Here is my most recent offering as posted on The-Latest.com. Read it below, or go directly to my blog there by clicking here!
I know what I want for my birthday - a computer from Crime Scene Investigation.
From what seems like a normal computer terminal that would cost little over £400, American detectives have somehow engineered the finest graphics on slick programs that allow faultless transparent windows, wild colour schemes and processing power that can fly through the database of Las Vegas’ entire criminal population for a match in no more than five seconds.
They seem to lack Windows Vista, XP, Linux, Ubuntu, Solaris or any recognisable operating system - windows appear and disappear almost by thought alone, each with the exact data asked for (without prompting). I am also yet to see a computer crash, or Gil Grissom kick the tower in a fit of rage.
The only qualification it seems you need to work these phenomenally easy tests is a lack of epilepsy.
Of course, computers just aren’t like that at all. Yet it seems that in most portrayals of technology in television, we are having the wool pulled over our eyes.
CSI of course uses their cutting edge technology (which is probably just a Flash-based animation) only to push the storyline through. If it had been a real PC being used, viewers would fall asleep at the dull black-on-white text displays, and results would need 6-8 weeks to be processed.
But in other more rational television shows, computers are portrayed falsely, and for no apparent reason.
Case in point: on an episode of Horizon, a woman is sat on a train watching a report on her laptop, before it fully cuts to the footage. The angle and screen could not possibly show the filming camera what she was watching, and it was very obvious that the display she was watching was added in later production.
In effect, she was staring at a blank screen and nodding in agreement. It was like watching Space Jam, but how it would have looked in the studio - Michael Jordan playing basketball with himself.
My favourite is probably when watching the MPAA anti-piracy adverts at the beginning of DVDs or at the cinema - they display a 15 year old girl staring at a screen with “FEATURE FILMS” and a nice big green button saying “DOWNLOAD!”. She duly clicks, and the download progress bar is filled within 10 seconds.
Now either she has the US Military’s internet speed, or the unspecified movie she’s downloading is ten seconds long.
This may sound like a stream of consciousness from a ranting nerd, but it displays something about society that I think is important: even though most of us now use computers, the powers that be don’t think we understand them at all. Ironically, their portrayal of them makes this worse.
Maybe it’s good for one thing though. In an homage to the late Arthur C. Clarke and his space-based predictions through 2001: A Space Odyssey, these computer programs that don’t exist could spark designers to create something for our noble house-bound PCs that reflects what we are seeing now - a perfect universal program that encapsulates everything we need, at top speeds, without any problems.
I just hope it’s soon - my computer crashed twice while writing this.
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