You know one of the Geek things I like to do is watch Movies and TV and see if I can identify the Hardware and Software they are using when computers appear.
First time I noticed this was Mathew Broderick in "Wars Games" having his Radio Shack TRS-80 war dialing in search of other computers to connect to. But soon the movies seemed dominated by Apple who had the product placement thing down to a science. Sandra Bullock in "The Net" was a prefect example. Apparently every major system in the world was a Mac and Sandra was plugged into them all. The first time I noticed a big variation of this was Swordfish when Dell made there big screen mark. Now in television it seemed like a different story. It was usually some generic box with some made up, fictionist operating system on it that only required one click of a mouse to start the count down to destroy the world. <side bar>Why did bad guys always put a count down before launching the huge bomb from a remote deserted island to destroy some country. </side bar> But I've noticed this trend changing of late. Now those generic boxes on television and even in the movies seem to have made the move to Linux. A few of the shows I watch clearly are using various Linux Distribution. CSI Las Vegas, where they originally were an Apple shop but the last few shows had them using a GNOME desktop. In the season finale, where the only link they had to their comrade was through the computer, the entire interaction was clearly going on through a Konqueror browser. Another show, also on CBS, is NUMB3RS, where the math genius and the FBI seem to have standardized on the GNOME desktop. NCSI another GNOME group. There are a couple of things you can figure out about this. One, I need a better hobby. Two, I watch a lot of cop shows. And three, CBS seems to like Linux. But then I noticed it make its first jump, at least the first one I noticed, to the big screen. OK, let's call it the medium screen because it was after all and Independent film. In a movie I watched this weekend on the Sundance channel called "DOPAMINE" <http://www.sundancechannel.com/home_entertainment/product.php?ixContent=5601> where one of the main characters is a developer and the game he is creating. It all happens on various Linux systems. So I was wondering what other shows and movies people might have noticed Linux desktops on. And things like "Revolution OS" don't count. I mean normal shows and movies. What else is out there? -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
