[aklug] Tron Legacy

Guess I'll be the first one to bring it up (on this list, anyway): To be
honest, I was a bit disappointed by the Disney movie "Tron Legacy"
overall as a cinematic production. Nevertheless, there were two things I
noticed which were quite unique:

1. I have never seen any commercially-produced, feature-length movie
before where any character (let alone the main character) advocated that
software should be freely shared and openly available. In addition,
there is a rather entertaining scene in the boardroom of the (evil)
ENCOM corporation:

  Alan Bradley: Excuse me
  Richard Mackey: Yes... Alan
  Alan Bradley: Given the prices we charge to students and schools, what
sort of improvements have been made in Flynn... I mean, um, ENCOM OS-12?
  Richard Mackey: This year we put a "12" on the box.
  [Board laughs. Bradley looks at Mackey coldly]
  Edward Dillinger: OS-12 is the most secure operating system ever
released. The idea of sharing our software or giving it away for free
disappeared with Kevin Flynn.

2. This is the first movie I have ever seen where the "hacker"
characters uses actual *nix shell commands. Both the good guy and the
bad guy hackers are seen using commands such as "grep" and "kill" in
terminals. Typically movie writers just make up dumb fictional commands
or unlikely key combinations that magically break into the system. I
also thought I saw a Linux desktop being used in one scene, though I
didn't catch what DE it was.

Anyway, I don't think it is anything we should get /over-excited/ about,
but it would be nice to see more of these types of ideas and images
permeate the mass-media. In Fairbanks at least, it seems like (outside
of UAF) most people don't even know that there is such a thing as "open
source", let alone that we have our own operating systems.

-- 
frigidcode.com
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