BOFH: CSI Haxploitation Cube Farm Apocalypse “Can you just come here for a moment?” Ray - the brand spanking new Boss with the IQ of a pot plant - asks, ducking into Mission Control. The PFY and I follow – after all it’s a Friday morning and there’s an hour or so till the pub opens for lunch. “Can you tell me what happened here?” Ray asks, once he’s led us to the …
but you forgot it is not an infinite resolution camera! They use "image enhancement" to sharpen the image. That's the magic!
I keep asking why, when matching fingerprints, the computer shows each record on the screen. Just think how much faster it would be if it didn't have to do that, and say, just did a relational database search on a hash of the loci!
Only topped by the real-time IR satellite images down to a resolution of about 5cm that appears in Behind Enemy Lines. I'll also swear that the first missile fired at the F/A 18 is in the air for nearly two minutes, whilst following highly evasive manoeuvres.
...and why do they always use the keyboard when they're doing these things? If it's a GUI can't they do it with the mouse?
"enhance square echo two..."
clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-click.
"and zoom in..."
clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-clicka-clicka-clicka-clicka-clickety-clickety-clickety-clicka-click.
It's like a touch typist updating their CV, FFS.
“Yes, I think things started going downhill when my assistant pointed out that no one in the audience was retarded enough to believe that even the best image enhancing software could pull the license plate of a vehicle 27 blocks away from the reflection in a shop window caught by a 640 by 480 CCTV image in an off-licence.”
When watching most TV series you are required to suspend belief. CSI is no different to the rest. How many cop dramas have you watched where the murder is solved by a single cop (or a pair of partner cops who don't quite get on) relying on intuition and some dodgy questioning? But they fail to show the hundred uniforms doing the door to door investigation, or the forensics teams in white overalls doing a painstaking fingertip search of somewhere over a number of days.
What makes a TV show fun is not necessarily the accuracy, but the characters. Gil Grissom for example is a very compelling and interesting character which make CSI Vegas very much worth watching. I've never found as compelling a character in the other CSI series and therefore don't watch them.
But appart from that an accurate post.
I have to say, in spite of the obvious inaccuracies, I love CSI (Vegas, not the spin offs). Grissom is a great character, his integrity and dedication to scientific process is an example to all of us. I know they "spice it up" but it's a great programme.
Yes I can suspend belief.
It would be nice if sci fi script writers understood science.
"Reverse the polarity" OMG dont they rectify anything, yes you can phase shift that by 180 degrees but it wont do anything, wow to achieve that they would have to reverse the polarity of everthing in the ship.
Normally thats fine on TV show but then one day the following happened
Turn on TV
-old CSI rerun on (only partially pay attention to it cause its normally pretty lame pap)
"So you want me to run up a GUI interface using visual basic to track the killer’s IP Address?”
-Jaw drops, ROFL. worst technoable ever!
Wife doesnt understand why I just go to pieces whenever the show is on now.
Damn you CSI!!!!! I can't get that line out of my head!!!!
"Or that you can copy the entire contents of a 1 Terabyte hard drive to a USB stick with 2GB stamped prominently on the side in 14 seconds.".
Yes you could. you could convert it to a Jpeg with maximum loss and zip it. On the other side, unzip the file, and convert to maximum gain jpeg, and the convert to 1Tb data.
Mathematically it can be represented by
data -> jpeg mximum loss -> zip............ unzip -> jpeg maximum gain -> data
voila
Mine's the one with the super compression algorithm in the pocket.
Just to be pedantic:
1) USB 2.0 has a max data speed of 60 MB/s (480Mb/s). This means to fill a 2GB memory stick running at the maximum possible speed requires 33s.
2) I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on hard drive speeds and assume this 1TB drive is on SATA 3. That gives you 6Gb/s (including protocol overhead) which amounts to about 600MB/s of raw data. That is over 1600s just to read the contents of the drive, which is almost half an hour.
3) If you use lossless compression, then depending on the entropy of the data, there is a very very good chance that a 1TB drive will not compress down to 2GB.
4) If you use lossy compression as you suggest, then the transformation needs to be represented as: data -> jpeg mximum loss -> zip............ unzip -> jpeg maximum gain -> horribly corrupted data. The data corruption will be worse if it isn't image data since jpeg is specifically designed to compress images in a way that the loss doesn't look bad to the human eye.
Next time you try to be pedantic and claim that the BOFH has made a mistake, please think carefully, the mistake is most likely yours.
You aren't taking full advantage of read-caching from the hard drive, nor overclocking the USB slot. As for the corruption, that's why you use .jpeg compression: You run it through the image enhancement software back at the lab, and get more detailed evidence than was originally present!
I can't explain why the .zip step, though. I recommend .lha instead.
My sister-in-law is on CSI:NY and I'm pretty sure she had the line, "“So you want me to run up a GUI interface using visual basic to track the killer’s IP Address?”
Her brother and I had a good chuckle at that one.
Dunno' about the rest of the franchise, but the cast and crew of CSI:NY are a bunch of sweethearts. The writers are just as tech-clueless as you might expect, I guess.
Hi Sarah Bee and all at The Reg. Having just completed my re-read of all Simon's work, both here & at http://bofh.ntk.net/index.php, I noticed mention in the fora of a Ninja icon. Is that available only for the Platinum cookie members? Please keep up the splendid work, which has kept me from running amok on a regular basis. Cheers :D
I read this atricle from TheRegister and then I looked at my PC and I see that I have two flashing orange light on the back where the two network cables come out so I have switched the machine off but does this mean i have a virus and should I be telling IT about it because i have looked at all my colleague's PCs and they all have orange flashing lights on them as well so does this mean we have a company wide infection? I dont know how my computer got infected because i wasn't looking at anything REALLY dirty
is the way that the murder scene is always a spotlessly clean apartment. So clean in fact, that the detective can see a single hair on the floor in the middle of the room while still standing in the doorway.
The reality, according to a friend who is a SOCO, is junk everywhere piled so high you can't get past, inch thick grease throughout the kitchen, inch thick layer of dust and old dog turds everywhere else. Now that would make a good programme!
/Sherlock because ... well, you be the detective
@Bill Cumming: "...Every action / drama show on US TV in the past 2 years have been heavily sponsored by microsoft..."
That figures. Hawaii Five-O uses what I think is a Microsoft Surface thingy
http://www.microsoft.com/surface/
Those things cost so much it probably left nothing in the budget for razor blades for McGarrett or Danno.
can't watch bones anymore. It's too full of "See how awesome my prius is? it knows how to park itself!" and pointless video calling on phones with overly large SPRINT badges -- or entire episodes which are just the trailer for some new show with bones spliced into the beginning and end
I just wish I could stand in the middle of our data centre, with no aircon and it be silent and not cooking the chips as well!!!
They must remove all fans from their product placed Dell servers, and have water cooling thereby not needing aircon either, plus they must all be equipped with SSDs.
I wish I had their computing budget!!
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