Fringe Blows
Posted: 2009.11.11 (13:04)
I had a sudden burst of inspiration for the following rant:
Fringe has officially jumped the fucking shark as of Season 1, Episode 12, as far as I'm concerned.
In rapid succession, I have just heard a data forensics expert rattle off a series of statements that are deeply insulting to my intelligence as an informed viewer.
A quick breakdown of what just happened, in under a minute:
Peter: "I have two hard drives, both of which recently downloaded the same file. I need to know where it came from."
Hakim plugs in a single hard drive. Not both. Just one. Furthermore, he only makes one plugging motion, so he either plugged in the bus or the power source, but not both, and only on one drive.
Hakim's computer starts up and loads an X display before it evens loads the BIOS, with three or four terminals popping up and disappearing sporadically containing text flashing across them. It's not possible to read any of the output, and Hakim hasn't even touched the keyboard yet, so it's not like he mounted the thing, but he can already tell details about the ~600 MB file Peter is talking about.
Let's not forget that other files the two hard drives have in common are, like, the entire fucking operating system, basic layout of the directory tree structure, and common cached content from whatever browsers they were using. But no, it takes half a second to scan the entire hard drive without mounting it or even plugging in the bus, comparing it to the contents of a drive that's not even in physical contact with any part of the machine (although also without mounting it), using some built-in AI to infer from some imaginary context that the file they were looking for was the one it should examine, and magically projecting this information into Hakim's brain, as there is nothing on his screen whatsoever that could possibly be telling him this. Oh, and it does this without any input on Hakim's part, because he's maybe made two keystrokes at the very most by this point.
Hakim: "This is a very sophisticated piece of technology. Integrated audio and video..."
Whoop-de-fucking-do! Integrated audio and video? You don't say! It's almost like the program could bear the revolutionary concepts implemented in, I don't know, ANY STANDALONE MEDIA PLAYER WRITTEN SINCE 1990. Writing something this "sophisticated" is a good first project for a freshman computer science student, if not a high-school age hobbyist.
Hakim: "Part of this isn't even computer code."
Peter: "Is that even possible?"
Although we are in no way looking at anything at all resembling source code or an assembly or hex dump on Hakim's screen, Hakim is describing the structure of the program. Not that it actually matters, because of two major issues:
1) If the program did anything besides sit as an inert, effectively random array of bytes on the hard drive and utterly fail to do a damned thing, instructions are being fed to the processor, which means it IS becoming machine code. Because it ran on that computer, it was obviously understood by it, and therefore it MUST have been written in some manner that the processor clearly and unambiguously understood.
2) Even if the program itself was the product of Enlightened Science, the people running it on their computers very probably did not have computers capable of comprehending it. One of the computers was in a frackin' car dealership, for crying out loud, so unless Dell made an effort to widely distribute affordable quantum machines hot off the Technocratic Union assembly line to simple home users in the late 90's, or whenever the dealership probably bought their one computer for the decade, that computer will only run things within that computer's limits. And for that matter, so will Hakim's.
Hakim: "It downloaded from ten times the normal number of sources."
So... ten? Would it be ten sources, then? Cuz ten times one is ten.
Again without examining anything that looks like a log or packet dump, Hakim determines that the file was sent through a distributed peer-to-peer network. The major question here is, how the hell does Hakim know how many nodes is typical for downloading this thing? When you're downloading a file over a distributed P2P network (e.g. BitTorrent), the number of nodes is going to be a completely arbitrary number. A movie, game, mp3, what have you, can have a tremendous variation in the number of seeders and peers providing it to you; in other words, there is no such thing as a "typical" number of nodes for any file transfer other than a direct one (in which case there'd be one node).
Hakim: "It's being downloaded now, at this address..."
This entire time, Hakim has maybe made five or six keystrokes in total. And without pulling up anything remotely resembling a connection to a tracking server, Hakim identifies another peer who is downloading the file. And without looking up the IP in any way whatsoever, he pulls a street address from it.
Keep in mind this happened in a single bewildering 30-second assault on my sensibilities. I am already completely stunned at having witnessed this, but the worst only comes after the fact.
I am right now looking at a paused frame of the episode that shows that the new IP address downloading the file is... are you ready?
456.262.736.462
Nope, no typos there. Four-FUCKING-HUNDRED fifty six, two-hundred-SIXTY-TWO, a mind-blowing SEVEN-HUNDRED thirty six, and another four-THE-FUCK-HUNDRED and sixty two. None of those are legitimate numbers for an IP. Zero of them. Oh for four, Fringe writers. Oh for four.
It is also worth mention that I leapt up and hit pause as soon as I gathered my wits about me, so I don't actually know what other horrors may come next. Maybe they're about to "launch a firewall at him" or "Download the JavaScripts. / Which ones? / ALL of them!"
I'm scared.
Attempting to enjoy this show has so far been a struggle because of its blatant concessions of intellectual integrity for... mass appeal, I can only guess, although I can't see how saying sensible things could make a show lose an audience any more than this alternative they've decided on.
I've been watching Dr. Whathisface repeatedly mention that things are "only theories," and otherwise show an almost hilarious disregard for the scientific method. I have still not seen him do anything that actually shows the scientific method in action; he only stabs randomly at ideas in utter darkness and pulls an experiment out of his ass that works gloriously on its inaugural run. But the 30 seconds I've just watched have broken the camel's back, shattered its lower body under its weight, formed a crater at the impact site, and has now begun to tunnel to the Earth's core. This is wildly beyond excusable.
I mean come on, the show clearly has a large budget, so would it be too much of a problem to grab absolutely ANYONE in the sciences to give the script a look before shooting? Anyone at all? Even if it's an uncle of one of the cast members or something?
I'm going to wrap up Season 1 to scrounge as many ideas as I can for a potential Mage game, and then I'm done with this show forevermore.
Fringe has officially jumped the fucking shark as of Season 1, Episode 12, as far as I'm concerned.
In rapid succession, I have just heard a data forensics expert rattle off a series of statements that are deeply insulting to my intelligence as an informed viewer.
A quick breakdown of what just happened, in under a minute:
Peter: "I have two hard drives, both of which recently downloaded the same file. I need to know where it came from."
Hakim plugs in a single hard drive. Not both. Just one. Furthermore, he only makes one plugging motion, so he either plugged in the bus or the power source, but not both, and only on one drive.
Hakim's computer starts up and loads an X display before it evens loads the BIOS, with three or four terminals popping up and disappearing sporadically containing text flashing across them. It's not possible to read any of the output, and Hakim hasn't even touched the keyboard yet, so it's not like he mounted the thing, but he can already tell details about the ~600 MB file Peter is talking about.
Let's not forget that other files the two hard drives have in common are, like, the entire fucking operating system, basic layout of the directory tree structure, and common cached content from whatever browsers they were using. But no, it takes half a second to scan the entire hard drive without mounting it or even plugging in the bus, comparing it to the contents of a drive that's not even in physical contact with any part of the machine (although also without mounting it), using some built-in AI to infer from some imaginary context that the file they were looking for was the one it should examine, and magically projecting this information into Hakim's brain, as there is nothing on his screen whatsoever that could possibly be telling him this. Oh, and it does this without any input on Hakim's part, because he's maybe made two keystrokes at the very most by this point.
Hakim: "This is a very sophisticated piece of technology. Integrated audio and video..."
Whoop-de-fucking-do! Integrated audio and video? You don't say! It's almost like the program could bear the revolutionary concepts implemented in, I don't know, ANY STANDALONE MEDIA PLAYER WRITTEN SINCE 1990. Writing something this "sophisticated" is a good first project for a freshman computer science student, if not a high-school age hobbyist.
Hakim: "Part of this isn't even computer code."
Peter: "Is that even possible?"
Although we are in no way looking at anything at all resembling source code or an assembly or hex dump on Hakim's screen, Hakim is describing the structure of the program. Not that it actually matters, because of two major issues:
1) If the program did anything besides sit as an inert, effectively random array of bytes on the hard drive and utterly fail to do a damned thing, instructions are being fed to the processor, which means it IS becoming machine code. Because it ran on that computer, it was obviously understood by it, and therefore it MUST have been written in some manner that the processor clearly and unambiguously understood.
2) Even if the program itself was the product of Enlightened Science, the people running it on their computers very probably did not have computers capable of comprehending it. One of the computers was in a frackin' car dealership, for crying out loud, so unless Dell made an effort to widely distribute affordable quantum machines hot off the Technocratic Union assembly line to simple home users in the late 90's, or whenever the dealership probably bought their one computer for the decade, that computer will only run things within that computer's limits. And for that matter, so will Hakim's.
Hakim: "It downloaded from ten times the normal number of sources."
So... ten? Would it be ten sources, then? Cuz ten times one is ten.
Again without examining anything that looks like a log or packet dump, Hakim determines that the file was sent through a distributed peer-to-peer network. The major question here is, how the hell does Hakim know how many nodes is typical for downloading this thing? When you're downloading a file over a distributed P2P network (e.g. BitTorrent), the number of nodes is going to be a completely arbitrary number. A movie, game, mp3, what have you, can have a tremendous variation in the number of seeders and peers providing it to you; in other words, there is no such thing as a "typical" number of nodes for any file transfer other than a direct one (in which case there'd be one node).
Hakim: "It's being downloaded now, at this address..."
This entire time, Hakim has maybe made five or six keystrokes in total. And without pulling up anything remotely resembling a connection to a tracking server, Hakim identifies another peer who is downloading the file. And without looking up the IP in any way whatsoever, he pulls a street address from it.
Keep in mind this happened in a single bewildering 30-second assault on my sensibilities. I am already completely stunned at having witnessed this, but the worst only comes after the fact.
I am right now looking at a paused frame of the episode that shows that the new IP address downloading the file is... are you ready?
456.262.736.462
Nope, no typos there. Four-FUCKING-HUNDRED fifty six, two-hundred-SIXTY-TWO, a mind-blowing SEVEN-HUNDRED thirty six, and another four-THE-FUCK-HUNDRED and sixty two. None of those are legitimate numbers for an IP. Zero of them. Oh for four, Fringe writers. Oh for four.
It is also worth mention that I leapt up and hit pause as soon as I gathered my wits about me, so I don't actually know what other horrors may come next. Maybe they're about to "launch a firewall at him" or "Download the JavaScripts. / Which ones? / ALL of them!"
I'm scared.
Attempting to enjoy this show has so far been a struggle because of its blatant concessions of intellectual integrity for... mass appeal, I can only guess, although I can't see how saying sensible things could make a show lose an audience any more than this alternative they've decided on.
I've been watching Dr. Whathisface repeatedly mention that things are "only theories," and otherwise show an almost hilarious disregard for the scientific method. I have still not seen him do anything that actually shows the scientific method in action; he only stabs randomly at ideas in utter darkness and pulls an experiment out of his ass that works gloriously on its inaugural run. But the 30 seconds I've just watched have broken the camel's back, shattered its lower body under its weight, formed a crater at the impact site, and has now begun to tunnel to the Earth's core. This is wildly beyond excusable.
I mean come on, the show clearly has a large budget, so would it be too much of a problem to grab absolutely ANYONE in the sciences to give the script a look before shooting? Anyone at all? Even if it's an uncle of one of the cast members or something?
I'm going to wrap up Season 1 to scrounge as many ideas as I can for a potential Mage game, and then I'm done with this show forevermore.
