I love how movies always show "hacking" or other assorted computer wizardry in some kind of graphical wonderland (like the infamous "UNIX" system in Jurassic Park) with progress bars and timers and whatnot, but the best way to get someone's jaw to drop and have them mutter something like "You people are gods" still remains pulling up a command prompt and fixing a problem entirely by typing arcane command-line stuff with lots of flags and switches.
reminds me of something I found ages ago online (acn't find the link ) which was a comparison of movie hacking, and real life hacking.
movie hacking: maybe if I can initiaite the subroutines in the... damn! he's locked me out!
IRL hacking: 'hello, this is bob, from your internet service provider!'
Damn it, now I want to redownload my old copy of Uplink: Hacker Elite.
...The only game I ever felt badass for playing at work.
I remember that game! I was doing really well, until I decided I was going to cheat on some of my "take down this mainframe" missions by releasing the beta version of Revelation on them instead. Oh the first few times it worked out great, until I accidentally ran it locally...
Shit. Shit. Shitshitshit.
Then the second time through I decided to hack a bank since I hadn't done that before, and it would give me enough internet moneys to basically breeze through the rest of the game. I guess I didn't cover my trail well enough. The worst part is to this day I have no idea where Uplink keeps it's saves, so restoring a screwed up game is completely.