I watched this the other day for the first time in maybe 20 years. I realized that the entire catastrophe couldâve been avoided if Hammond had forked up for more IT gear. Apparently the entire park is run by a SINGLE server that serves as production, dev, AND QA, and has no UPS. So when the âcode is compiling,â things glitch out all over the park, and pray that no one forgot a semicolon. Dinosaurs werenât the problem; crappy IT practices were.
Also, Alex saying, âThis is UNIX! I know this!â as she navigates over some crappy wireframe rep of, um, maybe a directory?âtotal BS.
fsn is actually a thing. But a better line would have been âWhat the-- oh, wait, I guess this is actually a UNIX system! I know this! But if I waste time screwing around with this interface weâll all be eaten, so Iâll bring up an xterm.â
as she navigates over some crappy wireframe rep
That goofy interface is actually an old Silicon Graphics demo called (I think) âButtonFlyâ. Back in the days when 3d graphics was hard and expensive and Silicon Graphics ruled the graphics world, people (including me!) used to think it was pretty neat. I canât imagine that anyone ever tried to use it to do real work though.
So technically you can look at it and say âThis is UNIX! I know this!â. But maybe you shouldnât.
Is that music by the same guy that wrote music for âThe Simsâ and âDesperate Housewivesâ
It strikes me as more like a Kickstarter video, with that soundtrack.
Can I also add that I find the nature documentary conceit of âfollowingâ the conveniently dramatised life story of a particular animal really infantile and condescending. The shoe-horned-in anthropomorphication of an animal detracts from actually observing and understanding the animal in question by jamming a bunch of themselves-questionable human values down the audienceâs throat.
The only example I can think of that actually worked was Gordon Buchananâs âThe Bear Family and Meâ - and I think that mainly stemmed from the apparent real-ness of the situation - in that you could see the human âobserversâ struggling with the desire to help animals when it was probably not ethical to do so. Most of the time, the nature documentary approach seems to be to shoot thousands of hours of footage of the species in question, and then stitch it together into a narrative so idiotic that it makes the average episode of WWE look like fucking Brideshead Revisited.
Ugh, can we have it re-cut as a British nature documentary instead? 
Yeah, thatâs kind of what I meant, but yours is pithier.
Nope:
Buttonfly was just a demo application which served as a program launcher. The only thing you could do with it was click on it.
Nuts. If Iâd scrolled down one more comment I could have saved myself the effort of commenting. Welp.
Agreed with you completely about Hammond cheaping out on his IT department (no redundancies, requiring going through an unsecured area to get to the backup generators, few to no systems in place at the time for dealing with a literal worst case scenario of all the fences going down at once, etc.
However that GUI was real apparently.
Edit: Wow apparently thatâs like one of those factoids most geeks hang onto once learned. Though I have to agree. Lex should have gone âwait what the- Please tell me they kept xterm. Yes! I can do this!â
Sorry for my screw-up on FSN, everyone. I still donât know how an 11-ish-year-old girl would have known anything about UNIX or FSN in 1993. Itâs not like that stack of Sun workstations on Dennisâs desk came cheap (and isnât it odd that most of the UI we see is Mac, not UNIX, even FSN?).
Come to think of it, why are those workstations sitting on a desk and not in a data center? Hammond ponied up for a beyond-state-of-the-art biology/cloning labâwell, except for the part where someone misspelled âTyrannosaurusâ and âStegosaurusâ (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/cf/6e/e3/cf6ee34b69225076fbe11929be7ec48a.jpg, https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTJcUiy1-zYcsIfB5aiXY6VqXxHSqLh5L4NsIra0i6CwjoMkzyF). No data center? And again, no UPS?
For me, âThis is UNIX!â is Trinity hacking the power plant near the end of Matrix 2. In the Beginning Was the Command Line and all that.
Eh. Lex didnât set up the machine: Nedry did, and we know he had issues. She probably recognized the file structure from the navigator and proceeded from there. Not everyone is as adroit with the console term or xterm.
Hate to be a book person, but its revealed in The Lost World that the cloning lab weâre shown is in fact almost entirely for show while all the real work is done in an entirely different lab on another island.
Wasnât that also in the movie? I forget.
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