I can think of that had a realistic computer user interface for the most part. Aside from a few dialog boxes that were pretty obviously mockups made for the sake of movie world clarity, the majority of the screens shown were using some variant of UNIX! I’m not sure which one — it’s pretty tough to tell from a command line, and most of the window managers out there have been ported to most *NIX flavors — but one little thing made me really wonder.
At one point in the movie Milo (the main character) is accessing a terminal and grabbing a bunch of video clips and stills, using a combination of GUI and CLI commmands. At one point, he calls up a program from the text prompt called “grabapp” — now, I know for certain that under Mac OS X, the screen grab utility is “Grab.app”, ported from the NEXT program “grab.app”. Made me take notice…could these be NEXT boxes? I highly doubt it, there could be any number of grab.app’s out there, or it could have just been put in to make it look semi-realistic to those of us geeky enough to watch the command line, but I thought it was at least a nice touch.
Anyway, a very entertaining, if predictable flick — catch a matinee sometime. I may pick it up when it comes out on DVD just to make a custom slipcase for it that actually says “Hackers 2000″….
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