Independence Day and the Case of the Unupdated Windows 95 OS
I love Independence Day. And Will Smith. How could you not? I even watched, and possibly enjoyed, Hancock. I’m a monster.
But there’s a huge technical flaw in Independence Day that I just can’t overlook: Jeff Goldblum somehow magically writes a “computer virus” that infects alien systems. What, the aliens just happened to have a USB port available to plug in some malicious stick? They happened to be running Microsoft Windows? They happened to use x86? I didn’t know that evolution of species on other world’s included Microsoft, and 32-bit Intel processors.
It’s impossible. There is no way that scenario could ever work. I would have liked to be in the meeting during movie production where it was decided that this was the best path, just so I could have punched every person in the face. Except Will Smith. Never Will.
In my mind, the movie has always ended with Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum failing to inject the virus, looking surprised about their incompetence, and then dying along with the rest of the human race. I literally don’t even know how the movie really ends, because all I can see is rage.
I remember watching this and thinking… damn C++ really IS the universal language.
lol. that’s the only conclusion that can be inferred.
By the way, impressive job capturing this in three frames. When I read the summary on Facebook before seeing the comic I was wondering with anticipation how you were going to pull this off. Well done!
Obviously they used a penta-opium processor to create haxor.jpeg gui that inflated the ram memory discs with monkey virus
You may enjoy this article. Or rage.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19160_8-scenes-that-prove-hollywood-doesnt-get-technology_p2.html
It was all down to money in the end.
The original ending was just to launch the nuke inside the mothership and hightail it out of there.
But Apple were a large contributor to the film in funding in return for mega screentime.
And it couldn’t have got anymore mega than Jeff saving the day with his Apple Macintosh Powerbook 5300, which Apple were marketing the fuck out of at the time.
No Microsoft products can be found anywhere on that film.
I will admit freely that I am not a fan of Indepence Day. But that scene does make the rest of the movie look pretty good, somehow. It’s amazing.
supposedly, there was a cut scene in which it was explained that all earth computer technology was based off technology from the roswell crash, so that’s why the virus semi-plausibly might have worked. at least it’s an attempt at an explanation.