Why Is It ... Hacking On TV And In Movies

Why is it that on TV shows and in movies, whenever someone manages to 'hack' into the ultra-top-secret target, all the documents on that system open up and populate the entire screen?

I mean, if it's a previous session, who leaves their workspace that way? And if that's what happens on every login, you have to ask, what good would an OS like that be? Every time you login it helpfully opens up every single file you've ever created? Talk about usability.

Hacking on the Knight Rider show
Gif was made using gifninja

  

Or maybe, it's a booby trap. You know, open up a whole bunch of dummy files in an infinite loop until the machine runs out of memory and the hackers get nowhere. Check this grab from the current Knight Rider series, season 1, episode 17 to see what I'm talking about.

[Update] 09 Mar 2009
Forgot that Picasa doesn't support animated gifs. Grumble.

Death Is A Sanskrit Dictionary?

So I was watching Dead Like Me - Life After Death the other day and the introduction sequence had this comic panel. Well, the jar doesn't actually say Contents: Death. It reads Sanskrit Dictionary! I thought that was hilarious! And kind of sad actually, that the filmmakers figured any 'alien' looking script could pass off as God's writing (that they picked the Devnagri script may just have some hidden cosmic significance though!). They might as well have used Klingon!


And a couple of days later, I was watching Scrubs and I spotted this on one of the computer monitors in the show. Do you recognize what it is on the monitor down in the right hand corner in the screenshot? It's the Windows Media Player setup screen! Looks like one of the nurses didn't have enough to do :)