Despite the fact that this movie has good directing, acting, jokes, and cast, the explanation of the program error is so ridiculous, that it is worth a reward for the most absurd IT sentence in movies. How can a program, which calculates votes, written by a mega corporation and accepted by the government be relevant to names of candidates?
shareI've been working as an IT person for over 30 years and I don't get your point. Sorry. Can you explain?
But as to your other statement that is has good directing, acting, jokes, and cast - I disagree. The directing is fine, the jokes were extremely poor.
What does the program intended to calculate votes have to do with candidate names when it determines the winner?
It's well-known that computers and programs portrayed in movies are far from their real counterparts. Isn't it?
About jokes. I like how Dobbs used jokes to incline people to his point of view, win their sympathy, no matter what they thought about him before. I know nothing about veracity of his jokes. I haven't ever worked for oil industry. ;)
Thank you. I understand more of what you meant now.
I agree with you about the computers. In movies, they frequently become a deus ex machina or magic device to advance a plot with little regard for what they can actually do.
I remember being a kid of 13-14 and getting my first computer, a TRS-80 Color Computer. A few of us had little computers of that nature in the early 80's. Movies at the time like "War Games" with Mathew Broderick, or "Tron", even "Weird Science" were totally off the charts in terms of what computers could do at the time. I think from memory even "Hackers" was far fetched. It's par for the course that computer things are not accurate. However, in this case the movie did not go off the wall with the computer side of it. I think alphabetical order, yeah it seemed a little silly, but it provided a simple yet clear mechanism for people to understand that plot point. It wasn't that important to the story, yes the coverup was, but the actual glitch wasn't a Cal Sci lecture if you know what I mean.
shareThe most ridiculous part of it is the lack of testing (and code reviews). You don't write such an important piece of software without testing it properly. Tests can't find all bugs but a code review should reveal a bug like this.
Rarely does a day (certainly never a week) go by that I don't find an error in someone's program. I have over thirty years in the business and am constantly annoyed with the level of work out there. My belief is that very little is actually tested before installation and that no code reviews happen at all (I can't even remember the last code review I was subject to). Happens all the time.
shareHi,
I would like to say I agree, with you and others, programs, code and computer science in general portrayed in movies are complete nonsense... I write computer programs so I know what I'm talking about.
The fact is most people, when I talk about what I and many other people do, they find it boring, and movies don't like that too much, so they mislead and portray programs in ways to appear "cool" and easy to understand. You see graphics, it's dynamic, colors and even if you don't really pay attention you get the point.
In this case it's not really about that, you don't see any code or even someone write the program... The computer "glitch" is not something that seems possible, I'm not saying that any program never had an error (in fact a space mission failed because the program for the propulsion system in charge of stabilizing the all thing had an error in the code) but common sense tells you that a double letter in the names of the candidates is not a proper bug. If you can see (like the woman on her laptop) the numbers for each candidate, they would immediatly notice that the winner isn't the guy with the larger number of votes.
Something that could happen is that when you vote for someone the vote is counted for someone else, not all the time but when parameters are a certain way... It's not really hard to explain since they don't do details.
By the way I would like to say that testing can't reveal every bug or error, the programs get to big and so many people are working on them, sometimes it's just one guy making a tiny mistake. If the bug occurs only in a specific set of circumstances and there's one billion possibility there's no way to test for all of them.
Gore Vidal has pointed out that the auditing of election IT systems is poor where it exists. However the weakness of the IT plot aspects did bother me.
shareThe action of the company CEO and his aid to Laura Linney early in the film was entirely plausable however.
shareReminds me of the idea that some people think any hacker can get into any PC without any software. Liek sayign a dumb terminal can get into the est firewall out there and in 5 seconds flat.
share[deleted]
lmao, everybody run, we got an angry nerd on the prowl!
shareI found it very frustrating that Laura Linney's character Eleanor Green knew there was a problem, and even after solving it and knowing what the problem was... she didn't spill even to Robin Williams's character Tom Dobbs. It was still just a problem, an error. How about tell him what the problem was right then and there. No, she had to hold on to it, keeping it a secret. I would think once she knew how to prove the error and able to show it is repeatability she would have leaked it. Seek vindication!!! Share what she knows, someone else would have checked it out, drug allegations or not. The other candidates would have jumped at it. She needed to spill it out to others like she did to the people at the Delacroy executives.
I also have a problem with the Delacroy company press conference, it would still kill the company as now it brings to light that they didn't have proper safe guards in place to prevent manipulation of the voting results. If the machine are secure, why have a press conference talking about an employee's manipulation of prototypes? Who cares about prototypes? They don't have to be perfect. The company Delacroy opened a can of worms holding the press conference.
Hollywood always gets IT wrong, or dummies it down to the stupid.
Absolutely it felt so stupid!
An overflow of the other two candidates count would have been already more believable (although a fairly stupid mistake for that kind of software).
Or even just skip explaining the issue, instead of explaining it like that.
I worked for a while as a coder myself, and I have to agree they did a poor job coming up with a credible IT explanation for the "glitch".
However, I live in a country that has been using electronic voting for the past 20 years, and although there's always some complaining or vague accusations of rigging from the loser side, most of the electorate seems to have a lot of confidence on the voting machines.
Because of this, the movie's depiction of many people's quickness to dismiss any problems seemed accurate to me, at least if the movie was about an election in my country, not in the US. If and when the US switches to electronic voting, you guys would be so paranoid about it that I believe no official vote would ever be cast until you're 100% sure that the code, the machines and everything else is thoroughly reviewed.
It's kind of ironic that a country with a people which is so skeptical about electronic voting ended up having a presidential election decided by a court in Florida, isn't it? And if I remember correctly, most of the problems in the 2000 presidential election arose from "glitches" in paper-ballots.
In the end, I guess we all have to assume the electoral process isn't perfect - electronic or not. But Hollywood should definitely hire IT consultants more often.
The Death Star on Star Wars was destroyed because of a small design error, and this "happened" on a time when interstellar travel is as easy as going to the market. But hey, I'm talking about one of the most successful movie franchises ever, so I guess they're right and we're wrong.
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