Holy shit, this thread made me realize Hammond invited the scientists and grandkids to the island with a hurricane inbound. Not like those things just pop up like tornadoes. You know it’s coming as much as a week in advance.
Yep, but he needed to push through legal and investor complaints, so rush rush rush, damn the risk. They’re “captains of industry”, they couldn’t possibly fail!
Newman had multiple monitors before it was cool.
Was it multiple monitors or multiple systems? Can’t see if there’s another keyboard and mouse there in front of the one behind him. Though I suppose it was all supposed to be mainframe terminals (running Linux in the movie, which I’m not sure had a mainframe version, as I understand, it started as a Unix for desktops, where Unix was the mainframe OS).
Edit: the Linux thing was my own bad memory, Lex recognizes Unix, which is weird because it was an experimental unix filesystem browser UI and most kids wouldn’t have access to machines that run any kind of unix, so it wouldn’t have been a “I played with some computers in my garage” kind of thing. Though being Hammond’s grandkids, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that she did have access to a mainframe either through Hammond’s companies or from access to universities and the like.
one it guy who you could distract with a shiny can of shaving cream
Don’t even, all of us thought that can was cool
As a young child who didn’t yet know what Barbasol was, I was still a little disappointed to find out that the can was not, in fact, filled with delicious whipped cream
Samuel L was also an IT guy, right? But yes, an expense was spared
Nedry was the systems engineer, Arnold was the operations admin. One was a construction worker, the other was the architect. Neither can truly do the other’s job, but are aware of how they do it.
Pretty farken standard. IT isn’t considered important unless they want their personal laptop de-porned
Ah, a rubber duck debugging adherent. At least they paid good money for a professional.
What is the rubber duck used for? Is it like the seashells in Demolition Man?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
tldr; basically you explain your buggy code to the duck, and when you explain it, you suddenly realize what the issue is.
any inanimate or even imaginary object works, but rubber duck is the classic option.
I find my dog works well too, she’s a great listener.
goodbest debuggerBest little bugger
I call it the Labrador method.
Have you ever been stuck on a problem (school, work, personal, whatever) and as soon as you go to ask someone for help, you start explaining the problem and figure it out? You basically use the duck for that - explain the problem out loud to “someone else” and sometimes you’ll see what you were missing.
Isn’t that Mona Wilder?
That’s a stress ball
This joke comes from people ignoring the following:
-
The presence of Ray Arnold the Chief Engineer who also worked with computers (not to the same level as Nedry)
-
Jurassic Park was operating with a skeleton crew at the time and Hammond thought the automated systems would work because he was assured as much from his Chief IT guy.
-
Nedry has a whole team working on the park’s IT system. And I’m not just referencing book material. Hammond even said in the BLOODY movie “call Nedry’s team on the main land” when shit started going down.
So no. Hammond was not stupid enough to trust the entire park’s computer infrastructure on just one guy.
The presence of Ray Arnold the Chief Engineer
Two IT guys
Jurassic Park was operating with a skeleton crew at the time
The opening scene - a working class schlub dragged into the Velociraptor cage because the transport protocols weren’t up to the task of containing a dinosaur - illustrates the core conceit of the movie. That humans and their modern technology simply aren’t ready to contend with a far more primal and powerful animal kingdom.
The hurricane flushing everyone off the island illustrated a major vulnerability. But the premise of the movie is that this park was never going to work precisely because the people running it were consumed by their own hubris and incapable of seeing the full extend of risk at play.
Nedry has a whole team working on the park’s IT system.
A team he’s undercut and sabotaged in order to afford him the opportunity to steal Hammond’s embryos. The subsequent movies are all around various mega-corps trying to seize control of the island and its bounty of dinosaur specimens and failing time and time again. The issue isn’t merely that they’re cheap, its that they’re all greedy, myopic, and self-destructive.
Hammond was not stupid enough to trust the entire park’s computer infrastructure on just one guy.
He was stupid enough to get locked out of his own systems by trusting a skeleton crew to manage the park during a hurricane. But that’s just the kick-off of the story. Crichton could have written it differently - an engineering problem that the hurricane exposed, dinosaurs that outsmarted the security, the EPA coming in to shut the park down Ghostbusters style, animal liberation activists trying to free the dinosaurs - and ended in the same place.
In many ways, Jurassic Park is a retelling of King Kong. Just swap out the big monkey for a big lizard. But the core of the story - the belief that humans can turn these primal forces into an entertainment commodity revealing man’s hubris - is tied up in Hammond’s belief in his ability to control the uncontrollable.
Nedry is just an example of one more thing Hammond can’t control.
Nedry bid for the job. He was literally the cheapest.
I wasn’t ready for this level of quantum level analysis of Jurassic Park.
I’M JUST HERE FOR THE DINOSAURS!!
But the Dinosaurs think you’re here for them.
They’re hungry and have ketchup ready.
Bravo!
Also, it’s not like the problems were only caused by Nedry or his team being understaffed or incompetent. Quite the opposite. He was a bad actor. And a bad actor in the right position can cause a lot of damage. He purposefully sabotaged the park in a way that couldn’t have been easily averted.
It was a low bid contract and Nedry was complaining about how he underbid and wanted more money. So Hammond was delusional when he said they spared no expense, he cheaped out on labour.
Wayne Knight is a fine actor, what are you talking about.
-
When I was young I thought “who needs 3 computers at once ?”
Now I get it.
Linux users. So we can troubleshoot how we borked one machine on one of the other two that we haven’t yet borked.
Ahhh Virtual Machines 🥰
One to break, one to fix, one to use.
Hihi, little you entering a atom power plant control center would have been funny 😁
In my country, even trash burning systems have control centres where 5 people work on about 50 screens 😄
(It is a garbage burning facility which takes out all the things still usable (like metals) after the burning process, and it gives heat energy to the houses around, and it captures the produced CO2 prior it enters the atmosphere, but probably creating “green fuel" out of it 😌. non the less, I am quite proud about this facility, even if recycling plastics would be even better, but being realistically, there are only two plastics which are good recycleable (PET and PE-HD) and those get collected selectively in my country anyway.
Hope someone thinks this is interesting
Hahah, silly ADHS me
Not only that, but a poorly paid and mistreated guy who volunteers to sell out major secrets.
They are UNIX systems, they don’t need an entire team to be managed once installed and running.
I’m only half joking. It’s not UNIX but I’ve been working with “legacy” systems like IBM i mainframes, and those things don’t need much to run. Sure, you have to update the system and the software once every few months, manage backups, role switches, etc., but it can mostly be done by a few people. But yeah, systems like this were (are) insanely expensive so most of his budget probably went there.
Newman.
That’s exactly the point. They did spare expenses, on a lot of things.
John Hammond Jurassic Park book spoilers
John Hammond is clearly portrayed as a villain in the book. They lightened him up in the movie.
Supposedly, that is the whole deal with the Chilean Sea Bass that he gloats about. Spared no expense. Apparently that fish sounds fancy, but is actually super cheap. The whole park needed to have the shine of a top-of-the-line facility, but in the end, Ingen and Hammond had no idea what they were really cooking up.
The raptors for instance, I always got the feeling that paddock was kind of small and rapidly constructed. Those things had killed multiple people in the past, and the park’s response was cram them into a jail cell. You’d think an intelligent, dangerous animal, that was not part of the tour or experience would be euthanized, rather than risk the whole park…but here is Ingen not dealing with the problem, and instead, actively making more raptors.
They just needed Chris Pratt, Raptor Whisperer and they would have been fine.
The book was a million times better than the movie. It was the first time I had read a novel that was turned into a movie and then saw the movie after reading the novel.
14-year-old me had never been so disappointed. And it taught me to never ever read the book before the movie.
I saw once that the reason Kristen Stewart was so hated in the Twilight movies is because all the young women who grew up reading the books imagined themselves as Bella. They were never going to like whichever actress was cast into the role since they would no longer be able to project their own likeness onto the protagonist.
I thought she played Bella perfectly:
A blank canvas. Nothing wrong with portraying the character accurately. I mean, I’m not sure all the mouth-breathing was necessary. Literally the only thing I remember about her, character-wise.
For me, it was really mostly the story changes they made so the movie could be rated PG instead of R. They also made some changes to some of the characters and the dialogue which made it come off a lot more cheesy than the book. Although, I will say, gender swapping the kids was a good move. I liked that it was the girl who was the UNIX whiz. In 1993, that felt like an especially fresh take.
Also, not generally portrayed as a “nerd”-type.
My wife always gets excited when a book she loves is being adapted (right now Verity and project hail Mary) but I learned from many disappointments to not get excited. I still watch most of them but I don’t expect too much
After seeing the trailer for project, Hail Mary, it seems like they’re gonna stick pretty close to the book. Like they did with the Martian.
Film is a different medium. You can’t have the same exact story in both a movie and a book.
I just think of it as someone else telling the story.
100% this is how I roll.
It’s like complaining that a photograph of a sculpture isn’t the same as the sculpture.
I can be equally disappointed about creative decisions made by an author as well as a director as much as I can be delighted by them.
He was evil in the books and was horrible to Nedrey
because it’s impossible for richard attenborough to be a villain
He came to prominence playing a psychopathic gangster
Did he have grandpa white hair and beard then?
Also Spielberg saw himself in the character.
Oh I bet he did
The movie really dumbed Hammond down to “overly optimistic money guy with a vision”. Which was a bit distasteful if you’ve read the books. Just a bit.
Maybe. I really preferred the movie version. Sometimes I prefer to like characters. I enjoyed the story more.
I liked movie Hammond too, don’t get me wrong. It’s just a completely different story because of the character shift.
That’s how adaptations work. They change stuff around.
My friend is sole IT guy for two production lines, managing security, multiple production buildings, redundancy, sensor lifetimes, emergency concepts etc, he has one colleague managing the human IT part
Like he manages all the machines and the other one all MS-Shit
It is always very interesting listening to his stories about managing multiple production lines where it costs so much if the machine is not running for some time
It is about producing chocolate, lol
Prime raise negotiation environment
You’d think so, but it really is just like Jurassic Park.
The way I see it, they could demand the same pay as 2 people so that their boss doesn’t have the hire 3 people.
I love the redundancy on tech level, but not on the human level. I can only imagine the manager’s dashboard with risks and mitigating actions.
I contract at a place that has lost well over a million in the last 11 months in downtime that’s specifically for low voltage/comms failures. They have been looking for an electrician for 11 months and 49-65k USD is the salary range.
They could have paid triple that and saved money AND got the deliverables for the year. They won’t now.
“Guys, you don’t understand, my MBA specifically said this would work!”
Often followed by “Hmm, can we pay someone to help us solve this personnel puzzle? Let’s find a consultant. I’m no rube though, I’m a shrewd business cretin - if we don’t find a consultant with an MBA fancier than mine, we’ll just be wasting our money.”
Haha, yes
They are so fucked, if some mad lad is road raging and prevents my friend reaching his workplace
He also had Samuel L Jackson.
Arnold was an engineer, though. He was competent in using the system and not totally lost when poking around the code, but he’s no computer scientist. Basically, he was a power user / sysadmin rather than a developer.
I’m pretty sure Nedry was the engineer. Arnold was systems administrator / operator. Neither were computer scientists.
Nedry was literally a computer scientist and systems designer / programmer from Cambridge. Arnold was a theme park engineer (designing rides and control systems; some programming involved but a whole different paradigm than developing large systems).
Source: Have read the novel 50+ times.
👍
Stares motherfuckerly at you…
🥇 You just won my comment-of-the-day awards 👍
Yay!!!
Yeah, he was always ready to lend a hand.
Jurassic Park is a tale of dangers of not investing enough on IT
